Europe is caught between two empires seeking power, China and the US, and between two views of the world that at least have the advantage of being perfectly clear.
On the one hand, we have a nervous West, struggling to defend a world order it no longer controls. On the other, we have a China observing its adversary’s weaknesses and continuing to build its network of influence with strategic patience.
It’s a two-speed race, but not in the same direction.
China is building infrastructure in Africa, investing in European ports (from Piraeus to Trieste, from Genoa to Rotterdam, virtually all the main European ports), and developing strategic technologies. They don’t need to “win”, it’s enough to know that the other side is struggling. The message is indirect, but clear enough: The West runs, and China walks – and whoever walks will ultimately get the furthest.
China will have its mega-embassy in London, and its expansionism is a slow-acting poison that is eroding the foundations of Western civilisation.
Keir Starmer’s Labour government has now approved the much-discussed and controversial expansion of Chinese power in the heart of the English capital. The embassy will be built on the site of the old Royal Mint Court, a stone’s throw from the Tower of London and the Thames, which once transported the riches of the British Empire.
It’s a complex that’s not just bricks, glass and steel. It’s a symbolic and operational outpost of the Chinese party-state in the heart of the West. Even though the UK has cut its ties with Brussels post-Brexit, it remains the transatlantic bridge above all others.
Everyone wants London.
There will also be a hidden room next to London’s most sensitive communications cables in the new Chinese mega-embassy, to be built despite protests from British intelligence.</p
Some documents obtained by The Telegraph show a 208-room underground complex beneath the diplomatic compound, which Beijing has tried to keep secret. Just a few centimetres from fibre-optic cables that transmit financial data from the City, along with email traffic and messages from millions of users. According to The Telegraph, the room could give China access to sensitive information and critical financial data. Alicia Kearns, shadow minister for national security, has warned that authorising the embassy would mean giving China “a base for economic warfare at the heart of the critical national infrastructure’s nervous system”.
China has been acting for years.
Twenty key universities in the UK have accepted £40 million in funding from Huawei and Chinese state-owned companies, The Telegraph also reveals. Many companies have direct links to the Chinese Communist Party. Imperial College London has received between £3.5 million and £14.5 million from Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant that has been denied participation in many European 5G networks for security reasons. The university has also received £10 million from Sinopec, the Chinese state-controlled petrochemical company, and £6.5 million from the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, a state-owned defence conglomerate. Huawei has donated £1.1 million to Lancaster University. Other universities, including Bristol, Exeter and Heriot-Watt, have declined to disclose details of the funding deals.
In 2017, Cambridge 300 research articles on behalf of the Chinese government, covering topics such as human rights, Tibet and Xinjiang. Louisa Lim, author of a book about the Tiananmen Square protests, called it a “bad” example of how “profit motivates judgements about academic freedom”. It was clear what they wanted in return.
The Times reports that Professor Peter Nolan, director of the China Centre at Cambridge, warned against discussing China on campus. He said it would not contribute to “mutual understanding” and advised colleagues to avoid controversial debates about the human rights situation in China.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, had just stated that Cambridge and other UK universities appear to have become “mouthpieces for the Chinese Communist Party”.
As always: follow the money
It’s no coincidence that the Cambridge college where Nolan teaches has received a £3.7 million donation to fund his professorship from a fund set up by the daughter of a former Chinese premier, Wen Jiaobao. Nolan is also the lead trustee of a charitable organisation that has received a £55,000 grant from the Chinese government for a translation project.
“How China is buying Britain” (The Times). “How China has bought Britain” (The Spectator). Now it’s just the verb tense that’s being discussed.</p
Resisting an American hegemony that is perceived as ridiculous and vulgar has become a route to embracing a far more sophisticated authority: the Chinese Communist Party. It doesn’t tweet insults, but builds the Belt and Road, buys ports, funds academic elites and shapes global narratives with the patience of those who know they have time on their side.
In November last year, China invested a new 138 billion euros in strategic sectors of the European economies.
While Trump is portrayed as the bully who “threatens the liberal order”, Europe is ceding symbolic and strategic ground to its biggest systemic rival.
We have become a mix of Vichy France, which collaborated with the Nazis to “resist” its Anglo-American allies, and the Byzantine Empire, which, to resist the Latin Crusaders, allied itself with the Ottomans and thus hastened its own downfall.</p
The orange Yankee, however crass, defends values that Europe professes: Individual freedom, free markets (albeit with tariffs), Western culture and an Atlantic alliance that saved the continent from Nazism and Soviet communism.</p
When we look into the face of the yellow tangerine, however, we see nothing.
That’s why the calm Chinese despotism is preferred to the noisy American populism, Xi Jinping’s high-tech totalitarianism to Trump’s nationalism, It is the best path to European suicide, a geopolitical harakiri.</p
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, hailed by many media outlets as an anti-Trump, has recently concluded meetings with Chinese Prime Minister Xi Jinping on a new strategic partnership. The following day, Carney was in Qatar to finalise other deals.
Between the Chinese and the Emirs, democracies really are in safe hands.
The Royal Mint Court, where the largest Chinese embassy in Europe will be built, isn’t just a building; it’s the place where the pound was once minted, the symbol of monetary and imperial sovereignty. Now, the largest diplomatic fortress is being built for a regime that sees Taiwan as a rebellious province, Hong Kong as a memory to be erased, the Uighurs and rebellious Christians as a problem to be “re-educated”, Tibet as a scourge to be assimilated, and the West as an adversary to be weakened with millennial patience.
Let’s remember Orwell’s words: Totalitarianism comes not in military boots, but with smiles and promises of prosperity.
Will we trade the West for the yuan? Our decline will not be an eclipse, but a silent annexation.