How should the West respond to large-scale Russian and Chinese espionage?
A recent string of arrests of Russian and Chinese spies in Europe has strained tensions between East and West.
All countries spy. Yet paradoxically spying is also illegal in all countries. Selling secrets to another country is a serious offense that can land someone with a 20-year prison sentence or worse. If they’re caught that is.
Yet this hasn’t stopped many citizens of liberal democracies from selling secrets to hostile powers or participating in subversive activities such as sabotage or spreading disinformation.
Only this month in the UK, a young aide to a prominent MP was charged with spying for China. In Germany as well, a German citizen, Jian Guo, who worked for the AfD’s lead European parliamentary candidate was arrested in Dresden and charged with the same offense.
Also in Germany, Petr Bystron, number two on the AfD list for the June election, was last week accused of participating in a vast Russian disinformation operation that aimed to undermine Western support for Ukraine. Allegedly, Bystron received around €20,000 for contributing to “Voice of Europe”, a website that peddles Russian disinformation.
Two German nationals were also arrested last week on suspicion of plotting to sabotage military aid to Ukraine, as well as three other Germans who were arrested for allegedly planning to pass on advanced engine designs to Chinese intelligence.
These subversive acts by Russia and China are reminiscent of covert political operations conducted by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. “Active measures”, as it came to be known, was a wartime mentality held by Soviet Intelligence, and involved a range of covert political influence and subversion operations, including sabotage and the spread of propaganda and disinformation.
During the Cold War, active measures took the form of inciting hatred against the West and Israel and promoting guerrilla and terrorist groups such as the PLO which in 1969 alone hijacked 82 planes worldwide. Other active measures were more subtle and involved funding political movements such as the peace movement against the Vietnam War.
Yet unlike during the last Cold War, the sheer scale of espionage today is truly unprecedented. Last October the head of MI5 said that over 20,000 people in the UK had been approached online by Chinese spies.
In an event last year involving members of the Five Eyes alliance, FBI Director Chris Wray said: “China has made economic espionage and stealing others' work and ideas a central component of its national strategy”.
“That threat has only gotten more dangerous and more insidious in recent years.”
Mike Burgess – the head of Australia’s security service - who also spoke at the event, said: “All nations spy, but the behaviour we are talking about here goes well beyond traditional espionage.”
According to reports, both Russia and China have been cultivating links with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party in Germany, since at least 2019. With Russia, contacts were established even earlier.
Mareike Ohlberg, a sinologist and specialist in the Chinese Communist Party's influence, believes that the aim of building such ties is to “gather information about the target country's views on China, and then to influence the way in which China is perceived.”
If this is true then it shows that China’s aims stretch beyond theft of commercial secrets.
But how should Western countries respond to such attempts at commercial theft and political subversion? So far, the UK government’s response has been limited to imposing sanctions on individuals and entities that play a role in Chinese espionage. Yet perhaps, since China has not stopped its large-scale spying activities, a stronger response is needed.
For a while now, China has been a hostile environment for Western companies while its Communist leaders have attempted to keep its society separate from the rest of the world. This has often involved restricting access to American tech companies such as Google and Facebook. Partly this is an attempt to insulate itself from Western influence, yet it has also benefited Chinese tech companies such as Baidu, Alipay, and WeChat which can act as Chinese versions of Western tech services.
This has been the case for a long time. Yet the aggressively protectionist stance taken by China has not been matched by Western countries other than the US, which has now under Biden banned the Chinese tech company Huawei and adopted a “Buy America” policy with regard to manufactured goods. In an effort to stop intellectual property theft, the US has also banned semiconductor chip exports to China and attempted to build up its own domestic chip industry.
Perhaps it is time for Britain and Germany to take a similarly muscular approach to relations with China, and perhaps even go further by stopping the sale of British companies to China and banning Chinese-owned companies like TikTok from operating in the UK until China stops stealing our technology.
Concerning Russia, perhaps a total ban on Russian gas imports is required until it ends its illegal occupation of Ukraine. This will send a message to Putin that the West is in this fight for the long haul and will not capitulate to Russian demands or claims of sovereignty over Ukraine. The attempted sabotage against German military facilities is a new level of escalation that cannot be tolerated. To show weakness will only provoke further aggression.
Taking a stronger stance against Russian and Chinese espionage will of course be anathema to market liberals and globalists who see Britain’s role as pursuing the global interest over the national interest. Yet to do nothing in the face of blatant hostility and theft is inexcusable.
The first step is recognising that Russia and China are both hostile states that seek to undermine the West. In the new Cold War climate of the 2020s, the naivety of Western politicians who thought they could trust Russia and China has been exposed. Whether the West has the fortitude to push back against this foreign theft and subversion, however, remains to be seen.