CHINA
- China has underpinned its economic and technological aspirations with a number of strategic documents, including the Made in China 2025' strategy. This strategy lists the ten key industrial sectors in which the CCP intends China to become a world leader—many of which are fields in which the UK has particular expertise:
- electric cars and other new energy vehicles;
- next-generation Information Technology (IT) and telecommunications;
- advanced robotics and AI;
- agricultural technology;
- aerospace engineering;
- new synthetic materials;
- advanced electrical equipment;
- emerging biomedicine;
- high-end rail infrastructure; and
- high-tech maritime engineering.[1]
- China is willing to employ a 'whole-of-state' approach, using all levers of Chinese state power to support its technological goals. This includes legitimate routes using influence via investment, directing the huge resources of the Chinese state into vast research and development programmes, and investing in high-tech overseas companies with a view to transferring legally the technology to China and undercutting Western competitors. It also includes espionage on an industrial scale—stealing the fruits of Western research and development efforts and high-value Intellectual Property (IP) so that it can develop and manufacture technologies faster and cheaper than the rest of the world. As the NCSC explained, China can "shortcut [its] need to do research and development by targeting Intellectual Property".[2] MI5 was equally clear, telling the Committee that China is using "intelligence collection … to support [its] commercial mercantile ambition".[3]
- In 2019, when the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament issued a statement on the inclusion of Huawei in the UK's 5G network, we warned that the problem was far bigger than that single issue: the West is over-reliant on Chinese technology and must act now to tackle China's technological dominance.[4] The same month that our statement was released, the Intelligence Community accepted that China's rising technological dominance posed a genuine threat to the West, with SIS telling the Committee that "the biggest risk from China is that the alliance of state control and 21st century technology will allow China to dominate technologies that shape our world".[5] This is a long-term issue, and one on which we are already lagging well behind. As MI5 told us:
- ↑ 'Is "Made in China 2025" a threat to Global Trade?', Council on Foreign Relations, 13 May 2019.
- ↑ Oral evidence—NCSC, *** October 2020.
- ↑ Oral evidence—MI5, *** October 2020.
- ↑ 'ISC statement on 5G suppliers', Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, 19 July 2019.
- ↑ Oral evidence—SIS, *** July 2019.
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