DESPITE Rishi Sunak’s claims that the UK’s response to the increasingly malicious and democracy-threatening Chinese regime is ‘more robust’ than many allies, recent weeks have shown the grave threat posed by the CCP.
In the Commons, Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden blamed Chinese ‘state-affiliated actors’ for cyber-attacks at the heart of British democracy, which targeted the Electoral Commission in 2021 and a group of China-sceptic Members of Parliament.
The rather toothless response from Westminster was to place sanctions on two individuals and a company alleged to be involved, but the question remains: how has this taken so long?
As has become commonplace or even second nature to the West, major powers are as usual a day late and a dollar short in their response to threats from hostile actors. Throughout the pandemic, many who suggested the possibility that covid could have originated from a lab were shot down as bigots. However, it is now widely reported that this is as credible a theory as any.
For far too long, the UK has become economically intertwined and dependent on a state that many see as a contradiction to Western democracy. You have only to take a look at the Government’s U-turn on Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s 5G rollout, or the dependency of the nation’s children on TikTok, to understand that Chinese state-backed enterprise is intrinsically linked to our day-to-day lives.
The funding of universities and private enterprise in the UK by Chinese investors means that the CCP has a stranglehold on the future of our nation, and while the Government may claim to be doing something about it by placing meaningless sanctions on a couple of Chinese nationals, the real extent of influence is far deeper.
This does not extend only to financial matters and venture capital investment from the East into the West. State-backed pacts have seen China become increasingly involved in the UK’s climate agenda, as the pursuit of Net Zero continues to blight the UK economy and act as an energy tax on the public during a cost-of-living crisis.
All this while China continues to emit more carbon dioxide than the majority of Western nations combined and continues to build coal power stations at a rate of knots.
With this in mind, the answer to why a response to Chinese aggression has taken so long is simple. The CCP has played the West brilliantly, with geo-political finesse. Over decades it has slowly emasculated the West, increasingly playing a more and more significant role in the economy, education systems and intergovernmental relations.
As China announces a major increase in military spending, amid growing aggression towards Taiwan, it may be that a full-scale invasion will be the only thing that wakes up the West to the dangers of the regime. Wherever you look there is creeping influence of China into the culture of many Western nations: a cut-and-paste strategy out of the communist playbook which the West are failing to address.