nuclear-news

Espionage. Repression. It would be sheer folly to do nuclear deals with the Chinese, By MAX HASTINGS FOR THE DAILY MAIL  4 August 2016 The Prime Minister’s decision to review the £18 billion Hinkley Point nuclear power project has won a cheer from everyone not in line to make money from it.

When the holidays are over, there are two good reasons why Theresa May should go further and cancel the scheme.

The first is that its electricity will be fantastically expensive.

The second, which we shall consider here, is that it was a critical error of judgement for the Cameron government to invite the People’s Republic of China to fund a huge national infrastructure project.

Allowing the Chinese access to Hinkley Point, and beyond it to other British nuclear plants, would give a hostage to fortune. The record shows that the Chinese can’t be trusted with sensitive industrial data. Fair dealing has no place in their system.

A decade ago, Robert Zoellick, then World Bank president, said the West’s future relations with China required the country to become a ‘responsible stakeholder’ in the international order.

This it has not yet done. Until it happens, we cannot do big business with Beijing.

The last government, and especially the then-Chancellor George Osborne, cherished naive ambitions to create a historic new trading relationship with the dragon.

The new Downing Street, and especially Mrs May’s joint chief of staff Nick Timothy, take a much beadier view. He recognises, and publicly warned about last year, the threat to Western interests posed by granting the Chinese access to our secrets and infrastructure.

HostilityA nation that engages in global industrial espionage, employing an estimated 1.5 million geeks to penetrate other people’s computers — while denying its own people online access — is not a comfortable business associate…………..

President Xi has shown himself to be the most autocratic Chinese leader since the death of the genocidal tyrant Mao Zedong in the Seventies.

The price of industrial co-operation with Beijing is British silence about China’s systemic human rights abuses, of which the highest rate of state executions in the world is only the most conspicuous example……..

AutocraticWe should be equally worried about the Second Bureau of the Third Department of the People’s Liberation Army — otherwise known as Unit 61398, which is engaged in the theft of intellectual property across the world………. we can scarcely ignore the evidence that Beijing scorns international law, personal freedom and property rights…….

RepressivePresident Xi and his comrades expect the international order to fit in with Beijing’s template…….

The involvement in Hinkley Point of one of the most repressive and secretive regimes in the world poses unacceptable risks.

Britain will have to pay a stiff forfeit for abandoning the project, but it seems right for the Prime Minister to make that decision.

There are many powerful economic arguments for cancellation, but the threat to our national security is the clincher.