UK resists calls to label China a threat following claims a Beijing spy worked in Parliament

LONDON — The British government on Monday resisted calls to label China a threat to the U.K. following the revelation that a researcher in Parliament was arrested earlier this year on suspicion of spying for Beijing. China branded the allegation of espionage a “malicious smear.” The arrest has upset British government efforts to ease tensions with Beijing that have soared in recent years over accusations of economic subterfuge, human rights abuses and Beijing’s crackdown on civil liberties in the former British colony of Hong Kong. Ex-Prime Minister Liz Truss, another China hawk, urged the government “to recognize that China is the largest threat both to the world and to the United Kingdom for freedom and democracy.” The arrested researcher, whom police have not publicly named, maintained in a statement released by his lawyers Monday that he is “completely innocent.” “I have spent my career to date trying to educate others about the challenge and threats presented by the Chinese Communist Party,” the researcher said in the statement. Sunak said he’d expressed “my very strong concerns about any interference in our parliamentary democracy, which is obviously unacceptable.” Sunak and Li met days after Foreign Secretary James Cleverly visited Beijing, the highest-level trip by a British politician to China for five years. In November, the head of the MI5 domestic intelligence agency, Ken McCallum, said “the activities of the Chinese Communist Party pose the most game-changing strategic challenge to the U.K.” Foreign intelligence chief Richard Moore of MI6 said in July that China was his agency’s “single most important strategic focus.” In January 2022, MI5 issued a rare public alert, saying a London-based lawyer was trying to “covertly interfere in U.K. politics” on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.