Fifty Chinese students have left the UK in the past three years after Britain tightened its procedures to prevent the theft of sensitive academic research, the head of MI5 said in a speech about the espionage threat posed by Beijing.
Ken McCallum, the director general of the spy agency, also warned that MI5 had “more than doubled” its effort against Chinese activity over the same timeframe as part of an unprecedented joint warning with his counterpart at the FBI.
The British spy chief said the “most game-changing challenge” MI5 faced came from an “increasingly authoritarian Chinese communist party” that was heavily targeting industrial secrets and intellectual property across the west.
A particular focus on Chinese state activity was western universities, McCallum said, and following a reform of the Academic Technology Approval Scheme (ATAS), “over 50” students linked to the People’s Liberation Army had left the UK.
The scheme, run by the British government, applies to international students from China and other countries subject to immigration control, who want to engage in research on military technology or other subjects deemed to be sensitive.
The spy chief did not provide further details about the Chinese students who had left, a fraction of the 150,000 that study in the UK, but it formed part of a wider warning about Beijing’s espionage activities aimed primarily at universities, military and high tech businesses and related organisations.
McCallum was standing alongside Christopher Wray, the director of the US FBI, who warned that “we consistently see that it is the Chinese government that poses the biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security”.
It was a threat that was “more serious” than “even many sophisticated businesspeople realise,” Wray said. The US agency was opening one China related investigation every 12 hours, a level of activity that had increased by 1,300% over the past seven years.
McCallum added that China’s “scale of ambition is huge” and that Beijing was focused on “areas of core technology where it would otherwise be impossible for China to catch up with the west by 2050”. Artificial intelligence was a particular area of interest to China, the head of the domestic spy agency added.
