Keir Starmer has formally approved the largest Chinese embassy ever built in Europe. The chosen site, Royal Mint Court, opposite the City of London, is close to sensitive financial and communications infrastructure. Ministers insist the risks can be managed, but there are plenty of sceptics.
The assumption underpinning much of the criticism of the embassy is that it represents a unique security risk – that Britain has sleepwalked into granting Beijing a listening post in the heart of the capital. Yet could a colder calculation have been at work? For the British state, perhaps the embassy is not a vulnerability but a controlled environment it can exploit.
Britain may be able to penetrate the site more effectively than China can exploit it
There is form here. In the late 1970s, the US allowed Soviet construction crews to build its new embassy on Leninsky Prospekt. The plan was to build a vast, modern embassy with protected wiring channels, sensitive communications floors and all the architectural swagger of a superpower projecting Cold War strength. But as the design became more and more ambitious, the more Washington depended on Soviet labour and materials.
By the early 1980s, American inspectors realised the site had been penetrated from the ground up. A decisive moment came in August 1985, when state department officials told Congress there was ‘strong evidence the Soviets had succeeded in incorporating a complex and comprehensive electronic surveillance system into the structure of the new US Embassy under construction in Moscow’. Listening devices had been set inside the poured concrete, embedded in pillars, welded into structural beams, threaded through the reinforcement bars. Gadgets weren’t hidden behind panels, they were part of the architecture and close to impossible to remove.
One Senate Foreign Relations Committee report described the building as ‘extensively and cleverly penetrated’. Entire floors were compromised. The structure could not be trusted for classified work at all. It was, in effect, a giant Soviet microphone. President Ronald Reagan was forced to admit that the building could never be made secure. ‘There’s no way to rid it of the many listening devices that have been built into it’, he said. Parts of the embassy eventually had to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch. The lesson was not simply that a host country has a home advantage, although that remains true. It was that an embassy built too ambitiously, in the wrong place and under the wrong conditions simply collapses under the weight of its own design.
Which brings us to the Chinese embassy in London. British contractors are expected to be involved throughout the project. Beijing will not be able to entirely control the construction process – it is simply not possible to import a completely prefabricated diplomatic fortress. Beijing will have to rely on British engineers, electricians, groundworkers and surveyors. They’ll all operate under a regime created and enforced by the British state. Every trench, duct and cable route could in theory be documented, checked and exploited by the Brits. We have a unique opportunity here to oversee the building as it is assembled from the ground up.
Britain may be able to penetrate the site more effectively than China can exploit it. And a single, contained embassy is certainly much easier to monitor than a dispersed network spread across London. At the moment it is difficult to penetrate Beijing’s web of private offices with opaque ownership, commercial fronts, university-linked institutes and short-term residential sites. A large, fixed, regulated embassy is the opposite. It creates a single point of focus, anchoring China’s diplomatic and technical operations in one place.
The Americans found in Moscow that a grand embassy can betray the very power it was meant to project. We should learn from their mistakes. Now that the mega-embassy has been approved, Britain’s spies should work on taking advantage of China’s hubris.
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