Chinese spies are working to woo British university students as a new avenue to extract UK state secrets, a security expert has warned.
Fears about the country’s influence on Britain have flared over the last year following warnings from MI5 and revelations that a “Chinese spy” was arrested in March.
Xi Jinping’s regime is not finished trying to work its way into UK inner circles, and Professor Anthony Glees, an intelligence expert from the University of Buckingham, has warned it is stepping up its efforts.
The expert has claimed that China is using an army of “elite” spies to entice Britons studying elite degrees.
Professor Glees recently outlined three ways by which operatives could persuade unsuspecting students to divulge secrets.
Speaking to The Sun, he said the UK’s top institutions and degree programmes would be the perfect places for Chinese spies to recruit “naive Brits”.
He said the universities with a Confucious Institute – public Chinese education programmes run by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China – are prime spots.
The presence of the institutions, he argued, would help top spooks quickly identify students who have an existing interest in the nation.
Specifically, he argued, they will look for people who may end up in a position where they can gain “secret intelligence to pass on to China”.
Professor Glees added that, once they have identified their “targets”, spies would entice them using offers of gifts and trips to China, cash, and beautiful women.
He said they would also attempt to appeal to their academic side by telling them China is “doing amazing research of the greatest interest, and that is an enormously powerful incentive”.
Once they have enticed the students to their country, the expert added that local professionals within Chinese spy circles would work to extract information “which to them seems completely useless or obvious, but fits into the Chinese jigsaw”.
The professor is far from the only person to have raised concerns about Chinese espionage in the UK, with MI5 having issued a warning earlier this year.
Ken McCallum, the head of the domestic intelligence agency, said in October that officials had seen a “sustained campaign” from the Chinese state “on a pretty epic scale”.
He added that MI5 has seen suspected agents approach up to 20,000 Britons via professional networking sites to try and convince them to hand over sensitive information.
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