London’s Chinese Embassy: What could possibly go wrong?

The English author John Le Carré is best known for his novels of Cold-War espionage. His most famous character, George Smiley, has the following to say on the subject:

The obsession of the two great economic systems with each other’s identity, intentions, strengths, and weaknesses had produced by the 1970s a state of mutual watchfulness and paranoia that seemed to know no bounds. Each side was ready to pay any sum, take any risk, tell any lie, to gain a seeming intelligence advantage over the other. Neither seemed able to grasp the utter sterility of this situation.

Smiley — a role played onscreen by two equally brilliant English actors, Sir Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman — was obviously considering Russia and the West. In context, Smiley’s description is as masterful a summation of the Cold War as you will find in Le Carré’s fine writing. But, in today’s post-Cold-War world, it seems charmingly antiquated, like seeing someone riding a Penny-Farthing bicycle.

In terms of espionage, the Russian bear is no longer the problem for the West. Enter the dragon. The acceleration in Chinese espionage since the turn of the millennium means that British concerns over clandestine CCP (Chinese Communist Party) intelligence-gathering has gone from treating it as an irrelevance to viewing it with alarm. China has gone from a distraction from what was the main event — Russia — to a major security risk in just 20 years. Putin’s people are doubtless tied up at the moment and have little time to spy on the British. They know Britain is a part of NATO, and they know that NATO is funding Ukraine to keep a “forever war” going. Keir Starmer has already committed to funding Ukraine for the next hundred years. They don’t need to listen in on conversations to see the obvious. And the Cold War is over, or at least the combatants have changed.

Unlike the Cold War, today’s spying game is not played with covert recording devices, anonymous handlers, and mysterious double-agents called Olga. The Chinese gather intelligence via what analysts call “influence operations”. Thus, the first quarter of the new century has seen a marked rise in Chinese student-visa applications to Britain, many more trade missions than the norm, and researchers who don’t seem to be able to get enough of researching the United Kingdom. These new spooks are not to be found translating “book code”, like James Wormold in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, with his copy of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, a coded letter, and a bitten pencil. Today’s spies are not to be found sitting in shady cafés waiting for a contact and wondering which of their many passports they will be using that day. Today’s spies are reading for a STEM degree at a fashionable university, manning stalls at trade fairs, and studying in the Reading Room of the British Library. The Chinese are also active in the property market. Americans and Canadians are beginning to get wise to the Chinese love of foreign property portfolios, and the People’s Republic have also been competing with Arabs and Russians to buy up London. One building in particular is of interest.

Royal Mint Court is on the approach road to London’s famous Tower Bridge. It is indeed the site of the old Royal Mint, from a time when printing money was a sign of a healthy economy rather than a diseased one. The Court itself is unprepossessing. I cycled past it on my way to work for a year and didn’t recognize it when I recently saw a photo, but that is because it is opposite the Tower of London, which tends to draw the eye. In 2018, Royal Mint Court was bought by a foreign owner, like so much of London. The new owners were, and still are, The People’s Republic of China. The intention was to build a new embassy there, the old one in Portland Place being too small to accommodate a planned consolidation of all Chinese diplomatic staff in London. There is, however, a problem with the site, not just for the new owners, but for the vendors. The Daily Telegraph, to their immense credit, were the first newspaper to pick up on the story, and they have run with it. If I were the editor, I would be wary of taking on any Chinese interns in the office, just for the moment.

From the Telegraph in January:

China is to build a hidden chamber alongside Britain’s most sensitive communication cables as part of a network of 208 secret rooms beneath its new London super-embassy.

The Telegraph were not alone in their misgivings. The new owners had their own problems with the acquisition, and the purchase was not straightforward. Several applications for planning permission made by the Chinese government had been turned down over security issues. The Director General of MI5 said, in a response to criticism of the super-embassy made by some MPs that “it was not possible to eliminate every threat” from the new building, a strangely asinine thing to say. It is not possible to eliminate every threat from anything. Children choke to death on soft toys designed to comfort them. Any foreign embassy represents a potential risk to any host nation because of diplomatic immunity. Nevertheless, the deal had stalled.

But help was at hand to hurry the Chinese acquisition through at Royal Mint Court, and it came in the shape of a new British government. Two weeks after Keir Starmer took up office as Prime Minister, the application went through, needing only a final set of signatures from the government itself to ratify the deal. This type of final, governmental imprimatur is standard practice if national security is an issue in any commercial deal with a foreign nation, and for obvious reasons. But the final sign-off was made in rather odd circumstances.

As is usual in international diplomacy, Starmer’s recent trip to China was planned months in advance. “Never-Here Keir”, as he has been dubbed, is known for fleeing the country whenever scandal arises, which is currently about every other day. The trip itself, however, was not signed off by the Chinese until eight days before Starmer was due to arrive in Peking. I won’t call it “Beijing” because that is what the media, led as they are by Associated Press, want us to call it. We visit “Paris”, not “Paree”. Well, we don’t anymore, but you take my point. Visa problems for one of Starmer’s people, perhaps? No, although Xi’s people did require a signature, on the dotted line at the bottom of the planning permission for the super-embassy. This was duly signed, and Xi got what he wanted. And what did Keir Starmer come back from China with, in terms of a quid pro quo? Well, holiday extensions. British tourists can now enjoy up to 30 days in China being tailed by CCP agents without needing a visa. So, we’ve got that going for us.

What are the security risks specific to Royal Mint Court? If the Chinese are going to spy on the British, surely they can do it just as well from Portland Place. If they built their new embassy in Chinatown, at the back of Wardour Street and Leicester Square, staff wouldn’t have far to walk for a good noodle-based lunch, leaving them more time for spying. But those areas don’t have the advantage of being in close proximity to high-capacity fiber-optic cables, telecoms infrastructure which carries many terabytes of sensitive information daily to the City of London and Canary Wharf, and the Wapping Telephone Exchange, itself a focal point for the aforementioned financial hubs. These are not just the biggest financial centers in London, they are among the biggest in the world, with a wealth of sensitive commercial information running right by the new Chinese Embassy. It is a big site. The Chinese got 20,000 square meters for their £225 million, and that is without digging down, which the new owners are doing to a depth which is alarming architects and security chiefs alike.

The building work itself is already going deeper than the original planning permission allowed for. There is a complex warren being built beneath Royal Mint Court, but no one seems to know why. Convection coolers have been shipped into the building in bulk, indicating a lot of processing capability that needs to be kept cool. Some of the wilder conspiracy theorists claim these rooms will be dungeons, because the Chinese are not just spying on the native British, but also on Chinese dissidents who are a part of a minor diaspora to the West.

The British government seem almost nonchalant about the new site. Shabana Mahmood, the Muslim British Home Secretary who says that Islam is at the forefront of everything she does, is either colluding with the Chinese or ridiculously naïve for a Home Secretary. From her statement on the planning permission:

There is no suggestion that the operational development permitted by any grant of planning permission would interfere with the cables, nor that a lawful embassy use of the site would give rise to any such interference.

So, that’s okay then. As long as the Chinese have given their word that they won’t tap into cabling which passes directly through property they own, and contains incredibly sensitive financial data, then surely they are to be trusted. We really must move on from those old racist stereotypes of the inscrutable and untrustworthy Chinese. Do we really think they are going to spy on us? We are all friends now. Also, note Mahmood’s use of the phrase “lawful embassy use of the site”. Lawful according to whom? Within any country’s embassy, you are in that country, in terms of being a legal entity. That’s why Julian Assange was effectively in Ecuador for seven years, even though physically the Ecuadorian embassy is situated in London. It’s a bit like architectural transubstantiation. Does Ms. Mahmood imagine that there is a Chinese law forbidding the CCP from spying on their hosts? And it is not just Chinese embassy staff who might be flouting British law behind the smokescreen of diplomatic immunity.

Last year saw the trial of two British men accused of spying for the Chinese. Except it didn’t happen. The trial collapsed at the 11th hour as the British were required to give an official acknowledgement of the fact that China poses a security threat to the UK. This was something a fledgling left-wing government could not afford to do, despite British intelligence having held the line that the Chinese most certainly did pose a grave security threat. When former Cabinet Secretary Simon Case confirmed this, a chorus of dissent led to the decision to scrap the trial. The fairly obvious conclusion is that the British government had stepped in to halt the progress of the case. The Chinese are very sensitive to what is said about them, and “face-saving” is a lot more important in Chinese (and perhaps Asian as a whole) culture than it is in the West, where “getting away with it” is more the fashion.

One curiosity of the Chinese embassy affair, particularly as it was part-brokered by a Muslim Home Secretary, is that there has not been a word of protest from Britain’s powerful Islamic lobby. One might have thought that China’s notorious treatment of their Uighur Muslims would have led to vociferous complaint. But the Muslims who increasingly run things in Britain seem quite content for the Chinese to embed themselves at the heart of the capital of the UK, regardless of whether the CCP keep Muslims in concentration camps back at home to use as slave labor. Xinjiang controls information with ruthless efficiency, but leaked documents, satellite images, and survivor accounts suggest human rights abuses on a scale that would usually lead to a chorus of objection from both Western and Muslim leaders, as well as a blizzard of #IStandWithUighurs infesting social media. But there is silence on all fronts concerning the plight of these unfortunates. In Europe, there is a near-psychotic reaction if a copy of the Koran is damaged. But actual Muslims suffering is of no concern. Muslims often hide behind the ummah, the worldwide collective of the Islamic faith, but they couldn’t care less about the Uighurs any more than rich and influential Jews facilitating mass immigration care about the Jews who are raped and murdered by Muslims across Europe as a direct result of these insurgent policies. Both the Uighurs and the disposable Jews of Europe are collateral.

But back to the new embassy.

Planning applications in Britain, and actual plans for permission to build or adapt, are supposed to be publicly available, not “for your eyes only”. The plans for the Chinese embassy are indeed available, it’s just that they are heavily redacted. It is to the Telegraph’s credit that they have been all over this story, and other stories the deep state would rather they didn’t cover. Their recent allegations that Starmer took on a case, when he was a human-rights lawyer, which led to the 12-year persecution of an army veteran accused of an improper killing in Iraq (Starmer allegedly took on the case pro bono), was close to the level of journalistic integrity which led the Telegraph to expose Parliament in 2009’s expenses scandal. They will make enemies of the Chinese, and that is a brave editorial risk.

It is hardly news that the Chinese are buying into every continent which will take their money, which is every continent. Outside Britain, China is not necessarily building super-embassies in historic buildings, but what they are involved in is worth an inventory. The CCP has invested heavily in Africa, specifically Kenyan and Ethiopian railways, ports such as Djibouti, mines in Zambia, and telecom infrastructure across the dark continent. Asia has seen similar levels of investment, with Chinese money flooding into transport corridors in Pakistan, more port projects in Sri Lanka, energy pipelines in  Central Asia, and the integration of manufacturing across the continent. Where once we laughed in the West at the fact that so many cheap items had “Made in China” stamped on the base, so too the Chinese will soon joke that all their trinkets say “Made in Bangladesh”.

Europe has also seen Chinese port investment and acquisition, such as the historic port of Piraeus in Greece, a vital military and commercial hub since at least the Peloponnesian War. As for Latin America, the Chinese are mining Lithium in Chile and Argentina, taking over energy concerns in Brazil, and once again shoring up infrastructure and telecom concerns across the continent.

Like Donald Trump, the Chinese know the art of the deal. The CCP’s financial arm invests with Confucian wisdom, often tailoring their investments to suit the national temperament. Here in Costa Rica, the capital San José got a brand-new football stadium in 2011. The CCP picked up the $11million tab, and it is an effective sweetener in a country in which, after la pandemia, the football pitches opened for training before the churches re-opened their doors. The only quid pro quo the Chinese required was that the major political parties in Costa Rica recognize China’s claim on Taiwan. Simple, really, like all the best deals. Oceania and North America are well aware of the extent of Chinese acquisition of land, technology partnerships, mining rights, and excursions into the venture capital realm of both continents. Canada is slowly waking up to Chinese influence. Wherever these global financial concerns exist, of course, so too there will be Chinese intelligence. The UK will not be the only country spied on by the Chinese.

It is often said that history is written by the victors, and it remains to be seen whether the history of this century will be written in English, Arabic, or the attractive ideograms of Mandarin Chinese. The story of the Chinese super-embassy will be either a footnote in that history, or deserving of a chapter on its own, as the first time a powerful Western country openly invited another super-power to spy on it. Any observer of the current plight of Britain, once the world’s greatest super-power, does suggest a question; what do the Chinese think is worth spying on in the UK? The financial data noted, of course, but proximity to cabling is irrelevant given the advanced state of computer hacking and cracking. There are people out there now who are a long way further down the road than the phreakers and script-kiddies of early-day computer hacking. Then there are the dissident Chinese. There are already concerns in the wake of reports that, as in the US, there are “Chinese police stations” across the nation tasked with monitoring Chinese who have migrated (and effectively defected).

International espionage is still a sort of perpetual-motion machine, and largely a pointless one, as George Smiley pointed out. Countries do it because they always have done, and they always have done because they always have. Like the British stock comic character, the “nosy Parker”, twitching the curtains to see what the neighbors are getting up to, the Chinese are about to have their very own terraced house from which to snoop and spy on the people next door. What they will find out is anyone’s guess — apart from possibly the details of your bank account — and they will know the risks attendant on grappling with MI5, if only via the James Bond franchise. But it is more likely that they would feel uncomfortable if they weren’t spying on their hosts. As George Smiley says in the screenplay to Smiley’s People:

It’s simply a question of whether your Service wants the product. I can’t see that anything else is of very much importance.

The system spies on the system. Eventually, like all technocracy, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Here is a game for any reader in London (although I would rather you imagine it than attempt it). Go and take some photos of Royal Mint Court. Keep doing that, and let me know in the comments how long it takes before the police turn up to feel your collar. They will be there a good deal quicker than they would if your house had been burgled, and you won’t need a fortune cookie to know whose side they will be on.