THE Communist Party warned today against efforts to whip up a “war psychosis” through the political furore over alleged Chinese espionage.

Sinophobes and anti-communist cold warriors have returned to the airwaves to decry the supposed security threat posed by a Chinese businessman, who can be named only as H6 due to a court order, due to his reported friendship with the King’s notorious brother Prince Andrew, though “H6” was barred from visiting Britain last year.

Tory shadow home secretary Chris Philp claimed on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme that China had been “systemically trying to infiltrate universities, steal intellectual property … and also influence government institutions,” without providing details.

Hopping over to Sky News’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips for good measure, he declared himself “deeply concerned by the activities of the Chinese Communist Party … I think everybody in public life and involved in business and academia needs to think very, very carefully about people who might be connected to the Chinese state.”

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper insisted ministers took “a very strong approach to our national security,” while adding that “with China we also need to make sure we have that economic interaction, economic co-operation in place as well.”

Communist Party general secretary Robert Griffiths said it “may be no coincidence that this story has resurfaced at the very time the Labour government says it wants to improve economic relations with China. 

“British state-imposed secrecy about Mr ‘H6’  is especially ludicrous when the name and open business and political links of the man in question are freely available from overseas news sources on the internet. 

“This nonsense is part of a right-wing agenda to whip up a war psychosis, complete with US-style laws against relations with the ’wrong type’ of foreigner. Perhaps we should be told whether Mr H6 first arrived in Britain in one of those Chinese ‘spy balloons’ that turned out be a product of fevered imaginations in the military and intelligence services.”

Early last year, US accusations that a Chinese weather balloon blown over its territory by high-altitude winds was a spy balloon prompted hysterical headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. In June 2023 the Pentagon quietly admitted that the balloon in question was indeed a weather balloon, and had not been involved in spying.