British lawmakers have been warned that Chinese spies are posing as job recruiters to target MPs and parliamentary staff in a bid to obtain “insider insights” on behalf of Beijing’s Ministry of State Security.
The warnings from the UK domestic intelligence service, MI5, were relayed in a letter to Members of Parliament by the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, on Tuesday.
Two LinkedIn profiles were explicitly identified as potentially being part of the “civilian recruitment headhunters” scheme, to conduct “outreach at scale”.
Named as Amanda Qiu and Shirly Shen, the warning to MPS said that the purpose was to “collect information and lay the groundwork for long-term relationships, using professional networking sites, recruitment agents and consultants” on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
Hoyle said that top targets include “Parliament staff, economists, think tank employees, geo-political consultants and those working alongside [the government], including MPs and members of the House of Lords”.
One parliamentary researcher, Simon Whelband, who works for Conservative MP Neil O’Brien — a prominent critic of the Chinese regime — told the BBC that he had been contacted by one of the apparent fake Chinese accounts, but dismissed the message because of its poor English.
“I’ve worked around Parliament for about 10 years now, so I’m kind of used to this. But if you were more junior, you don’t know what you’re looking for,” he said.
“You might think it’s a genuine offer that’s made to you on LinkedIn, they might accept. If it was written in better English and looked more credible, you could be fooled into thinking it was genuine.”
It comes in the wake of the leftist Labour government facing accusations that it intentionally hindered an investigation into alleged Chinese spying by a British parliamentary researcher and an academic by refusing to provide testimony to the Crown Prosecution Service to the effect that China represented a national security threat.
The government has denied that the decision was politically motivated, claiming that because the previous Tory government had not officially labelled the communist nation a threat at the time of the alleged offences, it could not do so in retrospect.
Conservative MP and co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, said on Tuesday that the warning from MI5 this week “blows a hole through all of that ridiculous nonsense” debate about China being a national security threat.
“Why is the government so unable to call China what it is, which is a persistent, continuing threat to Britain’s national security?” he questioned. “That is clear to every single member of the public… but somehow the government seems to think it isn’t that clear.”
China has long faced accusations of spying in Westminster, including in 2022, when MI5 said that “British Chinese Project” founder Christine Lee was working to “subvert the process” of British democracy through her various contacts with UK lawmakers, reportedly including £700,000 in donations to the Labour Party.
At the time, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage remarked: “If there’s one Chinese spy in parliament, you can bet your life there’s a lot more than that.”
Further concerns have been raised over the planned Chinese “super embassy” in central London, which, if given final approval from the government, would become the largest in Europe. Critics have warned that the site could be used to hack British telecommunications and a base of operations to launch espionage campaigns and target Chinese dissidents living in the UK.
Responding to the latest allegations, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in London said that claims of spying were “pure fabrication” and warned Britain to “stop going further down the wrong path of undermining China-UK relations”.
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