The British government has been accused of being “pathetic” in the face of the threat from Communist China after announcing a relatively mild round of sanctions after admitting that hackers “affiliated to the Chinese state” were responsible for two major cyber attacks against British democratic institutions and parliamentarians.
Speaking from the floor of the House of Commons on Monday, Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden formally accused Beijing of being behind the 2021 hack of Britain’s Electoral Commission, compromising the personal details of up to 40 million voters in the UK. While the Commission admitted last year that “hostile actors” were responsible for the hack, the government had not officially attributed the cyber attack to the communist nation until Dowden’s comments on Monday.
The deputy prime minister also asserted that China was responsible for “attempted reconnaissance activity” against four UK parliamentary accounts in a separate campaign in 2021 carried out by the state-tied hacker unit Advanced Persistent Threat Group 31 (APT31).
The government announced it would be sanctioning two Chinese nationals, Zhao Guangzong and Ni Gaobin, as well as Wuhan Xiaoruizhi Science and Technology Company Ltd for their role in aiding the hacks, the BBC reported.
Yet, the steps taken were described by former Conservative Party leader and co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) Sir Iain Duncan Smith as an “elephant giving birth to a mouse”.
“As I was watching this torturous procedure, I couldn’t understand why they hyped this all over the weekend, only to discover that it’s a tiny thing they’re doing,” he told Nigel Farage on GB News.
“The company, the entity, by the way, is tiny. I mean, it’s literally a few hundred thousand in terms of turnover and a tiny number of people. So this is really pathetic and very small.”
Smith also noted that on the same day, the United States announced sanctions against seven Chinese nationals, compared to just two from Britain.
The Executive Director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, Luke du Pulford, said that the sanctions fell flat because they failed to target the Chinese Communist Party officials behind the hacks.
He went on to criticise the British government of apparently failing to disclose the full nature of the Chinese hacking operation in Britain, with Dowden’s disclosures only mentioning four MPs being targeted, while a press release from United States Department of Justice revealed that 43 British Parliamentarians were targeted in the hack as well as the entire European Union membership of IPAC.
Ahead of the speech from Dowden, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that the government will “always do what is required to keep our country safe” while labelling China an “economic threat to our security and an epoch-defining challenge”.
However, Sunak’s government has steadfastly refused to officially label the communist country as a “threat” to the UK, an approach preferred by his predecessor Liz Truss, who was set to designate China as such before being ousted in a globalist coup by Sunak and his China-linked co-conspirator Chancellor Jeremy Hunt.
Sunak has come under criticism for his ties to China, with his wife’s family business, Infosys, an Indian tech giant, owning two branches in China, reportedly earning the company £134 million in 2021.
The Prime Minister, who has long argued for closer trade ties with China, was essentially endorsed by Chinese state media in the 2022 Conservative leadership race to replace Boris Johnson in Downing Street, with the CCP mouthpiece Global Times praising Sunak as the only candidate with a “pragmatic view of developing balanced ties with China.”
The failure of the government to label China as a threat on Monday was criticised by Sir Iain Duncan Smith, who said: “The reality is that if the Government means business, it must now make it clear that it no longer sees China as an epoch defining challenge but as a systemic threat. We must put China on the enhanced tier of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme.”
The Tory MP, who was personally sanctioned by the Beijing for his role in highlighting the genocide of the Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region of China, concluded: “We have to do better. China is a threat and we must now recognise that.”