LONDON : Britain's security services are becoming increasingly worried by a rise in Chinese espionage, a British newspaper reported.
The Guardian daily said that officials did not know what impact the espionage was having and how widespread it was.
Britain's MI5 internal security service believes that "at least 20 foreign intelligence services are operating to some degree against UK interests" with the Chinese and the Russians the most worrying, the newspaper said.
Security sources told The Guardian that the Chinese were garnering the tiniest morsels of information in the fields of business, security and industry and sending them back to China.
Justin King, managing director of C2i, a British counter-espionage consultancy, said businesses were highly aware of what was going on.
"The Chinese are desperate to find out everything about how western companies operate and how they are structured," The Guardian quoted him as saying.
"It is old-fashioned human intelligence gathering - it's thousands of years old and it works. Employers should plan for the fact that there is a strong likelihood information, even if it is low-level stuff, will be fed back to China."
Quoting a "well-placed" government department source, The Guardian reported that MI5 were concerned about the size of delegations China was sending over to investigate incidents.
They cited the delegation sent over to assist after the February 2004 deaths of at least 21 Chinese shellfish pickers at Morecambe Bay, northwest England, and the one dispatched to help police identification of 58 Chinese stowaways who died in the back of a truck entering Britain before last year's trial.
King said that hi-tech and scientific developments were arousing Chinese interest.
"The Chinese economy is booming but what they are short of is information technology and modern processing, manufacturing and design skills," he said.
King added that when Chinese nationals work in Western businesses, "our clients' experience is that they have mixed loyalties.
"We have come across cases where Chinese nationals are working at the heart of British companies' IT security departments with access to entire databases. To my mind, that is a business risk too far."
The Guardian added that US authorities were also becoming concerned over the impact of Chinese spies. - AFP/de