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The head of Britain’s cyber-intelligence agency is accusing China of using its economic and technological clout to clamp down at home and exert control abroad, saying Beijing’s aggressive stance is driven by fear and poses “a huge threat to us all.”
Jeremy Fleming, director of GCHQ, says Beijing’s Communist authorities are seeking to “shape the global tech ecosystem,” using technologies such as digital currencies and satellite systems to control China’s population and increase its influence around the world.
In a rare public speech later Tuesday to the Royal United Services Institute think tank, Fleming plans to say that the one-party system in Beijing seeks to control China’s population and sees other countries “as either potential adversaries or potential client states, to be threatened, bribed or coerced.”
He will say that “underlying that belief is a sense of fear.”
“And we’re seeing that fear play out through the manipulation of the technological ecosystems which underpin our everyday lives — from monitoring its own citizens and restricting free speech to influencing financial systems and new domains,” Fleming will say, according to extracts of the speech released in advance.
