Dmitry Kosyrev
A strange scandal flares up in the UK, in connection with which agent 007 is regularly mentioned in vain. This character is also mentioned by Chinese publicists, British – if only because the center of the scandal is an agency that is brotherly to where Bond worked (or still works, because he is immortal). Namely: counterintelligence, MI5.
This same counterintelligence sent a warning to the British Parliament that Christina Lee is a Chinese agent entrenched in Lon-don, trying to influence the British in favor of China again. And a many-voiced cry began (primarily in parliament), and one strongly conservative leader and former head of the corresponding party, Ian Duncan Smith, even called for Christina to be deported.
In intelligence, of course, anything can happen, but somehow we – including thanks to books about the same James Bond – got used to the fact that intelligence works quietly. And in acute situations, what did Bond himself do, who was listed as a liquidator, that is, the official killer of all kinds of bad agents who are difficult to neutralize in other ways? He made his way, he killed, he disappeared. But here the secret department makes an open appeal. Weird.
And even more strange that there are no secret agents in this case. Christina Lee is an open and official agent, her law firm has worked for years as a lobbyist for the interests of all and sundry Chinese in her country, that is, the UK. Christina herself (58 years old) is a British subject, so it would be difficult to deport her. She came to the country – more precisely, her parents brought her there – 48 years ago from the then British colony of Hong Kong, that is, she has a very indirect relationship with China.
But she is directly related to the British political cl-ass, received awards and p-raise from the hands and li-ps of Prime Ministers The-resa May and David Cam-eron. For what? For her activities in bringing the Chinese community closer to others and for donations to British parties and politicians – open, of course. Now for all the same she is called a Chinese agent.
Of course, a good screenwriter who creates the next Bond will come up with something here: maybe Christina was recruited by Beijing intelligence at the age of nine. But cinema is cinema, and in reality the situation fits into a completely different scenario: a sudden outbreak of a pathological fear of China and everything Chinese. And not only in the UK. Let’s remember what started happening in the US about four or five years ago. The same panic: the Chinese are everywhere. They started closing Chinese language and culture centers at universities (Confucius Centers), chasing the ghosts of Chinese hackers, and then a pandemic turned up – and quite officials of the previous administration seriously tried to accuse Beijing that the Wuhan virus was specifically conceived to undermine Americaand the world in general. Result: The Chinese community in the US claims an atmosphere of widespread suspicion and dislike for any Chinese at all.
Disclaimer: we are accustomed to the fact that everything is the same and in the same period of time applies to Russia and the Russians. Everything is correct, the same hysteria, including in relation to the Russian diaspora. It’s just that China is now in first place for them, we are in second, and yes, the atmosphere is similar.
And not just in the US or the UK. Here’s a long inve-stigative report on how the “East West”, Australia and Japan, now refer to Chinese students, especially those studying something related to high technology. To the extent that other students are driven through vigilance courses, explaining how fellow students will recruit them. In general, all Chinese are enemy agents. Well, the Russians too.
Let’s see what we have before us: a cataclysm of enormous proportions, a w-atershed in the entire history of what we call Western civilization. Well, that is, enemy spies were always afraid there, and rightly so – vigilance above all. But let’s remember with a slight sympathetic sadness about one of the load-bearing str-uctures of what we call the West.
This construction looked like this: in the competition between two economic and value systems, the Western one could not but win due to its obvious superiority. They have freedom, others have oppression and censorship, not to mention all sorts of gulags. They have supermarkets, others have a blue chicken, for which you had to stand in line.
And the basis of the fo-undations was a firm conviction: as soon as a person had the slightest chance to break out from behind the i-ron curtain, this person re-mained where freedom and supermarkets were waiting for him, and only in very rare cases could such a person be suspected of coercion (or due to special obst-inacy and fanaticism) will work for their former owners.
And let’s be honest about the obvious: yes, in the competition of systems, the USSR and China were losing, there were thousands of defectors from the West. Not all of them were engaged in propaganda on radio voices directed to the East – there were only a few of them, others simply somehow settled down and lived. This was the case, first of all, in the classic 1970s in this area, when the wave of enthusiasm of the 1960s for socialism with a human face broke in the USSR. But in the 70s, and before, and after, no one in the West questioned the powerful programs to pull out from behind the Iron Curtain any number of people – famous and not so famous. This worked for the collapse of a competitor and strengthened Western economies and societies.
If in doubt, ask the man who has written more James Bond novels than series founder Ian Fleming: it’s about John Gardner. He wrote other books as well (without Bond), and here the support of the transit of people from the “Eastern Bloc” is described very competently. As well as the fact that there were spies among those who defected.
But never in those years was the general principle questioned: that in general, those who left the socialist camp and ended up in the West are people who by no means can be a threat. On the contrary, it is “ours”, it is weighty evidence of the superiority of the West, and one should treat this living proof with at least sympathy.
And who then, in the 1970s, would have told the West that in the future the situation would turn upside down, the belief in their o-wn superiority would break off, and they would see enemy agents in literally all Russians and Chinese?
