There’s only one way to deal with a bolshy Beijing, prime minister

More than a century ago, Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu made British flesh creep. Long after Imperial China had imploded, the diabolical mandarin could still weave a fiendish plot to be the world’s “super-boss” – at least in fiction and flickering black-and-white films. Who doesn’t sneer at the “Yellow Peril” of yesteryear?

Past scares are not necessarily a guide to current dangers. But aren’t Chinese tentacles now embedding across Britain – in our universities, which have queued up to accept Chinese students and their generous fees; in Westminster, where this week MI5 warned that Chinese spies have been targeting MPs on LinkedIn as part of an operation to access government information; and with its much-delayed plan to build a “super-embassy” in east London, which could have grave implications for our national security?

If it is given the green light next month, the embassy – on the site of the former historic Royal Mint building near Tower Bridge – would be the largest in Europe, and close to fibre-optic cables, data centres and telecoms exchanges that carry communications between financial institutions in the Square Mile and Canary Wharf. Concerns have been raised that the diplomatic compound could be used to gain electronic access and trawl commercially sensitive data.

China’s ambition to build the biggest embassy in the heart of London is presented as Beijing’s commitment to its relationship with Britain. But so contentious has the proposal been that the decision was called in by ministers. Amid concerns that, as well as espionage, the embassy might also be used for the detention of dissidents, former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner asked the Chinese to explain why some rooms within its planning documents had been blanked out, for “security reasons”. Some 200,000 Hong Kongers now live in the UK, many having fled here after Beijing imposed a draconian national security law to quell mass pro-democracy demonstrations.

During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, fears of “reds under the bed” were exaggerated because the Kremlin lacked the economic and technological tools to turn a few Oxbridge spies into real influence in a Western society like ours. Today’s China has the cash to buy friends and influence people in almost every sector of British life worth influencing. Who doesn’t buy Chinese tech or – to be snobbish – plastic trash?

China’s ever-growing economic links with Britain offer benefits – but aren’t we becoming like the Qing rulers of China 150 years ago, buying the buzz from opium without recognising the threat to our society that the drug of Chinese investment in infrastructure brings with it?

I cannot entirely blame Beijing for resenting the havoc wrought two centuries ago, but I am not masochistic enough to justify revenge on us today.

Many of the critics of today’s China talk as if it were still run by genocidal ideologues as it was under Mao. I don’t think that’s an argument for appeasement – quite the contrary. Too much Western criticism of dictatorships and the challenge they pose is simplistic. Every bad guy is a new Hitler. But if you’re not a mad Austrian, there is nothing to worry about.

Today’s China is not the Third Reich reborn. It is much more like Kaiser Bill’s Germany in 1914. And that is what makes it dangerous.

When Mao was ranting about how China could win a nuclear war because its 100 million survivors would outnumber the living in the capitalist West, he had no capacity to inflict such damage. Now, our major rival simply targets us at home.

Before you say what’s all this to do with Starmer’s Britain arm-wrestling with Xi’s China, remember that president Xi has repeatedly referred to the so-called "Thucydides Trap" – by which the fear of an opponent makes going to war with them increasingly likely. What Thucydides was talking about 2,500 years ago was how the rise of Athens as a commercial power meant it could challenge Sparta’s domination of the Greek world.

Britain has to draw a clear line with China precisely because it is not a diabolically insane rival but highly rational in its drive for power. Beijing will respect a red light, not a fudge.

Mark Almond is the director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford