Former British parliamentary researcher Christopher Cash arrives at Westminster Magistrates' Court where he faces an Official Secrets Act charge related to allegedly gathering information for China, in London, Friday April 26, 2024.

One of the men, a young Briton known for his hawkish views on China, worked as an aide to a prominent member of the British Parliament. Another, a German citizen of Chinese descent, was an assistant to a member of the European Parliament representing Germany’s far right.

While from different countries and seemingly divergent backgrounds and outlooks, both men became ensnared this week in accusations of espionage on behalf of China — and a widening pushback in Europe against malign Chinese influence in politics and commerce.

In all, six people in three separate cases have been charged this week in Europe with spying for China: two in Britain and four in Germany.

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On Friday, as the two Britons made an initial court appearance in London, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the latest effort by the two rivals to keep communications open even as disputes escalate over trade, national security and geopolitical frictions.

The espionage cases in Britain and Germany, the first of their kind in two countries that once cultivated warm relations with Beijing, served as eye-catching exclamation points in Europe’s long, often anguished breakup with China.

Shortly after British and German officials announced that six of their citizens had been charged with espionage, Dutch and Polish authorities on Wednesday raided the offices of a Chinese security equipment supplier as part of a crackdown by the European Union on what it sees as unfair trading practices.

It was the first time that the bloc’s executive arm, the European Commission, had used a new anti-foreign subsidy law to order a raid on a Chinese company.

In early April, Sweden expelled a Chinese journalist who had been a resident of the country for two decades, saying the reporter posed a threat to national security.

After years of regular tiffs over trade followed by reconciliation, Europe “has lost patience with China,” said Ivana Karaskova, a Czech researcher at the Association for International Affairs, an independent research group in Prague, who until last month served as an adviser to the European Commission on China.

China still has steadfast friends in the EU, notably Hungary, she added, in “the multidimensional chess game” between the world’s two largest economies after the United States. But Europe, Karaskova said, has moved from a position of “total denial” in some quarters over the danger posed by Chinese espionage and influence operations to “take a less naive view, and wants to defend European interests vis-a-vis China.”

Accusations this week that China was using spies to burrow into and influence the democratic process in Germany and Britain caused particular alarm, as they suggested a push to expand beyond already well-known, business-related subterfuge into covert political meddling, something previously seen as a largely Russian specialty.

But, according to China experts, those accusations and the flurry of charges this week indicated not so much that Beijing was ramping up espionage but that European countries had stepped up their response.

“Countries have been forced to get real,” said Martin Thorley, a British China expert and the author of “All That Glistens,” a forthcoming book detailing how what London trumpeted a decade ago as a “golden era” of Sino-British friendship during the premiership of David Cameron made it easy for China to suborn politicians and businesspeople. The “golden era" has been widely mocked as a “golden error.”

Cameron, who is now Britain’s foreign secretary, has in recent months become an outspoken critic of China. “A lot of the facts changed,” he said during a visit to Washington in December, declaring that China had become “an epoch-defining challenge.”

His change of heart mirrors a wider shift across much of Europe in attitudes to a rising superpower that long counted on European countries, particularly Germany, to push back against what it denounces as “anti-China hype” emanating from Washington.

Germany’s security service has been warning publicly about the risk of trusting China since 2022, when, shortly after Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the head of its domestic intelligence agency, Thomas Haldenwang, told parliament, “Russia is the storm, China is climate change.”

The agency, known by its German acronym, BfV, said in an unusual public warning last summer, “In recent years, China’s state and party leadership has significantly stepped up its efforts to obtain high-quality political information and to influence decision-making processes abroad.”

Germany’s political leadership, however, has until this week been far more equivocal. Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently made a state visit to China, Germany’s biggest trading partner, to discuss trade and market access.

But Germany’s interior minister this week gave a blunt assessment of China’s activities. “​​We are aware of the considerable danger posed by Chinese espionage to business, industry and science,” said the minister, Nancy Faeser. “We are looking very closely at these risks and threats and have issued clear warnings and raised awareness so that protective measures are increased everywhere.”

China’s foreign ministry responded by dismissing the accusations as a groundless “slander and smear against China,” demanding that Germany “stop malicious hype” and “halt anti-China political dramas.”

Mareike Ohlberg, a China expert and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, said that “for a long time China was spared big public warnings.” Now, she said, German authorities are “more willing to call things out, or no longer have the patience not to call things out.”

Three of the four people arrested in Germany this week, a husband and wife and one other man, appear to have been involved in economic espionage using a company called Innovative Dragon to pass on sensitive information about German marine propulsion systems — of great value to a superpower interested in building up its navy. They also used the company to buy a high-powered, dual-use laser, which they exported to China without permission.

The fourth person, in what prosecutors called “an especially severe case,” was Jian Guo, a Chinese-German man who has been accused of working for China’s Ministry of State Security. His regular job was as an assistant to Maximilian Krah, a member of the European Parliament for the far-right party Alternative for Germany — a rising political force friendly to China and Russia — and its top candidate for elections in June.

Since then, the public prosecutor in Dresden has begun a “pre-investigation” into how much Krah knew of his employee’s ties to China. On Wednesday, his party decided to keep supporting Krah’s bid for reelection to the European Parliament but disinvited him from campaign stops.

When Xi travels to Europe next month, he will skip Germany and Britain and instead visit Hungary and Serbia, China’s last two staunch allies on the continent, and France.

Thorley said the spying cases had sounded the alarm over Chinese activities but were only a small part of efforts by China to gain influence and information. More important than traditional espionage, he said, is China’s use of a “latent network” of people who do not work directly for the Ministry of State Security but who, for commercial and other reasons, are vulnerable to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and its myriad offshoots.

“This has been bad for a while and has been left far too long,” he said.

The two men accused in London of espionage for China — Christopher Cash, 29, and Christopher Berry, 32 — were arrested in March 2023 but released on bail and were not named publicly until they were charged this week.

Cash was a parliamentary researcher with links to the governing Conservative Party and a former director of the China Research Group, a body that often takes a hard-line view on China and hosts podcasts with critics of Chinese interference.

His former colleagues include Alicia Kearns, a member of the governing Conservative Party who heads parliament’s influential Foreign Affairs Committee, and her predecessor in that role, Tom Tugendhat, who is now the security minister.

In a statement this week, London’s Metropolitan Police said Cash and Berry were charged with violating the Official Secrets Act and had provided information “intended to be, directly or indirectly, useful to an enemy.” It added: “The foreign state to which the above charges relate is China.”

“It took a hell of a long time to wake up, but we finally see some movement,” said Peter Humphrey, a British citizen whom China accused of illegally obtaining personal information while doing due-diligence work for pharmaceuticals company GlaxoSmithKline, and who spent two years in a Shanghai jail with his wife.

He was in jail suffering from cancer when Cameron visited the city in 2013 with a delegation of British businesspeople. “It was sickening,” recalled Humphrey, an external research fellow at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. “Nobody in the higher levels of the British government,” he said, “wanted to hear a bad word about China because of business interests.”

China summons German envoy to Beijing after four arrested for spying

Germany’s ambassador in Beijing has said she was summoned after Berlin arrested four people for allegedly spying for China.

Patricia Flor described her summoning as “quite a telling move” by the Chinese government and said that it gave her an opportunity to assert Germany’s stance against espionage.

“After four Germans were arrested this week for allegedly spying for Chinese secret services, I was summoned to the MFA today,” Ms Flor said on X, referring to the Chinese foreign ministry.

“We do not tolerate espionage in Germany, regardless of which country it comes from.”

Flor was summoned days after the German foreign ministry called in the Chinese envoy. The ministry said the envoy was briefed on Berlin’s "clear position on the ongoing investigations into suspected Chinese espionage activities".

The four Germans held for allegedly funnelling sensitive technology to China include an aide to a European lawmaker from the far-right Alternative for Germany party.

The German public prosecutor claimed that Jian Guo, who worked for MEP Maximilian Krah, was spying for the Chinese secret services.

Mr Krah has denied any knowledge of his assistant’s alleged involvement in spying.

“I learned of the arrest of my employee Jian Guo this morning from the press,” the lawmaker said. “I have no further information. Spying for a foreign state is a serious accusation. If the allegations prove to be true, this would result in the immediate termination of his employment.”

The arrests came shortly after German chancellor Olaf Scholz visited China and held talks with president Xi Jinping. Mr Scholz expressed concern over the spying allegations against the far right MEP saying they were "very worrying".

The arrests prompted an angry response from China.

A spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry said the allegations were aimed at "smearing and suppressing China" and "destroying the atmosphere of cooperation between China and Europe”. The spokesperson advised the German investigators to give up “their cold war mentality”.

Germany grapples with wave of spying threats from Russia and China

Six suspected spies have been arrested in Germany this month alone, in what has become a torrent of allegations of Russian and Chinese espionage.

For the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party it has proved especially embarrassing, because their top two candidates for the European elections in June have been caught in the crosshairs.

An aide to MEP Maximilian Krah, who heads the party's list, has been arrested on suspicion of spying for China. Jian G is accused of being an "employee of a Chinese secret service".

Prosecutors have also begun preliminary investigations into the politician himself over alleged payments from pro-Russian and Chinese sources. Mr Krah denies any wrongdoing.

Days earlier, Petr Bystron, the second name on the AfD list, denied allegations that he received cash from the Voice of Europe website, alleged by European intelligence to have been a front for Russian intelligence.

But the allegations go well beyond the AfD.

Two German nationals of Russian origin have been arrested on suspicion of plotting to sabotage Germany's military aid to Ukraine while three Germans have been detained for allegedly planning to pass on advanced engine designs to Chinese intelligence.

"It is really unusual to have detentions of three networks [allegedly] engaged in some sort of espionage for Russia and China coming almost at the same time," said Noura Chalati, a research fellow at the Leibniz Centre for the Modern Orient.

In all three espionage cases, the efforts of Germany's BfV domestic intelligence agency are believed to have been crucial.

"Our security authorities… have massively strengthened their counter-espionage efforts," Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said.

The arrests came hard on the heels of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's return from wide-ranging talks with China's President Xi Jinping in Beijing.

'Arrest always a political decision'

Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian security services, believes the case of the Russian-German pair could reflect a desire by the Kremlin escalate attacks on aid to Ukraine.

"It is just a completely new level of escalation," Mr Soldatov told the BBC. "These people [allegedly] collected information to help organise sabotage operations against military facilities on German soil."

Meanwhile, Roderich Kiesewetter, a former German Army officer who is now an opposition MP, alleged China was seeking to gain access to advanced research that could be useful for military or other purposes.

"China sees opportunities to exploit Germany's openness to access our knowledge and technology," he told the BBC.

Even so, Andrei Soldatov believes Berlin is putting down a marker.

"An arrest is always a political decision," he says.

"Counter-intelligence agencies in all countries prefer not to arrest people because it's better to follow them and monitor their activities in order to learn more about their networks and their activities."

One reason the political decision may have been taken is that Germany's adversaries - particularly Russia - have appeared increasingly keen to publicly humiliate Berlin as it has become more assertive in its foreign relations.

A particular low point was the leaking in March by Russian sources of a phone call between top generals discussing supplying long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine.

Months earlier a high-ranking official in Germany's BND foreign intelligence service called Carsten L went on trial, accused of leaking classified information to the Russians in exchange for payments of some €400,000 (£343,000).

Former UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace expressed the frustration of many allies when he said Germany was "pretty penetrated by Russian intelligence" and "neither secure nor reliable".

Roderich Kiesewetter says he worries about allies viewing Germany as untrustworthy. "We need to be a favoured partner," he told the BBC. "We cannot afford a German-free secret services co-operation."

Very public crackdowns on suspected spies may be one way to send a signal to friend and foe alike that Berlin is taking security seriously.

The BND and BfV said they did not comment on ongoing operations. The interior ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Legacy of history

Germany's intelligence agencies have long been frustrated by more extensive restrictions on how they can act than many of their counterparts in other Western countries.

In part, that is a legacy of communist rule in the former East Germany - widely considered one of the most surveilled societies in history. It is estimated that one in 6.5 East Germans was an informant for the secret police, known as the Stasi.

When the extent of Stasi spying was revealed following the fall of the Berlin Wall, strong legal limits on the intelligence services were imposed.

These restrictions largely remain, although some have since been weakened.

Human rights advocates see those limitations as a good thing that protects citizens' right to privacy. But the intelligence services have long complained they are unable to act effectively because of the controls on their behaviour.

Last year, two former heads of the BND wrote: "The German intelligence services, particularly the BND, now suffer from excessive oversight."

Some in the intelligence services see the recent high-profile arrests as a way of highlighting the extent of hostile foreign infiltration in Germany - and as a chance of boosting their argument for more powers.

The extent of this infiltration, says Mr Kiesewetter, is in part a legacy of political "naivety" that followed the end of the Cold War.

"Since 1990, there was the idea that Germany is surrounded by friends."

Leaders were focused on business deals, including with autocratic countries such as Russia, and took their eye off national security, he explained.

'Not asleep any more'

Rafael Loss of the European Council on Foreign Relations is more specific about what went wrong.

German intelligence entirely wound down a unit dedicated to counter-intelligence in 2002 under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

"It is remarkable that this entire unit of roughly 60 people was completely disbanded," Mr Loss says.

But things are changing. The BfV's staffing has doubled in the past 10 years. The recent spate of detentions shows that the intelligence services are becoming more assertive in a country whose political culture has traditionally been wary of them.

"All the arrests at once send a good signal to the nations that spy on us," said Felix Neumann of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

"Germany is awake and not asleep any more."

Is the European Parliament under threat from espionage?

Germany's far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party is under fire.

On Wednesday, an advisor to the AfD's lead candidate in European elections Maximilian Krah was arrested and sacked for allegedly spying for China.

Krah has strongly denied being involved in the espionage, vowing to still stand in the upcoming European Parliament elections - just six weeks away.

This is the second time in a month the anti-immigrant party has faced corruption allegations, with another AfD EU candidate Petr Bystron denying accusations he received €20,000 to spread Kremlin propaganda.

These scandals are very damaging to the party's image because both Krah and Bystron are widely supported by far-right members, warned politics professor Dr Hajo Funke.

The party doesn't just want "far-right extremists to vote in the European elections but also those who are frustrated, disappointed by the current government and even by the CDU as the opposition party. And against this backdrop, it's a scandal for them. Yes, and it's not getting any better," Funke told Euronews.

Funke says radicals in the populist party want Krah to stay because they seek a different kind of Germany.

"They want an ethno-nationalist, racist republic," he explained.

Although AfD is not the only right-wing party in Europe, it is the most 'influential' and "one of the most dangerous," Funke continued.

The expert also wasn't surprised by the allegations.

"There have actually been accusations against Maximilian Krah all along, constant accusations against Bystron," he noted. "They are two very radical representatives within the far-right wing of this party."

Allegations could be the tip of the iceberg

Intelligence agencies have been sounding the alarm that authoritarian networks are using espionage tactics to gain political, military and diplomatic advantages across Europe, for several years.

Many fear that if the AfD were to get into power they could change the constitution and get rid of state-funded media that holds them to account.

Krah didn't respond to Euronews' request for comment.

The German Bundestag met on Thursday to discuss Russia and China's threat to European democracy.

Member of Bundestag, Konstantin von Notz, called the AfD "a disgrace to this house and to our entire country."

Both Krah and Bystron remain candidates for the AfD in the EU Parliamentary election, although Krah is not attending the opening event of the party's European election campaign this weekend.