Don’t say we weren’t warned about China’s plans for its London ‘super-embassy’

Knowing what we now do following a leak of the blueprints for China’s new super-embassy in London, it would be on the mad side of reckless to allow Beijing to develop the site of the former Royal Mint for its own ends. And yet that is precisely what the government is expected to announce in the coming days.

Full, unredacted layouts for the derelict site near the Tower of London have reignited concerns over what it could mean for Britain’s national security. The plans for the 22,000 square-metre complex depict a basement containing 208 unmarked rooms, which some have suggested could be used as cells in which to hold dissidents.

An exterior basement wall will run less than two metres away from critical national infrastructure – fibre-optic cables that carry highly sensitive financial data to and from the City of London, and beyond.

The addition of huge cooling systems imply the installation of data servers that could be used to sweep up any passing information; hacking into cables, collecting and analysing the data, is a relatively easy task, as Edward Snowden showed in 2013 when he revealed how the UK's intelligence agency, GCHQ, has the capability to tap into North Atlantic cables at the beach at Bude.

The Chinese are, of course, experts in IT. At the prospect of a green light for their super-embassy, they must be licking their lips.

Embassies from the “sending” country represent their nations in the “receiving” country, in keeping with the 1961 Vienna Convention which provides the basis for diplomatic immunity for staff – a guarantee that the premises should be inviolable and immune from search.

Arrangements over embassies are always reciprocal, and Beijing is linking our wish to have a new embassy in Beijing (the current one is tatty) to theirs. However, apart from its proposed size, what is also highly unusual is that China owns the freehold for Royal Mint Court, having bought it in May 2018, for £255m.

Since China spent some £37bn in the UK from 2000 to 2017 (cash every UK government has been delighted about), no one seems to have thought what might become of the Royal Mint.

If China were permitted to build a new embassy here, it would be the largest diplomatic mission in Europe. It would also give the People’s Republic its largest spying and subversion base – in the form of a cultural centre – in the entire continent.

China already spies on us massively – every piece of information it hoovers up is of importance to its Ministry of State Security – but it also attempts to subvert our democratic way of life, throwing cash everywhere: at MPs and our universities, in particular. In 2022, Chinese officials pulled a Hong Kong democracy protester into the grounds of the Chinese consulate in Manchester and beat him up; six officials were later recalled to Beijing without charges, citing diplomatic immunity. We can be certain that some of the rooms in the Royal Mint Court plans would be used to monitor, kidnap and detain Chinese dissidents in the UK.

Bizarrely, No 10 says that neither MI5 nor MI6 objects to the Chinese plans. We cannot know if they were asked to say this; some might suppose the leaking of the unredacted plans ahead of a government announcement was MI5’s work. What we do know is that, repeatedly, MPs and intelligence and security chiefs have warned us about China, its intentions towards us, towards Taiwan, and its strong support for Putin’s vile war of aggression in Ukraine.

However, even if MI5 felt it could handle the domestic threat, and MI6 might see an advantage to itself in an enlarged embassy in Beijing, the official line – “China is a threat, but security issues can be managed” – is self-evident nonsense.

The jaw-dropping collapse of the trial of two suspected Chinese spies last October, displaying a total failure in the director of public prosecutions to bring them to trial, shows clearly that, even if MI5 had the manpower to keep watch over the super-embassy, which it hasn’t, there would be nothing they could do to bring Chinese spies to justice.

An initial request for planning permission to convert it into an embassy, a “cultural centre” and 255 homes for Chinese officials were rejected by the local council, despite support from the London mayor Sadiq Khan and the previous Conservative government. They were resubmitted in August 2024, following the election of a Labour government.

That this project is of the greatest importance to China can be seen not just in the plans’ resubmission, but by President Xi Jinping raising them personally with Keir Starmer in their very first conversation in August 2024 – and then again at the G20 Summit later that November.

When Starmer’s government gives the green light to the super-embassy, we can’t say we weren’t warned.

Professor Anthony Glees is emeritus professor at the University of Buckingham, and a former director of Brunel’s Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies