China is seeking to “disrupt” a project to help Australia build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, the head of the British Security Service said.
Beijing has made it a “high priority” to try to steal intellectual property involved in the AUKUS partnership, MI5 Director-General Ken McCallum told reporters at a security summit in California, the Telegraph reported on Friday.
The AUKUS partnership — an agreement among Australia, the UK and the US to share military technology, such as nuclear-powered submarines — was formed in 2021 “to counter China’s growing influence in the Pacific region,” the newspaper said, adding that Chinese spy agencies have been attempting to infiltrate AUKUS and steal its secrets since its formation.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“If you saw the wider public reaction when the AUKUS alliance was announced, you can infer from that they [Beijing] were not pleased and given everything else, you know about the way in which Chinese espionage and interference is taking place, it would be safe to assume that it would be a high priority for them to understand what’s happening inside AUKUS and seek to disrupt it if they were able to,” McCallum said.
His remarks follow concerns voiced by the British Royal Navy that US bureaucracy has held up the sharing of technology, the Telegraph said.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) said in March that the alliance would “only exacerbate [an] arms race, undermine the international nuclear nonproliferation regime and hurt regional peace and stability.”
He said that the three countries, “for their own geopolitical interests, have totally disregarded the concerns of the international community and gone further down the wrong and dangerous path.”
McCallum last week said that an estimated 20,000 Britons have been approached by Chinese state actors on LinkedIn in the hope of stealing industrial or technological secrets.
Industrial espionage was happening at a “real scale,” he said, adding that about 10,000 British businesses were at risk, particularly in artificial intelligence, quantum computing or synthetic biology, where China was trying to gain a march.
“Week by week, our teams detect massive amounts of covert activity by the likes of China in particular, but also Russia and Iran,” he said ahead of the FBI-hosted summit of spy heads from the agencies of Five Eyes alliance countries of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US.
“Activity not aimed just at government or military secrets. Not even just aimed at our critical infrastructure but increasingly [at] promising start-ups — innovative companies spun out of our universities, academic research itself and people that understandably may not think national security is about them,” he said.
A key attack vector, McCallum said, was to try and steal information by Chinese actors posing as recruitment consultants on LinkedIn.
“We think we’re above 20,000 cases where that initial approach has been made online through sites of that sort,” he said, compared with 10,000 two-and-a-half years ago.
Concerns about Chinese industrial espionage have risen dramatically over the past decade, led by the US.
FBI Director Christopher Wray described the Chinese Communist Party as “the No. 1 threat to innovation,” adding that Beijing has made “economic espionage and stealing others’ work and ideas a central component of its national strategy.”
He said that he was running “well north of about 2,000 investigations” relating to Chinese activity, and that his agency was opening a new case file “roughly every 12 hours.”
McCallum did not provide any equivalent figure for MI5, but the agency has previously said its China caseload has risen sevenfold in the past four years.
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