US-UK intelligence presentation promotes fear, hate

At the London headquarters of MI5, the United Kingdom's internal intelligence agency, Christopher Wray, director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, and his UK counterpart, Ken McCallum, gave a joint presentation recently on what they claimed was an unprecedented economic threat from China.

Wray made sweeping allegations that China "steals", "cheats "and engages in "industrial espionage", claiming that Beijing was on a mission to dominate the world by obtaining the ins and outs of every industry before claiming their market share.

Unfortunately, the event was given uncritical and favorable coverage by the British media, even if it was overshadowed by the ongoing collapse of the Boris Johnson government.

The presentation was nothing more than the accumulation of the worst racial, cultural and McCarthyist prejudices against China originating in the United States, which has poisoned discourse concerning the country. Such prejudices have led to racial hatred and the persecution of Chinese scholars and scientists under the US Jusitice Department's notorious "China Initiative". But this was all conveniently omitted from coverage of the Wray-McCallum presentation.

While everything said was either false or extremely exaggerated, the consequences will undoubtedly poison legitimate avenues of research, exchange, collaboration and business between Chinese and Western institutions.

Since the era of former US president Donald Trump, the US has used racial caricatures and prejudices against Chinese people in order to garner support for geopolitical containment on the technology front, masking it with the acceptable－at least in the West－facade of anti-Communism.

However, one can find that such prejudices existed long before Communism.

An infamous, racist cartoon from 19th-century Australia known as the "Mongolian Octopus", published in a Sydney newspaper, stands as a historical benchmark on how many contemporary attacks leveled at Communism have evolved from racist discourse.

The cartoon also depicted Chinese people in a very negative way. In this respect, little has changed with US and UK falsifications.

All this knits together a wider body of discourse referred to as the "Yellow Peril", which frames China and its people as undermining "civilization" and the values of the Western world.

Again, in the modern era, such discourse has evolved from explicit racism to mask itself behind the banner of Communism, yet for all intents and purposes it is the same.

The address by both directors was short on facts, but extremely high on fear, generalization, hysteria and the invocation of paranoia. If one listened to it without knowing this context, one might assume that no legitimate forms of interaction with China could feasibly exist.

This discourse also leans on the impression that every single Chinese person is pursuing subversive and illicit action in some shape or form.

Worst of all, this hate speech intentionally degrades and dismisses China's achievements over the past 50 years and paints a falsified narrative that China's economic rise has been at the zero-sum expense of the West. This is despite the fact that China accounts for more scientific papers annually, and files more patent applications annually, than any other country.

It pushes the assumption that China cannot innovate, that China's own trade successes are merely the product of theft or "taking Western jobs", that every Chinese person in the West is an agent or spy, all acting as part of a coordinated conspiracy fueled by ill intent. It also suggests that Western countries have never had any true benefits from engagement with China.

Above all, the Wray-McCallum presentation was filled to the brim with falsehoods and was hateful, inflammatory, unacceptable and thin on facts.

Neither of these institutions, the FBI or MI5, is known for acting in good faith, let alone representing the interests and concerns of ordinary people.

The joint presentation will ultimately go down as a low point in the West's relations with China and be seen as an example of how "Western deep states" are deliberately cultivating a poisonous atmosphere of hate and fear in manipulating public opinion against China.

The author is a British political and international relations analyst.