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CHINA is unleashing warfare on the West in a daring bid to create a terrifying new age led by Xi Jinping and time is running out to wake up to it, a former British diplomat warns.
The Communist regime is combining its economic, military and political power to bamboozle the world’s democracies which have become over-reliant on China for basic goods.
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That’s according to Matthew Henderson, a Geostrategy researcher who worked for the Foreign Office as a diplomat for three decades.
One key way Xi is pursuing his goal of global dominance is for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to leverage how dependent the West has become on its supply of goods, Henderson says.
Cyber attacks, political influence, military expansion, bribery and corruption are other weapons being deployed out of Beijing, he says – as well as deepening alliances with Russia, Iran and North Korea.
He said the West was reluctant to acknowledge President Xi Jinping’s insidious progress because of the conflicts already raging in Ukraine and the Middle East.
But he branded this approach “completely stupid”.
Henderson told The Sun: “It’s not a question of opening up another front, it’s a question of admitting that we’ve been at war without really thinking it or wanting to believe it for a very long time.”
The challenge for the West – because of how democracy works – is that its economic, military and political strategies are fragmented, whereas China’s are merged into one in pursuit of one national goal – to take over world order.
Henderson said: “We’ve seen clearly, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are always exchanging this phrase – you’re going to see global changes that haven’t happened in 100 years.
“And we, the Chinese and the Russians, are going to see those changes through together.
“And that basically means unseating the United States as the leader of the rules-based international order.”
Henderson says the West desperately needs to wake up to the dangers of cheaper Chinese goods, like phone company Huawei, and instead endure short-term pain to stop heading down the path of CCP control.
“The reason it’s (Huawei) cheap is because it’s a state-run operation that’s very heavily subsidised precisely with the view of undercutting our own digital market and making sure everyone buys equipment that the Chinese can use to collect intelligence on us.”
Huawei has in the past asserted its technology has never and will never be used to spy, and chief executive Ren Zhengfei insisted he’d “never harm the interests of my customers”.
But the UK vowed to remove the telecom from 5G infrastructure by 2027 after the US slapped sanctions on the company, slamming it as a security risk.
Hudson Institute economic policy pundit John Lee also sounded the alarm on cheap Chinese goods.
Using the example of solar panels, he said China effectively stole know-how from the West to start producing them for far cheaper – allowing it to take over the entire market.
Lee explained to The Sun: “What the Chinese did was that they lured a lot of these (US and EU) companies to set up manufacturing plants in China. Because a lot of these plants are cheaper, they’re subsidised.
“The technology was transferred into the Chinese tech ecosystem, and then the Chinese government subsidised Chinese companies to sell solar panels to the rest of the world at prices around 80 per cent beneath the market price.
“So obviously, the Western companies then went out of business and that allowed China to dominate supply chain.”
Cyber attacks against government departments, contractors and MPs
May 2024
Britain accused China of stealing the names and bank details of former and current members of the UK’s armed forces.
Some 270,000 people including regular troops, reservists and some veterans were affected by the hack.
Defence officials refused to name the country or hackers behind the attack but insiders suspected China.
The attack is thought to have been carried out on a payroll system which included current service personnel, some officials and some veterans.
March 2024
The UK and the United States accused China of a global campaign of “malicious” cyber attacks in an unprecedented joint operation to reveal Beijing’s espionage.
Britain publicly blamed China for targeting the Electoral Commission watchdog and for being behind a campaign of online “reconnaissance” aimed at the email accounts of MPs and peers.
The Electoral Commission attack was identified in October 2022, but the hackers had first been able to access the commission’s systems for more than a year, since August 2021.
December 2023
A Foreign Office minister told the Commons that private conversations of high-profile politicians and civil servants were compromised by Russia’s principal security service during “sustained” attempts to interfere in UK politics.
A cyber influence campaign by a group known as Star Blizzard, “almost certainly” a subordinate of an FSB cyber unit, had “selectively leaked and amplified information” since 2015.
July 2022
The British Army confirmed a “breach” of its Twitter and YouTube accounts. The channel featured videos on cyptocurrency and images of billionaire businessman Elon Musk.
The official Twitter account had retweeted a number of posts appearing to relate to NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
July 2021
The UK accused the Chinese government of being behind “systematic cyber sabotage” following a hacking attack which affected a quarter of a million servers around the world.
The attacks, which took place in early 2021, targeted Microsoft Exchange servers.
April 2021
Britain accused Russia’s foreign intelligence service of being behind a major cyber attack on the West.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) had assessed that it was “highly likely” the SVR was responsible for the so-called SolarWinds hack.
July 2020
Britain, the United States and Canada accused Russian spies of targeting scientists seeking to develop a coronavirus vaccine.
The three allies said hackers linked to Russian intelligence were seeking to steal the secrets of research bodies around the world, including in the UK.
Lee said concerns were now mounting that China is eyeing a host of other technologies to take over, making the West rely on them even more.
Henderson said the West desperately needed political willpower to put an end to business with China, even it means forgoing cheaper goods.
He said: “We’ve simply got to say it’s (China) a different place.
“When you opened your factories in China, or R&D (research and development) in Shanghai, you may well have had a case at that stage to think it’s a good move, well now, it’s not – and you need to think hard about that.
“Nobody has the political will to start what looks like an uphill struggle.
“We need people in public not just saying China is a threat and we need to think twice about buying a Chinese electric vehicle, but we’re now facing a greater threat than since well before the Cold War.”
Finding alternative partners has to be the way forward, Mr Lee said.
He added: “For geopolitical reasons, it’s just an unavoidable choice.”
Henderson added China’s activity in the economically-vital South China Sea – where it claims big slices of disputed waters – has nothing to do with fairer free trade, but making free trade impossible.
And China would then get to “dictate who gets what when”, he said.
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AXIS OF EVIL
The contest in the South China Sea recently caught the eye when Xi’s navy joined forces with Vlad’s for a warship exercise including live-firing drills.
Dr Sari Arho Havrén from UK defence and security think tank Royal United Services Institute said the introduction of Russia to the region was part of the two nations’ “no limits” friendship.
Dr Havren said it illustrated how rival alliances were deepening ties.
“It signals a forming of blocs in the area, like China-Russia-North Korea, and then the US-led coalition of Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and so forth.”
Henderson sounded the alarm over China’s deepening ties to countries like Russia and Iran and warned it was time to take notice.
He said: “There are some people who really have spent a long time thinking hard about China, who still really dislike the idea that we should treat them, or can’t even think of treating them as an axis.
“But we have got to do so.
“This is not an axis that exists because the West, with superior power and an active policy of containment or deterrence, has been forcing China into alliance with its Russian friends and its North Korean friends and its Iranian friends.
“Those friendships are long, deep, and they have been nurtured for many years. We have just preferred not to think about it.
“Now we’ve all got our own views about Iran. We’ve got separate thoughts about North Korea, and we’ve had until lately separate thoughts about Russia.
“But unless we start glueing all those pieces together, it’s no longer a jigsaw which we can separate and ignore. This is a big, bright picture staring us in the face.
MORE TRADE BLOWS
Economic conflict between the US and China has been erupting for several years, particularly since 2018 when then-US President Donald Trump slapped the Asian power with tariffs and trade barriers.
The Biden administration has since kept the tariffs in place.
Lee expected Washington – whether Democrat or Republican-led beyond 2024 – to continue firing trade blows at their bitter rival, and countries like the UK could start following suit.
He said: “You are seeing signs of that, and you are seeing at least diplomacy and rhetoric coming out of Europe, even though they haven’t gone as far as the Americans yet in having all out tariff wars with the Chinese.”
China was the UK’s sixth largest trading partner in the year to the end of March, according to the latest government data.
But UK exports to China were 21 per cent down on the previous year, and imports dropped 19 per cent.
While doing business with China for some goods is unavoidable, Mr Lee expects trade decline to continue.
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