When MI5’s director-general, Sir Ken McCallum, urged the public “not to think too much in terms of classic card-carrying spies based out of embassies,” it sounded almost like a eulogy.
The age of trench-coated men passing envelopes under London’s drizzle—the world John le Carré taught us to imagine—has given way to something quieter, larger, and harder to name.
China’s espionage, British officials now admit, does not unfold in alleyways or safe houses.
It hums through data cables, business deals, and research collaborations.
It looks less like a spy novel and more like a spreadsheet. Yet, in this shift lies something deeply psychological: the fear that power itself has changed form.
The new face of espionage
In late 2025, the collapse of a high-profile spy case involving two British citizens accused of working for China sparked outrage.
The charges were dropped, prosecutors blaming “out-of-date” laws.
But the embarrassment only exposed a deeper confusion: What does “spying” even mean now?
The old Cold War grammar—secrets, agents, betrayal—barely fits this new reality.
Beijing’s intelligence services, vast and bureaucratic, operate less as a handful of daring agents than as an ecosystem.
Their mission is not only to steal information but to shape environments: cultivating local politicians, funding think-tanks, buying data sets, building telecoms.
The goal is continuity—the Communist Party’s rule—achieved through subtle influence rather than cinematic intrigue.
From secrets to systems
Le Carré’s George Smiley hunted traitors in smoky rooms.
Today’s spies read metadata. Where once espionage meant penetrating a file cabinet, it now means modelling a population’s behaviour.
Ciaran Martin, former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, has warned that China is “collecting population-level data” on British citizens—financial, medical, even emotional.
This is espionage as machine learning: intelligence as an algorithm.
In this light, the recent revelation of a cyber-operation codenamed Salt Typhoon, which compromised telecoms networks worldwide, is not an aberration but a preview. The data harvested can map not just individuals but societies—their fears, habits, and fault lines.
It is not a question of who knows your secrets, but who can simulate you.
The anxiety of dependence
Britain’s dilemma runs deeper than security.
It is dependence disguised as partnership.
For decades, the West has convinced itself that trade would tame China.
Now, as Chinese firms dominate green tech, electric vehicles, and critical minerals, London finds itself asking a le Carré-like question: What if the mole is the market itself?
The Huawei debate—once about whether the company’s 5G equipment could be used to spy—was really about control.
Technology creates reliance; reliance invites leverage.
The same is true of TikTok, which has become one of the UK’s most pervasive news platforms. Influence is no longer smuggled—it’s downloaded.
Economic power as moral confusion
A paradox haunts every discussion of China in Westminster.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves says “choosing not to engage with China is no choice at all.”
The truth is that Britain’s economic fragility and its moral discomfort are now intertwined.
China’s “epic campaign” to acquire Western technology, as one former US intelligence officer described it, is not just theft—it is an assertion that growth itself is intelligence.
Each stolen patent, each compromised university lab, is a reminder that economic power and moral power no longer align neatly.
The West, in contrast, still dreams of clean hands and open markets.
It wants prosperity without dependence, security without suspicion.
But espionage has become the shadow side of globalization: the price of our interconnection.
The ghosts return
Perhaps that is why le Carré’s ghost lingers over every British security briefing.
His novels were less about the mechanics of spying than about moral corrosion—the slow, bureaucratic loss of innocence.
In today’s networked world, the question is no longer who betrays whom, but how systems betray intentions.
Algorithms track loyalties more efficiently than human informants ever could.
The spy’s tradecraft has merged with the engineer’s code.
And yet, for all its novelty, the emotion remains the same: paranoia.
The sense that somewhere, unseen, someone is rewriting the story you thought you were living.
The silence after the rain
If the Cold War was a drama of ideology, this is a drama of intimacy—who owns your data, your thoughts, your digital self.
The tools are new, but the stakes are ancient: trust, truth, and the fragility of human judgment.
Britain, caught between Washington’s demands and Beijing’s reach, faces the oldest dilemma in intelligence: how to know the world without losing its soul.
Somewhere, George Smiley might still be waiting—coat soaked, eyes tired—watching not a double agent, but a flickering screen filled with numbers.
Source:
- Gordon Corera, “How China really spies on the UK,” BBC News, October 30, 2025.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgr4xpyrkdqo - Additional reporting from MI5 briefings, UK National Cyber Security Centre publications, and public statements by Ciaran Martin and Sir Ken McCallum.