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PRAGUE — China and its communist ruler Xi Jinping are “absolutely complicit” in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the chief of the U.K.’s Secret Intelligence Service (known as MI6) said at a rare public appearance hosted by POLITICO in Prague Wednesday.
Richard Moore — known in the intelligence community as “C” — also blamed China for enabling the brutal actions of Myanmar’s military junta and warned of threats to other countries from Chinese “data traps” and technological advances.
He said MI6 now devotes more resources to tackling China than anything else.
“When Putin invaded Ukraine, the Chinese very clearly supported the Russians,” Moore told POLITICO executive editor Anne McElvoy. “They have completely supported the Russians diplomatically, they’ve abstained in key votes at the United Nations, they’ve absolutely cynically repeated all the Russian tropes, particularly in places like Africa and Latin America — blaming NATO and all of this stuff.”
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But this support has come at a cost to Vladimir Putin’s rule and prestige in Russia.
“What may have happened, which I know many Russians find deeply uncomfortable, is that the balance of power between them has shifted,” he said. “It’s very hard to look at them and not recognize that one is very much now subservient to the other.”
The Chinese Communist Party has put forward a widely discredited “peace plan” for Ukraine and often claims it is a neutral party in the conflict.
From the late 1970s until about a decade ago, Chinese leaders described the country’s foreign policy as “tao guang, yang hui” — or “hiding one’s light and biding one’s time.”
But under chairman Xi Jinping, Beijing has jettisoned that caution and become increasingly aggressive abroad, while ramping up repression at home.
“We now devote more resources to China than anywhere else,” Moore told POLITICO Wednesday. “The resources and size of the Chinese intelligence agency effort is huge and they deploy overseas in large numbers.”
He warned China has laid “data traps” for other countries that dilute their sovereignty and increase their vulnerability, and during the pandemic Beijing required countries to share vaccination data as a condition of receiving Chinese vaccines.
“That is exactly the kind of condition in any deal which should ring alarm bells,” Moore said.
He also noted China’s untrammeled access to vast data sets at home and its practice of illegally “hoovering up” data from abroad gave it some advantages in developing artificial intelligence.
“The Chinese authorities are not hugely troubled by questions of personal privacy or individual data security, they are focused on controlling information and preventing inconvenient truths from being revealed,” he said. But “my service, together with our allies, intends to win the race to master the ethical and safe use of AI,” he added.
As well as supporting Russia’s war on Ukraine, Beijing is propping up several unsavory and corrupt authoritarian regimes around the world, such as Iran and Myanmar, he said.
“On Myanmar, it’s appalling to see what is happening in that wonderful country … it’s deeply, deeply tragic. I’m afraid China does have responsibility because they are the foremost supporter of that regime and it’s hard to see that it would be able to operate in the way that it currently does if it didn’t receive that support.”
From its founding in 1909 until 1994, the U.K.’s overseas intelligence agency did not officially exist, apart from in James Bond films or in spy novels. But in recent years, MI6 has drawn back the veil a little.
The event with POLITICO at the British ambassador’s residence in Prague was Moore’s second-ever public speech in his role as C. It included a livestream and recorded podcast interview with McElvoy — herself an expert on the Cold War and co-author of a biography on an East German spymaster.
It is the only public appearance Moore plans to make this year.