High profile British politicians, members of the Royal Family, and British military have been surveilled by a Chinese tech company, in a global scheme to bolster Chinese Communist Party’s intelligence’s ability to embark upon the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, a report has found.
At the behest of the Ministry of State Security, China’s equivalent to the CIA or Britain’s MI6, Shenzhen-based tech company Zhenhua Data harvested data on high profile members of the British establishment, as well as their family members and close friends.
The list of figures in the UK that were swept up in the Chinese dragnet includes Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter, and members of the Royal Family, including Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, and the Dukes of Cambridge and Sussex, Prince William and Kate Middleton.
According to documents seen by The Telegraph, Zhenhua Data amassed files on over 40,000 people in the UK. The data is now reportedly being stored in a secure server within the Chinese state.
The documents were reportedly stolen by an anti-China activist, who shared the key to the database with the Five Eyes security network of the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
