Could the Chinese embassy be an opportunity for Britain? |
Keir Starmer has formally approved the largest Chinese embassy ever built in Europe. The chosen site, Royal Mint Court, opposite the City of London, is close to sensitive financial and communications infrastructure. Ministers insist the risks can be managed, but there are plenty of sceptics.
The assumption underpinning much of the criticism of the embassy is that it represents a unique security risk – that Britain has sleepwalked into granting Beijing a listening post in the heart of the capital. Yet could a colder calculation have been at work? For the British state, perhaps the embassy is not a vulnerability but a controlled environment it can exploit.
Britain may be able to penetrate the site more effectively than China can exploit it
There is form here. In the late 1970s, the US allowed Soviet construction crews to build its new embassy on Leninsky Prospekt. The plan was to build a vast, modern embassy with protected wiring channels, sensitive communications floors and all the........