On March 16, the British Prime Minister will release his “most significant report since the Cold War” on the government’s approach to national policy in the post-Brexit era, and mentions Britain’s return to the Indo-Pacific region and the building of a democratic alliance to deal with the Chinese Communist threat.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the report as “the largest assessment of Britain’s foreign, defense, national security and development policies since the end of the Cold War.
According to internal government documents, the report states that in order to better analyze and respond to the systemic challenges posed by the Chinese Communist Party, the British government will focus on increasing its investment in countering the Chinese Communist Party, particularly in cyber security. The UK will also seek to engage in higher-level Indo-Pacific affairs and regularly deploy forces overseas to improve detection, deterrence and countermeasure capabilities against defense threats.
The report was originally scheduled for release in early 2020, but has been delayed by the Communist Chinese virus (COVID-19) outbreak. The UK is also expected to release a defense white paper on March 22 to supplement its future military building strategy.
Relations between Britain and China have taken a sharp turn for the worse since the CCP unilaterally tore up the Sino-British Joint Declaration and pushed through the National Security Law in Hong Kong. Recently, the Communist Party’s major outreach network, the Global Television Network (CGTN), had its license revoked by the UK. In addition, the acquisition of well-known private schools in the UK by Chinese Communist capital has also raised concerns in the UK recently.
A new study led by Jo Johnson, the Prime Minister’s brother and former Minister of State for Universities and Science, reveals that more than one-fifth of high-impact research projects in the UK are in partnership with China on at least 20 topics, many of which are in the science and technology category. In highly sensitive areas such as automation, telecommunications, and materials science, more than 30% of the reports are British-Chinese collaborations.
On the eve of the release of this report, the Financial Times also revealed that the total number of academic articles co-authored by UK and Chinese researchers, which stood at 750 in 2000 and accounted for 1% of UK academic article production, had increased to 16,267 or 11% in 2019.
Given the close cooperation between UK universities and the Chinese Communist Party on scientific and technological research, the report recommends that the UK government should urgently improve its oversight mechanisms and pay close attention to academic links with the authoritarian regime.
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