Perfidious Albion

Using Huawei in UK 5G networks would be 'madness', US says
British told allowing Chinese firm access would put intelligence sharing at risk
By Dan Sabbagh

A special delegation of US officials presented an incendiary dossier which they said featured new evidence of the security risks of relying on Huawei technology. 

Using Huawei technology in UK 5G networks would put transatlantic intelligence sharing at risk, senior US officials have told British ministers, warning that allowing the Chinese firm access would be “nothing short of madness”.
The extraordinary American ultimatum came as a special delegation led by President Trump’s deputy national security advisor, Matt Pottinger, presented an incendiary dossier they said featured new evidence of the security risks of relying on Huawei technology in future phone networks.
The intense and public lobbying presents an immediate headache for Boris Johnson, the prime minister, who had been expected to make a final decision about Huawei shortly, having been repeatedly advised by the UK’s security establishment that any security risks can be contained.
Ahead of the UK decision the head of MI5, Andrew Parker, said over the weekend that he saw “no reason to think” that using Huawei technology should threaten intelligence sharing with the US, suggesting that Britain was poised to give the Chinese company the go-ahead.
But that assertion was flatly contradicted by a senior US official who was part of the delegation, who said: “Congress has made it clear they will want an evaluation of our intelligence sharing.”
A second member said that the US president hoped not to fall out with the UK over the issue but added: “Donald Trump is watching closely”.
Last spring, the UK had indicated it would allow Huawei to supply non-core technology such as mobile phone masts and antennas in future 5G networks, after a cabinet committee had voted by 5 to 4 in favour.
But even that would not be enough to allay Washington’s concerns, the US officials said.
Huawei has consistently denied that it has ever been asked by the Chinese government to introduce secret “back doors” into its technology, and has even offered to sign a “no spy agreement” with countries adopting it.
But the US insists there is a surveillance risk.
The officials, who had flown in specially from the US, would not spell out what the “relatively recent information” that they had shared with their UK counterparts was, but it is understood to be of a technical nature.
Although the long-standing intelligence-sharing relationship between the US and the UK would not be immediately compromised, they said that members of Congress would want to review it in future legislation.
A final decision will also be seen as a crucial early signal in how far the UK wants to move towards the US orbit as trade talks with both Washington and Brussels loom after Britain formally leaves the EU at the end of January.
As well as Pottinger, key officials in the US delegation of six included Chris Ford, an assistant secretary in the US state department, and Robert Blair, the special envoy for international telecoms.
The delegation claimed that Chinese spies, working for the People’s Liberation Army, also worked simultaneously for Huawei – and that the company “had played a role” in supporting the “re-education camps” for the country’s Muslim Uighur minority.
British sources initially said that they were only going to meet civil servants, but the US delegation said they had spoken to at least one cabinet minister.
Huawei is one of three companies that supply equipment to Vodafone, BT and other mobile phone companies for high-speed 5G networks, alongside Ericsson of Sweden and Nokia from Finland.
Its kit is recognised by UK phone companies as being cheaper and more advanced than rivals, and some believe that the Trump administration wants to weaken China’s advanced position in the market for trade reasons.

Perfidious but naïve Albion

Boris Johnson’s Bad Bet on China
The controversy around Huawei shows you can’t benefit from the Chinese economy without acquiescing to Chinese politics.
By ISAAC STONE FISH

Boris Johnson in London in 2016.

It was an odd juxtaposition. 

At a NATO summit in London on Dec. 4, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised he would keep the controversial Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei away from Britain’s 5G network if it jeopardized the United Kingdom’s work with its intelligence-sharing partners, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. 

“I don’t want this country to be unnecessarily hostile to investment from overseas but, on the other hand, we cannot prejudice our vital national security interests,” Johnson said. 

Then, perhaps fearing he had ventured too far, less than 24 hours later Johnson pulled out a phone and took a selfie with two TV anchors — a Huawei phone.
Though his staff later claimed the phone didn’t belong to him, the incident got wide coverage in British press. 

The British government will reportedly announce how to handle Huawei after the Dec. 12 election, which pits the widely reviled Johnson and his Conservatives against his widely reviled challenger Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. 

Corbyn, who is unlikely to win, has spoken little about China or how to deal with state-backed companies like Huawei.
But Johnson, in his more than a decade in the public eye, has a long track record on China. 

Johnson believes he has a brilliant solution that policymakers elsewhere have missed: by acknowledging the political and security risks of a close economic relationship with China, London can then overlook those risks in favor of trade. 

“China is a rival,” Johnson said in a leaked June 2018 recording, while he was foreign secretary, “but China is a rival whose growth and whose incredible developing power can be used to our advantage.” On the one hand, he said in the same recording, Britain should “treat China as our friend and our partner,” on the other hand, “they will try to stiff us.” 

Johnson seems to believe the United Kingdom can benefit from China economically while not acquiescing to it politically—to have its cake and eat it too, as the prime minister is fond of saying.
This position is naïve. 

It ignores the most important reality of a Chinese Communist Party–controlled China: Politics always trumps economics. 

Building a trade relationship isolated from a political relationship is a lovely ambition, but Beijing’s Leninist political system precludes it. 

“No part of the Communist Chinese state is ultimately able to operate free of the control exercised by its Communist Party leadership. This is a simple statement of fact,” writes Richard Dearlove, the former head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, in the foreword to a critical May 2019 report on the risks of Huawei in the British system, “and no amount of sophistry can alter it.”
The debate over Huawei typifies the British government’s China myopia. 

Founded in 1987 by the former army engineer and Party member Ren Zhengfei, the telecoms giant has always had close links to the party. 

Ren’s management thinking naturally carries “very deep imprints of the Communist Party culture,” according to a 2017 Chinese book based on more than 100 interviews with top Huawei executives, and written by a friend of Ren’s. 

The U.S. and other governments have long been suspicious of Huawei’s ability to act as a proxy for Beijing; in 2012 the House Intelligence Committee called Huawei a national security threat and the U.S. government, and in August 2018 President Donald Trump signed a law de facto banning government agencies from using Huawei products.
In December 2018 Canadian police, at Washington’s request, arrested Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s CFO and Ren’s daughter, on charges related to sanctions violations in Iran. 

Tensions between the two superpowers spiked. 

London attempted to seesaw between the United States, Britain’s largest trading partner and most important ally—potentially an even more important one post-Brexit—and the rising economic power of China. 

In April, embattled then–Prime Minister Theresa May decided to allow Huawei to build noncore elements of Britain’s 5G network. 

Then, after the U.S. government condemned the move, the British government announced it hadn’t yet decided and May fired Defense Minister Gavin Williamson, blaming him for leaking the decision (he denied the charge).
This hedging stretches back to 2010, when British security officials reportedly began noticing unusual “chattering”—communicating data to unknown sources—in Huawei equipment used in the country. 

That year, the British intelligence service GCHQ partnered with Huawei to establish the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre, also known as the Cell. 

The Cell is supposed to inspect Huawei equipment for malicious code. 

Huawei funds the Cell, and most of the employees are from Huawei. 

Despite this sponsorship, the Cell’s latest annual report, from March 2019, states that it can “only provide limited assurance” that Huawei does not jeopardize U.K. national security. 

And then, in May of this year, Huawei Chairman Liang Hua absurdly offered to “sign a no-spy agreement” to placate London.
If Huawei is trustworthy, why does it need to be monitored? 

And if it’s duplicitous, how would a “no-spy agreement” constrain it? 

“It is far easier to place a hidden backdoor inside a system than it is to find one,” writes the former British diplomat Charles Parton in a February 2019 paper. 

“In the battle between Chinese cyber attackers and the UK’s Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre, the advantage and overwhelming resources lie with the former.” 

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Cell strengthens rather than weakens Huawei’s ability to harm British national security.
A well-connected senior member of a prestigious British think tank faults the 2010–2016 Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, who in September 2015 publicly advised Britain to “run towards China.” 

Under Osborne’s influence, in 2015 the United Kingdom became the first major Western country to join Beijing’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (despite “a very hostile briefing from the Obama White House telling us not to do it,” a former adviser to the British treasury told me.) 

Former Prime Minister David Cameron, who launched what he called a “golden era” of relations between Britain and China, resigned in June 2016 after the Brexit vote and tried to raise a fund to invest in projects with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. 

Embarrassingly, he failed.
Johnson has played his part as well. 

In 2008, four years before London hosted the Summer Olympics, then-Mayor Johnson joked in Beijing that “ping pong was invented on the dining tables of England in the 19th century and it was called wiff waff.” 

Or, as he joked in 2013 after announcing a Chinese company would refurbish the Port of London Authority building, which stands in for the offices of the spy agency MI6 in the James Bond film Skyfall, “if that isn’t openness to China, I don’t know what is.” 

He added, “we have sold you our offices of the secret service. Saves time, I imagine.”

Perfidious Albion

Pompeo Warns Britain Over Huawei Security Risks

By Stephen Castle

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with Britain’s foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, at Lancaster House in London on Wednesday. Mr. Pompeo warned about the risks of allowing the Chinese company Huawei to be part of Britain’s new cellular network.

LONDON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday made a blistering attack against China as he stepped up pressure on Britain, warning that American intelligence sharing could be risked by the involvement of a Chinese company in a new British telecommunications network.
Speaking in London, Mr. Pompeo argued that China posed such a range of economic and security threats that the world now faced “a new kind of challenge, an authoritarian regime that’s integrated economically into the West.”
“China steals intellectual property for military purposes,” he said. 

“It wants to dominate A.I., space technology, ballistic missiles and many other areas.”
The question on the table in Britain is whether the government should allow Huawei, a Chinese company considered a security risk by the United States, to help build some of the next-generation, 5G cellular network in Britain.
Discussions on that topic were the subject of a leak that last week prompted the firing of the British defense secretary, Gavin Williamson, who had opposed working with the Chinese firm.
Huawei denies that it is a security risk.
In a speech for the 40th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory, Mr. Pompeo asked whether the British leader who came to be known as the Iron Lady would have allowed China “to control the internet of the future.”
Mr. Pompeo argued that Chinese law allowed the government to demand access to data flowing through Huawei systems.
“Why would anyone grant such power to a regime that has already grossly violated cyberspace?” he asked. 

“What can Her Majesty’s government do to make sure sensitive technologies don’t become open doors for Beijing’s spymasters?”
He also issued a stark reminder to his British hosts that if security were compromised, it would restrict the ability of the United States to share sensitive intelligence information with the British, as it does extensively.
“Insufficient security will impede the United States’ ability to share information within trusted networks. This is just what China wants — to divide western alliances,” Mr. Pompeo said.

A Huawei ad in central London.

Mr. Pompeo also said at an earlier news conference, however, that he has “great confidence that the United Kingdom will never take an action that will break the special relationship,” a reference to the close ties of the two nations and a comment that reassured some British officials that damage to relations with the United States can be avoided.
Britain’s foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, told reporters that the government had not made its final decision on Huawei, and would never take a decision that would compromise its ability to share intelligence with its closest allies, “or in particular with the United States.”
British officials believe that it is possible to give Huawei some access to noncore elements of its new 5G system while maintaining the security of more sensitive networks.
The United States has warned several governments around Europe against working with Huawei, and the topic has become increasingly touchy as countries decide on how to build their 5G networks.
The issue is particularly delicate for a British government that is planning to leave the European Union and wants to forge stronger economic links with China, while also building on its close diplomatic and trading relationship with the United States.
Mr. Williamson was fired last week after an investigation into a report in The Daily Telegraph regarding discussions about the Huawei decision in Britain’s National Security Council, of which Mr. Williamson was a member.
The article suggested that Theresa May had overruled objections from some cabinet ministers, including Mr. Williamson, about bringing the Chinese company into the 5G project. 

Mr. Williamson has denied being the source of the leak.
In Parliament on Wednesday, Julian Lewis, a senior lawmaker in May’s Conservative Party and chairman of the House of Commons Defense Committee, asked the prime minister whether it would not “be naïve to the point of negligence to allow Huawei further to penetrate our critical national infrastructure.”
May said she was “not considering any options that would put our national security communications at risk, either within the U.K. or with our closest allies.”
During his visit, Mr. Pompeo, who held talks with May and Mr. Hunt, also made an apparent swipe at their political adversary, Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party. Speaking at his news conference, Mr. Pompeo described the support of some politicians for the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, as “disgusting.”
Unlike the British government, Labour has refused to condemn Maduro, arguing that Venezuela’s political future was a matter for its own citizens. 

Corbyn has announced that he will not attend an official dinner during President Trump’s scheduled state visit to Britain next month.

Perfidious Albion

UK to sell unlimited amount of military equipment to China, including advanced radar technology and tracking systems
By JAMES BICKERTON

The revelation was made by the South China Morning Post, based on information from within the UK’s Department for International Trade.
According to the leak, a UK company, which hasn’t been identified, has been granted an Open Individual Export Licence (OIEL), allowing it to trade in restricted goods.
OIELs usually last between five and two years, although the figure in this case is unknown.
The paper reported that the licence covers “target acquisition, weapon control and countermeasures” for military planes, helicopters and drones.
The supplier is also expected to export software and technology for military radar systems.
The licence has been condemned by anti-arms trade activists.
Andrew Smith, CEO of the UK based Campaign Against Arms Trade, claimed: “It’s potentially a big license and it does say the end user is the Chinese Air Force.”
Over the past few years the UK has continued to lead China on radar development.

“If they are willing to sell we are willing to buy"

Chinese military spending has increased dramatically over the past few years.

According to Cao Yunhe, a Chinese radar specialist who lectures at Xidan University, China is hoping to benefit from UK expertise.
He said: “If they are willing to sell we are willing to buy.
“We want to know how their systems operate. It will help us improve our own design.”
Last month Hugh Griffiths, a leading British radar expert, was rewarded for his work helping Chinese radar development.
He was presented with “Outstanding Award for Chinese radar International Development” in Nanjing, capital of an eastern Chinese province.

Theresa May with Xi Jinping in Beijing in January of this year.

News of the UK’s potential exportation of military equipment comes amid an ongoing trade dispute between the US and China.
China and the US are currently engaged in a trade war after President Donald Trump accused the nation of unfair competition and intellectual property theft.
Trump has accused the world’s second biggest economy of committing “longtime abuse of the broken international system and unfair practices”.
In June, the US placed a 25 percent tariff on $50billion (£38.6billion) worth of Chinese goods, with China retaliating with counter-tariffs on US products.
The situation escalated further when Trump ordered tariffs on another $200billion (£154billion) of Chinese goods, leading to a tariff increase on $60billion (£46billion) of American products in response.

Perfidious Albion

Britain is looking away as China tramples on the freedom of Hong Kong – and my father

By Angela Gui

Angela Gui: ‘My father’s case is only one out of many that illustrate the death of the rule of law in Hong Kong.’ 

Iam too young to remember the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and its promise for the new world I would live in. 

But I have lived to see that promise trampled.
The Sino-British Joint Declaration, signed to pave the way for the handover, was supposed to protect the people of Hong Kong from Chinese interference in their society and markets until 2047. 

Yet as the handover’s 20th anniversary approaches, China muscles in where it promised to tread lightly while Britain avoids eye contact.

Gui Minhai: the strange disappearance of a publisher who riled China's elite
As Xi Jinping has consolidated his grip on Chinese politics since he took office in 2013, Beijing has increasingly ignored the principle of “one country, two systems” on which the handover was based and actively eroded the freedoms this was supposed to guarantee.
In October 2015, my father Gui Minhai and his four colleagues were targeted and abducted by the agents of the Chinese Communist party for their work as booksellers and publishers. 

My father – a Swedish citizen – was taken while on holiday in Thailand, in the same place we’d spent Christmas together the year before. 

He was last seen getting into a car with a Mandarin-speaking man who had waited for him outside his holiday apartment. 

Next, his friend and colleague Lee Bo was abducted from the Hong Kong warehouse of Causeway Bay Books, which they ran together. 

Lee Bo is legally British and, like any Hong Konger, his freedom of expression should have been protected by the terms of 1997.
Their only “crime” had been to publish and sell books that were critical of the central Chinese government. 

So paranoid is Beijing about its public image, that it chooses to carry out cross-border kidnappings over some books. 

Causeway Bay Books specialised in publications that were banned on the mainland but legal in Hong Kong. 

The store’s manager, Lam Wing-kee, who was taken when travelling to Shenzhen, has described Causeway Bay Books “a symbol of resistance”. 

In spite of Hong Kong’s legal freedoms of speech and of the press the store is now closed because all its people have been abducted or bullied away. 

Other Hong Kong booksellers are picking “politically sensitive” titles off their shelves in the fear that they may be next; the next brief headline, the next gap in a family like my own.
I continue to live with my father’s absence – his image, messages from his friends, the cause he has become. 

Turning 53 this year, he spent a second birthday in a Chinese prison. 

Soon he will have spent two years in detention without access to a lawyer, Swedish consular officials, or regular contact with his family.
My father’s case is only one of many that illustrate the death of the rule of law in Hong Kong. 

Earlier this year, Canadian businessman Xiao Jianhua – who had connections to the Chinese political elite – disappeared from a Hong Kong hotel and later resurfaced on the mainland. 

In last year’s legislative council elections, six candidates were barred from running because of their political stance. 

The two pro-independence candidates who did end up getting elected were prevented from taking office. 

If “intolerable political stance” is now a valid excuse for barring LegCo candidates, then it won’t be long before the entire Hong Kong government is reduced to a miniature version of China’s.
The Joint Declaration was meant to guarantee that no Hong Kong resident would have to fear a “midnight knock on the door”. 

The reality at present is that what happened to my father can happen to any Hong Kong resident the mainland authorities wish to silence or bring before their own system of “justice”. 

Twenty-one years ago, John Major pledged that Britain would continue to defend the freedoms granted to Hong Kong by the Joint Declaration against its autocratic neighbour. 

Today, instead of holding China to its agreement, Britain glances down at its shoes and mumbles about the importance of trade. 

It is as if the British government wants to forget all about the promise it made to the people of Hong Kong. 

But China’s crackdown on dissent has made it difficult for Hong Kongers to forget.
Theresa May often emphasises the importance of British values in her speeches. 

But Britain’s limpness over Hong Kong seems to demonstrate only how easily these values are compromised away. 

I worry about the global implications of China being allowed to just walk away from such an important treaty. 

And I worry that in the years to come, we will have many more Lee Bos and Gui Minhais, kidnapped and detained because their work facilitated free speech. 

Hong Kong’s last governor, Lord Patten, has repeatedly argued that human rights issues can be pushed without bad effects on trade. 

Germany, for example, has shown that this is entirely possible, with Angela Merkel often publicly criticising China’s human rights record. 

With a potentially hard Brexit around the bend, a much reduced Britain will need a world governed by the rule of law. 

How the government handles its responsibilities to Hong Kong will be decisive in shaping the international character of the country that a stand-alone Britain will become. 

I for one hope it will be a country that honours its commitments and that stands up to defend human rights.