News of Chinese bugging devices found in UK Government car sent alarm bells ringing. The security apparatus is stripping and combing for more devices. At least one SIM card capable of transmitting location data was found from a vehicle component which was sourced from China without the manufacturer's knowledge. This gets all the geolocation data transmitted – where it is/has been, the time stopped, the time it ran and so on. Manufacturers usually don't strip the components before fitting them to vehicles. China misused this process to eavesdrop on another sovereign country.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in the UK said, "The allegations are groundless and rumour." Further said, "We are firmly opposed to political manipulation on normal economic and trade cooperation or any smear on Chinese enterprises."
A well-known global menace
This is not new. On 26th January 2018, France's Le Monde reported that confidential data on the IT network of the Chinese-built African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa Ethiopia was being siphoned off to Shanghai every night between 2012 and 2017. Information of alleged leak, when analyzed gave insight into how China seeks to expand its influence in Africa. Those analyses also supplemented as circumstantial evidence as it matched with the developments in that time period on Sino-African relations.
In 2020, The Guardian wrote at length about one Chunsheng Chen – a Chinese communist party spy on how he fled Australia and how ASIO swung into action. Chunsheng Chen, in 2017, was spying on a tyre recycling plant, which was closely guarding a tech to convert used tyres to oil, steel and carbon byproducts. China wanted to allegedly know the closely guarded secret technology that the company was using. It is also reported that Chen was spying on a biotech company and was sharing an office building with CSIRO (Australian Government agency).
In December 2022, Politico reported on the spy problem in the EU. The snooping is so rampant that Brussels / European Union is just not able to stop them. Belgian authorities have said that they just can't compete with a country like China in resources to stop this from happening. Before this, there was news about how the Chinese had a 'listening station' right across the street from the European Union office in Brussels.
All the above incidents were vehemently denied by Chinese officials at various levels. But, the reality is something else. So, spying and doing business unethically is not new to China. Especially, when it comes to "One Belt, One Road" project. There are several such instances that one can find reported by media in the past few years. While it is unethical, it is important to deal with this problem sternly. One nation can't be given so much free run.
