In the following article, Carlos Martinez surveys a burst of anti-China stories in the British right-wing press – the Telegraph’s warning that Chinese chips in GPS-guided tractors could be used to spy on farmers and fitted with kill switches; the Times’ claim that Chinese-made wind turbines could be used to shut down Britain’s electricity supply; and the Telegraph’s discovery of a hotel near RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus with a good view of the runway.
In each case, he notes, the evidence is absent and the motive is never explained. Meanwhile every documented instance of weaponised supply-chain hardware – Stuxnet, the NSA’s intercepted routers, Nord Stream, the booby-trapped pagers in Lebanon – belongs to Britain’s Western allies rather than to China.
He also points to an instructive contradiction: in the same week that Chinese industrial policy was being described as a threat to national survival, both the Guardian and the Financial Times carried pieces arguing that Britain should be learning from it. The purpose of the hysteria, Carlos argues, is not to inform economic policy but to build support for the US-led New Cold War.
If the right-wing media is to be believed, Britain is facing a systematic attack by the Communist Party of China.
On 4 September, it emerged that the perennial evil-doers in Beijing are hacking our tractors. The Coalition on Secure Technology, headed by the Labour MP Graeme Downie, warns that Chinese-made chips are standard in GPS-guided tractors, farming drones and irrigation systems, and that around 70 percent of the world’s cellular internet-of-things modules are made in China.
Beijing, we are told, could use this fearsome capability to harvest data on crop yields, production forecasts and livestock populations. All of this information is, of course, published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), but it’s understandable that the Chinese would rather spend their time compromising combine harvesters in Lincolnshire.
We are further informed that the Chinese will likely have fitted kill switches to these tractors, albeit without any evidence or indeed any suggestion of a possible motive.
There is, as it happens, a documented case of a tractor manufacturer installing software locks: the US firm John Deere builds them into its machines, chiefly to stop farmers repairing their own equipment. That threat comes not from Beijing but from Moline, Illinois.
Just days earlier, the Times warned that those same sneaky Chinese communists may have inserted spying devices in our wind turbines.
UK offshore wind produces around 16,000 MW, just under a fifth of national energy needs. By next year, over 6,000 MW will come from wind farms part-owned by Chinese firms or dependent on Chinese supply chains – it’s difficult to avoid these supply chains, given ten of the world’s 15 largest turbine suppliers are Chinese. Indeed, the article concedes that Britain’s net zero target “means an inevitable reliance on Chinese companies”.
The problem, again, is kill switches. More specifically, CPC henchmen installing remotely accessible chips in turbines so they can shut down the UK’s electricity supply at will.
Quite why China would want to do such a thing remains something of a mystery. Using a kill switch capability even once would mean instantly giving up on a number of highly important export industries that China currently dominates, including solar panels, wind turbines, internet-of-things devices, batteries and electric vehicles. Decades of hard work and industrial strategy, wiped out in an afternoon. It is hard to picture the cost-benefit analysis that concludes this is a good idea.
Anyway, if Britain is genuinely worried about this sort of activity, it should take a closer look at its allies, the US and Israel. Stuxnet physically destroyed Iranian centrifuges. The NSA was documented intercepting Cisco routers to install backdoors. Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. Israel detonated thousands of booby-trapped pagers across Lebanon. Every confirmed case of weaponised supply-chain hardware belongs to the West.
Perhaps coincidentally, the “related articles” section in the Times includes an editorial with the title “Ignore the naysayers and drill, Andy, drill” – a reminder that the realistic alternative to cooperation with China on green energy is to double down on fossil fuels and hope for the best. In other words, better dead than red.
A room with a view
A week earlier, the Telegraph brought news that British intelligence and military officials had voiced concerns about the City of Dreams Mediterranean resort near Limassol in Cyprus. The resort is 16 storeys tall and by all accounts has a splendid view, which, the paper reported, could potentially be used to monitor activity at the nearby RAF Akrotiri base. The resort belongs to Melco, run by the Chinese-Canadian billionaire Lawrence Ho (a son of the late Stanley Ho, a legendary entrepreneur known chiefly for his role in the Macao casino industry); hence, apparently, the near certainty that Xi Jinping is routinely booking the top-floor presidential suite in order to watch US aircraft take off to bomb Iranian infrastructure.
Sources, of the customary unnamed and anonymous variety, told the paper that an observer with binoculars and a suitable vantage point could monitor aircraft movements and the comings and goings of troops. Since commercial satellites supply all of this for considerably less than the price of a room in such a salubrious establishment, the reasoning for any such espionage modus operandi is somewhat difficult to discern. And indeed the article notes, with the admirable frankness, not to say slimy disingenuity, for which the right-wing media is known when simultaneously reaching for the weasel’s thesaurus whilst looking over its shoulder at a lengthening queue of libel lawyers, that there is no suggestion of wrongdoing by the hotel, its owner or its operator. So, in summary, the story is that there is a building, and it is quite high up.
It is worth mentioning in passing that Akrotiri is of course not in Britain. Together with Dhekelia, it makes up 98 square miles of “Sovereign Base Areas” that Britain insisted on retaining in 1960, when Cyprus gained its independence following a heroic armed struggle. It currently hosts F-35s and US U-2 spy planes, and it has been used for surveillance flights over Gaza throughout the genocide and for US Air Force operations in the criminal war on Iran. If the worry is that the neighbours might find out what goes on there, a remedy suggests itself: close the bases, give Cyprus back its land, stop flying reconnaissance for an army facing genocide proceedings at the International Court of Justice, and stop bombing Iran.
Two Chinas, one week
Interestingly, in the same few days that the Times ran Chinese turbines as a threat to national survival, the Guardian gave Larry Elliott space to argue that Britain should have learned from Chinese industrial policy, and, similarly, a Financial Times op-ed by Ravi Gurumurthy, chief executive of Nesta, a British foundation registered as a charity that supports innovation, argued that Shenzhen shows how states can create markets and drive innovation.
So, in the same week, China’s industrial policy is described as a mortal security threat and as the thing Britain urgently needs to copy. Readers may be left confused about whether their government should work closely with China or comprehensively “decouple” from it.
But the purpose of all this anti-China hysteria is not actually to inform economic policy. Rather, it is to build support for the US-led New Cold War. The Trump regime is pressuring Britain to align itself unambiguously with the Project for a New American Century and to comprehensively disavow the global trajectory towards multipolarity. The propaganda is designed to make that choice seem like a matter of national security rather than one of drinking poison to quench thirst.
