Labels matter: Westminster spy case collapses

Foreign leaders party in Pyongyang; CCP restricts European telecoms providers’ access

Observing China is the essential newsletter to understand the UK-PRC relationship, explained in the context of global developments.

This image was generated using Artificial Intelligence.

The debate has been going on for years: should the United Kingdom (UK) designate the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a threat to national security? Politicians from both the Labour and Conservative parties have, at points, called for this designation, and often used the lack of it to attack their opponents.

But calling Beijing a threat would obviously not be conducive for bilateral business; a priority for the current government, as well as at various points during the previous Conservative leadership.

Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister, pointed to the bipartisan difficulty of ‘how to label China’ by stating that His Majesty’s (HM) Government would not deviate from his predecessor’s appellation of the PRC as an ‘epoch-defining challenge’. This is the ultimate reason why two young British men, and alleged spies for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), found their case dropped – the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) stated that even though evidence was sufficient to prosecute at the time, the fact that the PRC was not designated an official ‘threat’ by Whitehall meant that the two suspects could not be charged under the relevant Official Secrets Act.

This debacle will only intensify the debate in political and academic circles about whether HM Government’s approach to the PRC – ‘compete, challenge and cooperate’ – is the correct one.

Welcome back to Observing China.