And finally in this catch-up blast, a longer op-ed for the South China Morning Post looking at some of the recent machinations between China and Iran. Had a few comments back that this was an obvious point to make, but it feels like it needs to be all considered against the broader backdrop of China’s growing influence and power in its own backyard. More on this topic to come.
All of these posts aside, spoke to the Sunday Times about Chinese investment and influence in Ireland, spoke to CNBC about China-Russia (which was translated into Hungarian), TheNational about the far right in Germany, to Samaa TV about ISIS in Khorasan, to The National again about bounties being put on ISIS leaders heads, an old interview was used again in this fantastic Portuguese piece in Sabato by Nuno Tiago Pinto about important Portuguese foreign fighter Nero Saraiva who lived for a while in the UK, an earlier comment to the Telegraph about Hamza bin Laden’s death was picked up again, and another earlier piece in the Sunday Times was picked up by VoA.
While regional players like Iran seek to bring China into the conversation as an ally, Beijing continues to rely on the rhetoric of non-interference
China is focused single-mindedly on its own interests and set to get stronger as a result
The first-ever Chinese goods train to Iran arrives in Tehran on February 15, 2016, after a 14-day journey hailed as a revival of the Silk Raod under China’s Belt and Road Initiative. China is emerging as the central power in its immediate and expanding neighbourhood, while the West tears at itself and old alliances. Photo: EPA
Buried among last week’s news of confrontation with Iran was a story that China was on the cusp of investing US$400 billion into the country’s hydrocarbon industry. This was followed late in the week by the news that Iran was going to be joining China and Russia in new naval exercises, an announcement that came a week after the Iranian Armed Forces Chief of Staff, Major General Mohammad Baqeri, visited a naval base in Shanghai.
The clear suggestion was that Iran was showing it had a strong ally in Beijing. The axis of convenience against the West was bringing Tehran firmly into its bosom.
Yet, in the face of all of this noise from Iran, Beijing was largely silent. A foreign ministry spokesman denied any knowledge when confronted with a question about the investment during a regular press briefing. The Chinese commentariat seemed mostly focused on downplaying Iran’s role in the strike on the Abqaiq and Khurais facilities in Saudi Arabia, and President Xi Jinping had a phone call with King Salman.
Reported in similar terms by both the Saudi and Chinese state media (the Belt and Road was only mentioned in Xinhua’s read-out and the Saudi statement was far more aggressive), the phone call was a decorative effort highlighting the importance of the bilateral relationship and China’s desire for events not to escalate.
And, while Beijing seemed eager to not engage, Iranian sources appeared to deny the existence of the supersized investment. On Friday, an interview emerged with the head of money and capital markets at the Tehran Chamber of Commerce stating that he had not heard anything about it.
Furthermore, Iran’s oil minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh denied the rumours, bluntly saying, “I have not heard such a thing.” In fact, the discussion in Tehran at the moment around China is about how long the Bank of Kunlun will be able to continue to be a lifeline of sorts for the country.
Owned mostly by the China National Petroleum Corporation, the bank is a Xinjiang institution that has long served as a conduit for financial relations between China and Iran. As the rest of the world severed its links to Tehran, Kunlun has kept a connection going. The bank has faced some pressure, falling into the US Treasury Department’s sights, leading the bank to try to downplay its relations for fear of damaging repercussions for parent institution CNPC.
The result has been a paring back of financial relations between the bank and Iran, with the maintenance of only a few lines of credit focused specifically on non-sanctioned goods.
Rather, the Iranian announcements have the ring of similarity to previous announcements to have emerged from Moscow, as its relations with the West went downhill.
Back in 2014, as the West’s condemnation of Russia’s redrawing of Ukraine’s borders reached fever pitch, President Vladimir Putin headed to Shanghai where he oversaw the signing alongside President Xi of a US$400 billion energy deal between China and Russia. The deal was one which had been announced and signed a few times before, but it landed in Shanghai at a convenient moment for the Russian leader.
Again, this was not a moment without some irritation for Beijing. While China never condemned Russia’s actions in Ukraine, it was not best pleased, keeping its comments sparse. China is not keen on major disruptions to international affairs, like the attack in Saudi Arabia, especially ones which might have repercussions for Beijing.
The precedent that Russia set in redrawing borders in Ukraine was not one that China wanted widely adopted – fearing the loss of its own restive regions. And disruptions to international energy supplies result in higher prices, something China could do without.
The question, then, is whether China is hostage to disruptive powers like Iran and Russia, or whether Beijing is, in fact, gaining the upper hand.
To better understand this, it is important to note another event over the weekend that ties the three countries together – the Taliban negotiating team’s visit to Beijing after stops in Moscow and Tehran.
Organised after the dramatic failure of the American-led talks, the whistle-stop regional tour appears to be an effort by the Taliban to understand better where things now stand. With Afghan elections around the corner and the conflict showing little evidence of concluding, all three surrounding powers have begun to worry about how they will manage the long-term instability with which Afghanistan seems cursed.
From China’s perspective, however, this is all reflective of the fact that everyone appears to want to show that Beijing is on their side. In each of these situations, the regional players have all sought to bring China into the conversation and show that Beijing is backing them.
China is judicious in avoiding apportioning blame, and at best uses the opportunity to make digs at the United States. The net result is that China emerges as the central power in its immediate and expanding neighbourhood, while the West tears at itself and old alliances.
For Beijing, there is some danger in assuming this position. First, it reinforces the image of China as the central power in a new axis of convenience against the US-led West. And second, it places China in a position of potential responsibility between some of the world’s most intractable conflicts.
Yet, it is equally possible that Beijing has factored both of these realities in and is actually happy to bolster alliances against the US.
In terms of China’s unavoidable responsibilities, this is something that has been on the cards for some time, and yet Beijing has yet to really demonstrate a requirement to have to step in.
Instead, China continues to call on the rhetoric of non-interference to simply let things play themselves out, focused single-mindedly on its own interests. Rather than taking on the activist West at its own game, China appears to be crafting its own playbook.
And while Tehran may think that it is hustling Beijing into showing its hand in its favour, the reality is that it is China that is most likely to emerge strengthened from this geopolitical dance.
Raffaello Pantucci is director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London
A slight diversion from usual work here, this time in the form of an interview for my agent Artellus blog, talking to one of their excellent authors Michael Gillard who is a expert journalist looking at the world of organized crime in the UK. The interview is in honour of his new book Legacy which looks at corruption around the London Olympics, politics, organised crime and police corruption – a very interesting and readable book which I have almost finished. Would recommend!
Michael Gillard is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of experience uncovering corruption, organised crime, and illegal activity at the heart of London’s establishment and beyond.
His latest book LEGACY (Bloomsbury, 2019) traces the sinister underbelly of London’s acclaimed 2012 Olympics, where organised crime and corruption were more involved than most people imagined.
Director of International Security Studies at RUSI and Artellus Associate Raffaello Pantucci spoke to Gillard about his work….
R: This is not your first book on organised crime and corruption in London, but tell us a bit about how this particular book came about?
M: It came about when I was in a pub, strangely, in 1999 and a load of detectives were there some of whom I was going to meet and amongst them there were two who looked particularly mournful and I asked one of them what was up and he explained to me that they had just come off this operation, this secret operation in East London targeting an organised crime figure called David Hunt who I had never heard of and that this character had walked away from the operation without any conviction. He had been held on remand in prison for slashing the throat of an associate which had happened at a car show room that the police were bugging, but for reasons that they weren’t aware of, they suspected corruption, he had got off because the witness had withdrawn his evidence. And then we got talking about the level of criminality that Mr Hunt was supposed to be involved and it just intrigued me enormously and from that point on I made it my business to find who he was and what he was about.
This is the first time David Hunt was one of the subjects of your books? Did he come up in earlier ones?
He was covered briefly in my first book Untouchables, which came out in 2004, but that was based on work about police corruption that I had started in 1999.
Were you worried writing about such dark and secretive topics as police and political corruption and organised criminals?
Not particularly, I am cautious. But if you look at the statistics British journalists by and large don’t face the types of threats that journalists in other countries, largely outside Europe, do face for reporting on this area. There have been two examples, interestingly enough in Northern Ireland and Ireland, of journalists being killed, not as a result of crossfire, but as a result of targeted assassination. One being Veronica Guerin in 1996 and the other being Martin O’Hagan in 2001. Veronica, who wrote about organised crime, and Marty, who wrote about the dirty war in Northern Ireland and the involvement of paramilitaries on either side in organised crime. But in general the idea of journalists being in danger for covering this area doesn’t really compute here, so there is not that kind of reason to be afraid. The bigger fear I feel about journalism in the UK is lawyers and the assault on freedom of expression through the rise of privacy law for the big rich, crooks and politicians.
Gillard’s 2004 book The Untouchables (Bloomsbury) covered corruption in London’s Metropolitan Police
So it was lawyers who scared you the most rather than any of the criminals or corrupt people you were looking at?
Rather than scare me, annoy me.
Could you tell us a bit more about Davey Hunt in particular?
David Hunt’s rise to the top of the gangster tree is typical of his generation – so he’s in his late fifties now – in terms of coming from a very hard, marginalised area in London, East London. And from a large family of brothers and sisters, I think he was the youngest who by the age of twenty-one had established himself as the top dog in his family which is no mean achievement.
I think there’s a misconception about gangster-ism in this country in particular. Very few gangsters are Robin Hood characters. Most of them are both moral conservatives and arch capitalists, and through heavy organised crime they want to legitimise themselves, and he was a classic example of that, and to do well for their family. And I think that at the time I started to look at him, he was on his way to becoming what they say in organised crime parlance, a legitimate businessman.
And he had done this through a number of means, through street cunning, a propensity for violence, psychological intimidation, and he is, you know, a street smart top gangster.
Some sociologists and writers try to look for environmental conditioning rather than the free will of some working class men to be career criminals. I think the very smart criminal Stephen Raymond said it best when he told me in an interview for Untouchables – “I’m a criminal by design not default.”
Raymond went on to tell me that he was “95% legitimate.” I asked about the other 5%, which he said he only did to piss off the police and show them how clever he was. Narcissism was his undoing and he eventually got a hefty sentence for a massive cocaine importation.
So by the time you were looking at Hunt he was a legit businessman rather than criminal anymore?
He was on his way to becoming a legitimate businessman. There had been quite incredible investments in a scrap metal yard on the Thames in Dagenham. He had bought himself a twenty-acre mansion in Essex. He had other business interests in entertainment – the infamous Epping Forest Country Club – and at the same time he was effectively a tax ghost. And when he did file any returns or make any mortgage applications, he lied about the size of his income; on paper he was a freelance scaffolder.
One of the fascinating things about reading the book is that you uncover all sorts of nefarious wrong doing and malfeasance, have you ever seen any prosecutions result from your work?
Unfortunately, I think I can say that I am a classic example of journalism having no effect whatsoever in terms of prosecutions. You can put it into the public domain, but at that point it’s down to the authorities. I think this country has a pretty poor record of prosecuting organised crime, its not because they don’t have the statutory tools, there are other problems with it. And also one of the things in this particular area is that after the events of 9/11 and the events in London of 7th of July, there was a wholesale disposition of policing away from organised crime work into counter-terrorism work. This combined with an anti-corruption campaign that took shape between 1994 and 2000 had a joint effect of stopping detectives having the necessary experience to tackle organised crime as the agenda moved elsewhere to tackling home-grown Jihadis and other issues around counter-terrorism.
Tell us a bit about your sources of information – how do you get people to tell you the ins and outs of these secretive worlds? And how do you assess/evaluate their reliability?
On the first part of that question, I think journalism is about getting out on the street, you can’t do it on the phone, you can’t do it on a computer alone. So I spend a lot of my time in pubs – obviously because I like drinking – but because it is a great leveller of getting police officers, criminals and people on the fringes of crime to talk to you. And they will talk to you in relaxed circumstances. That, however, has changed dramatically since the Leveson Inquiry into media standards and the effective criminalisation of relationships between journalists and police officers outside of a controlled press office environment. Therefore, the type of people I used to speak to for stories are terrified one of losing their pension if caught and two of possibly even going to prison. So it’s a lot more difficult now than it was before – but before, during the 90s and 2000s, because, as I mentioned earlier Scotland Yard was at war with itself over corruption issues, that created a lot of hurting detectives in that organisation. Any journalist worth their salt is able to exploit their pain for public gain, to get information about what’s going on and that’s certainly what I did.
And when it came to evaluating sources and their information?
In terms of evaluating, that’s a very interesting area – we’re currently in a sort of journalist policing space where believing fully in an alleged victim of crime has reaped some horrific results. For example, the recent imprisonment of Carl Beech for making up allegations about a VIP paedophile ring. That was the product of a swing in the pendulum towards police offers believing at the first instance anyone who comes in with an allegation of sex crime. Journalists have also suffered from that problem and I think that what we should do is neither believe or disbelieve but treat fairly and firmly. At the end of the day it is in our interests to establish whether we’re being lied to so that we don’t look like fools. When I’m dealing with criminals, who are notoriously slippery, or people on the edges of crime, I generally don’t believe anything they say until and unless they implicate themselves in the same crime they’re trying to implicate others in. That seems to me to be a good test; that criminals can gas on about any criminal activity that other people have done, but until they implicate themselves in crime to you they’re almost worthless. So I take that as a starting point. It’s interesting; when the police think about recruiting informants, who are largely and most effectively from the criminal world, they look at their motivations and they divide it into three main things: one is revenge, two is money – because police have an informant fund (I don’t and won’t) – three is to get rid of the opposition.
That’s how they gauge their effectiveness. Criminals aren’t going to speak to cops and implicate themselves in crime freely, whereas strangely the relationship between the journalist and the criminal is one where they can discuss their own criminality, sometimes boastfully, because they know that you’re not going to immediately arrest them or use that as leverage to make them become an informant. Basically, the first thing I look to is whether they implicate themselves in their own criminality, and then I look for corroboration, sometimes from police intelligence files and police officers and other criminals about that criminality.
For Queen And Currency (Bloomsbury, 2015) was Gillard’s exposé of Royal Protection Officers serving at Buckingham Palace
At various times the book reads like a film – are there plans to shoot the stories you have written?
The simple answer is that, quite interestingly, there is a mania in television and film land at the moment for true crime stories that can be turned into returnable multiple-episodic dramas. The problem in this country is we do it very badly compared to America, and there are other reasons for that, but the most obvious one for me is that crime is treated a lot more seriously and with respect in the US because they understand its implications for wider society from the lowest level to the highest level of government. In this country, we reduce it to a broken-nosed slap-dash Guy Ritchie-type approach. Within that, journalists trivialise their own patch by inventing stuff that they don’t need to and trying to apply the American mafia model to the UK. I’ve always said that we have a very unique organised crime climate here that lends itself brilliantly to drama. When I devised the idea of doing this book I wrote a synopsis and almost immediately it got optioned by a film and TV company in the UK looking for this multiple-episodic state of the nation drama who could see that something like ‘Legacy’ was effectively ‘The Long Good Friday’ 40 years on and in real life.
Talking of The Long Good Friday, it was written by Barry Keeffe who I had the pleasure of meeting and we discussed the poor state of affairs in how crime and cops and corruption are represented on the UK screen. He said it was because the writers write ‘from the outside in’ whereas Barry, a former crime reporter in East London, wrote ‘from the inside out.’ Broadcasters here commission from the same incestuous pool of writers who believe they can turn their hand to any genre with credibility when they can’t. On the other hand younger writers who’ve grown up with The Wire think they can write that here forgetting it was conceived and written by a former Baltimore crime reporter and a retired Baltimore detective – from the inside out – and that Britain has its own unique crime scene.
Talking of which, I was recently the victim of crime – a smash and grab raid on my copyrighted journalism to make a very clichéd British crime film with some high profile actors. It’s about to get ugly unless they make amends.
Do you prefer writing in book form or long-form journalism for daily outlets?
I think books are more enjoyable when you’ve got something to say, because the ability to combine your investigative skills with a writing space is quite attractive but difficult and I think that the carbonisation of news journalism makes it difficult sometimes to express the richness of the material you’ve already got, whereas books allow you to be a lot more expansive and draw the reader in. And I think that a narrative non-fiction style of telling true crime stories is great, which is why, if you have access to transcripts of covert conversations or surveillance logs they lend themselves greatly towards helping that narrative non-fiction storytelling which is essential in getting people to move across what are often very complex and dark criminal landscapes.
On a lighter note – who is the most interesting character you’ve written about or come across?
I don’t believe in glorifying criminals or cops. This binary narrative that you get in drama and true crime books of cop vs. robber is quite dull; I’m more interested in the professional journeys of flawed people who try to do good but do good for doing bad or vice-versa. Many have a very odd redemptive arc, are never perfect, fatally flawed and when I see that in individuals, if you can then interview them thoroughly to get into the elements of their life, how they think, you can try and do justice to them as individuals. Of those characters, the two I’ve most enjoyed writing about are Paul Page, a royal protection officer at Buckingham Palace who was the subject of my 2nd book, and Jimmy Holmes who was a criminal associate of David Hunt who then decided after they fell out to become a guerrilla gangster and do a lot of hit and run activity against Hunt to try and get back at him for what he felt was his self-emasculation under Hunt. Those two characters plus a third I would add, a black armed robber from West London called Hector Harvey, who was so smooth and clever he was able to have over his criminal associates, the Flying Squad and the anti-corruption squad in a masterful piece of duplicity.
Those 3 characters probably are the ones I’d say are ready-made films. In fact, I have written a pilot drama with my two colleagues Michael Holden and David Whitehouse about Paul Page, who ran a Ponzi scheme at Buckingham Palace during the great housing bubble, so the story is bookended between the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and the global financial crisis of 2008.
Finally – what’s the next story you’re going to tackle?
I’m interested in how after the Leveson Inquiry into the so-called hacking scandal the media is being put back in its cage and on the back foot while big business and politicians are unfettered in their greed and corruption – I spoke earlier about the criminalisation of sources in the police – while this all happened, print journalists are becoming risk averse and controlled largely by lawyers worried about data protection and privacy issues. Meanwhile in the private sector, corporate intelligence companies are breaking the law willy-nilly and sucking up all your personal data instructed by pukka law firms on behalf of very ugly and dodgy clients here and abroad, be they corporations, oligarchs or captains of industry and I find that a very interesting area to look at for a book – the decline of journalism and the rise of corporate intelligence firms stealing your privacy and the revolving door with state intelligence and policing agencies.
Separately, and again with Michael and David, we are developing a drama around this idea of a newspaper investigations unit in an upmarket right-wing broadsheet operating in a post Leveson world. It’s called Monster.⬛️
Many thanks to Michael Gillard for this deep-dive into his world, and for the honour of being his literary agents. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Finally doing some catch up posting as have let things slip for a while. Been somewhat preoccupied with some real-world issues which am still working through. Likely going to see some workflow changes in the future, so watch this space!
But back to the matter at hand, back in early September this chapter emerged at last as part of an NBR publication. The paper was the product of an excellent workshop in Washington that Nadege, Brian, Ed and their colleagues had invited me to last year. The final report is a very interesting one featuring a selection of colleagues and experts writing about China’s growing security efforts along the Belt and Road.
I have reposted the executive summary here, but the whole paper is available to easily download from the NBR website. More on this topic more generally in the pipeline over the next period.
The Dragon’s Cuddle China’s Security Power Projection into Central Asia and Lessons for the Belt and Road Initiative
by Raffaello Pantucci
September 3, 2019
This essay examines how China’s growing security engagement with Central Asia provides a blueprint for how China might engage with countries through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in a similar fashion.
Executive Summary
Main Argument
Xi Jinping’s decision to deliver one of the speeches announcing BRI in Kazakhstan was not incidental. It highlighted the centrality of Central Asia in Beijing’s thinking about the initiative. Consequently, it is useful to examine China’s behavior in Central Asia in some detail to understand better the longer-term consequences of Chinese influence and investment in regional countries under BRI. In the security space, Central Asia has been traditionally considered an area of Russian influence, but over time China has gradually increased its interests using five pillars for engagement: the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), training and joint exercises, military aid, military sales, and private security companies (PSCs). Given the analysis of PSCs elsewhere in this report, this essay will focus on the first four pillars in order to better understand the long-term consequences of China’s security engagement in Central Asia and survey options for policymakers seeking to address China’s growing influence.
Policy Implications
Chinese security engagement in BRI countries should be understood in a broader context than military sales. Instead, a continuum of security activity should be considered, encompassing training and multilateral engagement as well as military sales. External powers seeking to understand or counter Chinese influence in this space need to engage in a range of security actions.
China is investing considerable resources into educating and developing the next generation of security leaders in Central Asia. The longer-term consequences of these efforts may take decades to play out but will likely require a more sophisticated level of engagement from outside powers.
The SCO is often considered an impotent institution that has failed to deliver any clear action. However, China and other members appreciate the consistent forum for engagement that the SCO provides, and the forum offers China opportunities to influence the normative space.
Raffaello Pantucci is the Director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in London.
Raffaello Pantucci 