Be careful what you wish for in tackling the China 'threat'

Terminology does not change objective facts and the central one, which should be beyond political dispute, is that the question of how to balance relationships with China on multiple levels defies simplistic or even consistent answers.

It involves a necessary desire to maintain positive economic connections as well as diplomatic influence while recognising that Chinese intelligence services are up to no good, just as they haven’t been for decades past. Lobbing grenades into that ongoing challenge – my preferred word – makes no sense.

‘Be careful what you wish for’ might be a useful watchword for the hawks. A major diplomatic rift with China could be strewn with unintended consequences. For starters, there are 150,000 Chinese students in the UK – by far the biggest foreign cohort.

Due to Scotland’s approach to funding higher education, some of our own universities are disproportionately reliant upon their bloated fees. One stroke of an authoritarian pen in Beijing could put a stop to all that, leaving a lot of empty bedrooms and distraught university bursars.

Then there is the question of Chinese investment into the UK, and not least the proposed £1.5 billion wind turbine facility at Ardersier. It’s a disgrace, of course, that 20 years into dispensing planning consents for windfarms, we still don’t manufacture any of the main components. But we are where we are.

So do we want Chinese investment to address this deficiency or don’t we? Unless persuasive evidence is produced to the contrary, the answer is that we probably do.

After all, they are already deeply into the UK nuclear and water industries, so it’s difficult to see how wind turbines would be a greater threat to national security.

And if we don’t want them to build wind turbines, should we also shoo them away from existing commitments? That does not seem likely so realpolitik dictates that we continue to manage the relationship rather than engage in panicky gestures.

The current risk epitomised by Kemi Badenoch is that postures are adopted on a wave of hysteria generated by charges being dropped against a couple of individuals who were accused of spying, though the level at which this is alleged to have taken place seems unlikely to have tipped the balance of global power.

There is no real reason to doubt the Government’s explanation of why the charges wouldn’t stick. At the same time, it would be naïve not to believe that sometimes cases go away when there is a greater national interest at stake, without anything so crude as political pressure on the Crown Prosecution Service.

Either way, the case of Messrs Cash and Berry offer little to get agitated about in the wider context of how to handle the complexity of relations with China. Ms Badenoch’s attempt to elevate it to a higher status confirms why she should never be entrusted with matters of such delicacy. Indeed, who would now risk sharing a security briefing with her?

Helpfully, like the ghost of Christmas past, Mr Dominic Cummings re-emerged to claim that, while working for Boris Johnson, he was party to briefings that “vast amounts” of highly classified information were nicked by the Chinese over a period of years, by compromising a network used to transfer data across Whitehall. The scandal, he said, had been “covered up” at the highest levels.

Mr Cummings is not the most reliable witness but his account does lend some perspective to current excitements. There is nothing new about Chinese spying - or indeed any other national brand - and the walk-on part of a young researcher working for a Tory MP nobody had ever heard of was scarcely at the cutting-edge of how it manifests itself.

We still tend towards an image of spies as furtive Le Carré characters armed with tiny cameras exploiting carelessness with secret documents. But these were the good old days. Now, in spite of all experiences, even the most classified material seems to be transported by electronic communication which, as proven time and again, is vulnerable to hacking in industrial quantities.

Maybe if we wanted to stop the Chinese or anyone else obtaining confidential material, the first step would be to stop sharing it in this way, no matter how limited the distribution list. The alternative is a constant ratcheting up of cyber-security and a corresponding commitment by “bad actors” to breach the defences. And so it will go on, with predictable results.

Yet one quickly enters “emperor’s clothes” territory by suggesting that the onward march of communications technology is of questionable wisdom, whether the context is national security, personal banking or anything in between. Encouragement to assume its inevitability comes, of course, from corporate interests which stand to profit mightily.

The recent commitment to identify “cards” is a case in point. I have never seen the rational case against ID cards and even less when commercial concerns like Facebook know more about me than I know about myself. However, the waters were muddied by a presumption this will be “digital ID”, built at phenomenal cost and, as one cyber expert put it, like “painting a huge target to say ‘come and hack me’.”

A society in which all information travels through cyberspace may seem like a dream to nerds, hackers and IT companies. From national security to personal insecurity, maybe it is time to start counting the cost. There was a lot to be said for paper – a great Chinese invention.