The head of Britain's cyber-intelligence agency has accused China of trying to "rewrite the rules of international security", saying Beijing is using its economic and technological clout to clamp down at home and exert control abroad.
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GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming says despite war raging in Europe since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Beijing's growing power is the "national security issue that will define our future".
In a rare public speech to the Royal United Services Institute think tank, Fleming alleged that Beijing's Communist authorities wanted to "gain strategic advantage by shaping the world's technology ecosystems".
"When it comes to technology, the politically motivated actions of the Chinese state is an increasingly urgent problem we must acknowledge and address," Fleming said on Tuesday.
"That's because it's changing the definition of national security into a much broader concept. Technology has become not just an area for opportunity, for competition and for collaboration, it's become a battleground for control, for values and for influence."
He argued the one-party system in Beijing sought to control China's population and saw other countries "as either potential adversaries or potential client states, to be threatened, bribed or coerced".
Before the speech, a Chinese official in Beijing said China's technological development was aimed at improving the lives of Chinese people and did not pose a threat.
"These allegations have no factual basis at all," foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said. "Clinging to the so-called China threat and provoking confrontation benefits no one and will eventually backfire."
Relations between Britain and China have grown increasingly frosty in recent years, with UK officials accusing Beijing of economic subterfuge and human rights abuses.
British spies have given increasingly negative assessments of Beijing's influence and intentions. Last year the head of the MI6, Richard Moore, called China one of the biggest threats to Britain and its allies.
In 2020, then-British prime minister Boris Johnson followed the United States in banning Chinese tech firm Huawei as a security risk, ordering it to be stripped out of the UK's 5G telecoms network by 2027.
Fleming warned that China sought to fragment the infrastructure of the internet to exert greater control. He also said China was seeking to use digital currencies used by central banks to snoop on users' transactions and as a way of avoiding future international sanctions of the sort imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
Australian Associated Press
