A SPECTRE is haunting Britain: the spectre of the Communist Party of China. The last couple of weeks have witnessed a flurry of news reports reminding the good people of this country about the imminent threat posed to their way of life by Xi Jinping and his henchmen.

Freedom of speech under attack?

A report by the viscerally anti-China think tank UK-China Transparency (UKCT), released on August 3, claims that Chinese students at Britain’s universities are being pressured to spy on their classmates and to actively suppress the discussion of anti-China talking points. The report further alleges that some academics involved in sensitive research have been denied visas by the Chinese government.

It seems the CPC is intent on imposing its singularly authoritarian governance model on our own green and pleasant land: UKCT claims that, “for Chinese nationals, surveillance is so entrenched that it appears the situation in China itself has been partially replicated in Britain.”

Nobody could accuse UKCT of an excess of scientific rigour. Their methodology is, ironically, not terribly transparent, but we’re told that the report “draws on anonymous testimony from 50 China studies scholars based in Britain” — that is, it compiles a few anonymous survey responses. The Chinese embassy’s characterisation of the report as “groundless and absurd” seems fairly apt.

However, it has received significant media coverage, with many journalists noting the chilling coincidence of the report being released just a few days after the government introduced new rules demanding universities do more to promote academic freedom and freedom of speech.

Oddly, these same journalists failed to notice any such irony when, a week later, over 500 people were arrested for expressing their support for a non-violent anti-genocide direct action group.

Hong Kong democracy advocates under attack?

Then on August 11, the Guardian published an interview with Chloe Cheung, a 19-year-old from Leeds, who faces a warrant for her arrest under Hong Kong’s national security laws. Needless to say, the nice people at the Guardian cannot but feel the deepest sympathy towards this brave young woman, her only crime being to criticise the dastardly CPC and to advocate for democratic reform.

The article makes no mention of the actual charges against Cheung. It turns out she is not wanted for her criticism of Hong Kong’s authorities, which is not actually a crime in China. Rather, the charges against her include incitement to secession and foreign collusion, as an active member of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, a group which has submitted slanderous “evidence” to both Britain’s foreign affairs committee and US Congress and which calls for foreign countries to impose punitive sanctions on China.

As Ronny Tong, former chairman of the Hong Kong Bar Association, points out in a August 13 article for the South China Morning Post, “anyone with an intent to separate Hong Kong from the rest of China or who encourages those inciting separation is acting contrary to the Chinese constitution, the Basic Law and the Joint Declaration.”

He continues: “Is mainland China or Hong Kong unique or unreasonable in outlawing secession? Hardly. A simple search on the internet will tell you that the US, India, Spain and Russia, just to name a few, have legal codes or high court rulings and interpretations of their constitutions that outlaw separatism by various different legal or political means.”

Chinese spy centre in Tower Hamlets?

The anti-China non-stories don’t end there. The long-running saga over China’s plans for a new London embassy has resurfaced, with reports that some rooms on the planning documents have been marked “redacted for security reasons.”

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has given the Chinese side two weeks to “identify precisely and comprehensively” why the drawings have been “greyed out.”

The government is due to make a decision on planning permission for the embassy by September 9.

This episode follows years of scaremongering about the “espionage risk” of allowing Beijing to set up an embassy so close to London’s financial district. According to the BBC, many are concerned that embassy staff could “tap into nearby fibre optic cables carrying sensitive data for firms in the City of London.”

Meanwhile, “pro-democracy campaigners from Hong Kong also fear Beijing could use the huge embassy to harass political opponents and even detain them.”

Clearly, there’s nothing unusual or sinister about embassies having space for dealing with sensitive documents and engaging in secure communications; indeed the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations provides a legal framework for this.

So the arguments against the new embassy are predicated on the assumption that the Chinese are uniquely sinister. Even the nutty rightwingers at Spiked Online observe that “embassies the world over are full of spies and all the IT that espionage now requires — and that doubtless goes for Britain’s own embassies, too.”

A Global Times article of August 7 points out: “Britain’s overreaction to China’s embassy plans reflects how, despite government signals to improve ties, some people in Britain remain influenced by bias and suspicion. Viewing China as a threat, Britain misinterprets standard diplomatic practices as potential security risks.”

One of the few sensible comments on the topic, reported by CNN, comes from Mark Lahiff, a local property developer: “Tower Hamlets is one of the most impoverished boroughs in Britain. For the People’s Republic of China to invest into this borough is a huge investment ... We’ve been looking at it rotting away for decades, so to bring some life and vitality into this area, and the socio-economic benefits, are huge for the borough.”

A hybrid war against China

Tellingly, the US has involved itself in the embassy issue, voicing “deep concern” about the site’s proximity to the London offices of US banks. This tells the whole story of how the “golden era of UK-China relations,” which reached its pinnacle just a decade ago, came to be replaced with a pervasive Sinophobia.

As China specialist Jenny Clegg has written, “The US elite has convinced itself that China is intent on taking over the world, just as Fu Manchu threatened to disintegrate Western civilisation back in 1912.” And in the current geopolitical conjuncture, where the US goes, Britain almost invariably follows.

The US administration has been applying pressure on Britain and other countries to downgrade their trade and co-operation with China. In May this year, Peter Navarro, Donald Trump’s chief trade adviser, accused Britain of being a “compliant servant,” warning that “if the Chinese vampire can’t suck the American blood, it’s going to suck the UK blood and the EU blood.”

Britain has been only too happy to play ball. Our enduringly hapless Defence Secretary John Healey, asked last month by the Telegraph what Britain would do to help Taiwan “prepare for potential escalation from China,” pronounced: “If we have to fight, as we have done in the past, Australia and Britain are nations that will fight together. We exercise together and by exercising together and being more ready to fight, we deter better together.”

The great historian Gerald Horne described the original Red Scare as being the handmaiden of the cold war. The purpose of McCarthyism was to create a climate of fear, feeding into support for the West’s aggressive foreign policy.

Similarly, this new McCarthyism and “yellow peril” fear-mongering serve to build public support for the project of waging a new cold war — and potentially a hot war — against the People’s Republic of China. By corollary, it also seeks to demonise and isolate those of us who oppose the new cold war and who are working towards a future of peace, friendship and co-operation.

The British working class has nothing to gain by falling for this nonsense. China’s proposal is for mutual respect and non-interference; an economic relationship based on mutual benefit; and for close co-operation on the central issues of our era: climate change, pandemics, peace and development.