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Updated December 1st, 2021 at 08:32 IST

China's military strength & desire for Taiwan will destabilise world peace: UK spy chief

“Worryingly, Chinese technologies of control and surveillance are increasingly being exported to other governments by China,” the MI6 chief Moore said.

Reported by: Zaini Majeed
China
IMAGE: AP/Twitter/@IISS_org | Image:self
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China’s overconfidence would run it into a risk of “miscalculation” about the West’s resolution over Taiwan, the new chief of British secret intelligence service MI6, Richard Moore, known as C speculated said on Tuesday in his first speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank in London. “Beijing’s growing military strength and the Chinese Communist Party’s desire to resolve the Taiwan issue, by force if necessary, poses a serious challenge to global stability and peace.” 

Outlining the ever overpowering military might of Beijing, and its intent of takeover of the self-administered island, the MI6 chief, who assumed his role in October 2020, warned that the implied risk "is real.” The top-secret service figure, for whom it is unusual as the holder of this office to give public speeches, said that the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CPC) conducts "large-scale espionage operations against the UK and our allies", including the foreign nations to assert its expansionist agenda, and over recent years has been a “single greatest priority” for MI6, the British Spy Chief told the conference.  

“We’re living through an era of dramatic change in the security landscape,” said MI6 chief Moore, adding that it becomes increasingly significant for the nations to defend themselves from the growing threat from state actors.

Chinese Intelligence Services are highly capable of 'spying' on UK’s partner nations

Labelling China as “adversaries feeling emboldened,” Moore stated that they are able to draw on greater resources compared to the past. He revealed that the three of the ‘Big Four’ [China, Russia, and Iran] are on the priority list for the intelligence service MI6, the 58-year-old chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Moore cautioned that the “tectonic plates are shifting” and that the Beijing’s willingness of flexing military muscle and asserting its regional power has been expanding.

Further cautioning the nations to stay  “clear-eyed”, Moore explained that the British intelligence service has also been focused on addressing the fourth priority—the amorphous, shape-shifting character of international terrorism. China is an authoritarian state, asserted the MI6 Chief, adding that this is reflected in the threats "we see emanating from the Chinese state".

The Chinese Intelligence Services are highly capable of “spying” on UK’s partner nations, conducting covert operations on actors constricted to the government, industries, or on the research of particular interest to China.

“We [MI6] are concerned by the Chinese government’s attempt to distort public discourse and political decision across the globe via their Chinese intelligence officers that use of social media platforms to facilitate their operations,” said Moore. 

On the national security grounds, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s leadership and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) make bold and decisive decisions to display military power as the days of Deng Xiaoping’s “hide your strength, bide your time” is long over. CCP brook no dissent, warned the British spy chief, referencing Chinese dismantling of Hong Kong’s ‘one country, two systems’ framework and squashing the autonomous state’s human rights and freedoms by introducing the draconian National Security Law. The Chinese military’s surveillance operations targeted the Uyghur population in Xinjiang for ethnic cleansing and arbitrary detention of an estimated 1 million Muslims, according to Moore. 

“Worryingly, Chinese technologies of control and surveillance are increasingly being exported to other governments by China,” the head of the SIS shockingly revealed. He then stressed that MI6 needs to operate “undetected” as a secret intelligence agency within the surveillance web worldwide.

Be careful of trap of Chinese ‘debts’

The British Intelligence Service Chief warned countries about China’s debt traps, data exposure, and vulnerability to political coercion that arise from dependency, targeting nations where there’s no recourse to an independent judiciary or free press. Furthermore, Moore warned that the UK’s adversaries are investing money and ambition into mastering artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and synthetic biology “because they know that mastering these technologies will give them leverage” globally. 

Reports floated earlier that China, which doles out liquidity in the form of loans to the tune of trillions, has been on an aggressive campaign of global infrastructure acquisition under its Belt and Road (B&R) Initiative. In its latest attempt of forfeiting state assets relating it to the condition of ‘monetary loans’, China has overtaken Uganda’s airport as it was unable to pay its debt to Beijing for a USD 207 million loan from the Chinese Exim Bank via a contract in November 2015, reports confirmed. 

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Published December 1st, 2021 at 08:32 IST

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