Report Reveals over £135 Billion in UK Assets Owned by China

According to a new report by the Times, at least £135 billion worth of British assets have been acquired by Chinese investors. The report comes amid growing tensions between the UK and China over issues such as the ‘genocide’ of Uyghur Muslims and the autonomy of Hong Kong. 

The assets acquired by China include schools, businesses, property and key infrastructure.

The investments, which have been made both by individual Chinese investors and funds linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), signify a massive increase in the scale of Chinese ventures in the UK, with roughly 40 per cent of the 200 investments identified being made since 2019. 

As noted by the Times’s investigation, almost 200 British companies are under partial or complete control by Chinese investors or minority shareholders with at least £44 billion of the £135 billion in Chinese investments in the United Kingdom originating from entities with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The report, which reportedly employed a “conservative approach” in making its estimations by valuing assets based on their price at acquisition rather than the current market price, asserted the difficulty in “assess[ing] the value of [the] dozens of investments and declared “the true value of Chinese ownership in the UK is likely to be far higher than the £135 billion found.”

British assets acquired by Chinese entities include shares in key infrastructure companies such as Thames Water, Heathrow Airport and UK Power Networks and approximately £57 billion of shares in the FTSE top 100 companies. Additionally, Chinese investors acquired almost £10 billion worth of property in the UK.

As reported by the Times, some of the largest Chinese expenditure was found in the energy sector. China General Nuclear (CGN), a CCP-owned corporation, bought a 33.5 per cent stake in the Hinkley Point C power station in Somerset and reportedly has also joined French energy giant EDF in a 20 per cent stake of the proposed nuclear plant at Sizewell C, Suffolk. A third plant in Bradwell, Essex, will see Chinese technology implemented, with CGN taking a majority 65 per cent stake in the installation. 

China has also accumulated shares in British oil and gas companies through its sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corporation (CIC). The ventures include Neptune Energy, set up by former Centrica boss Sam Laidlaw, the Dudgeon wind farm off the Norfolk coast, the Moray East wind farm off Scotland, and Afton on the Scottish mainland. The CIC also has an interest in the supply of gas to British homes, having led a consortium to buy the National Grid’s gas distribution business which supplies 11 million homes and businesses. 

Aside from the energy sector, Chinese state-owned venture capital firms have constructed a portfolio of British companies including gene-sequencing company Oxford Nanopore and cancer specialist Immunocore. In London, the China Investment Corporation holds a 10 per cent share of Heathrow Airport, and Hong Kong-based conglomerate CC Land has owned London’s ‘Cheesegrater’ tower since 2017 (which made £16.7 million in rent in the first six months of 2020). Additionally, the British semiconductor design firm Imagination Technologies was acquired by Chinese government-funded private equity fund Canyon Bridge for £550 million in 2017, and steel giant Shagang Group is now the largest shareholder in Global Switch, a London-based data centre operator. 

Conservative Member of Parliament Neil O’Brien, the co-founder of the China Research Group, told the Times in reference to the report: 

“This shows the scale of China’s ownership of firms in the UK. It is essential that reforms of takeover law enable us to distinguish between beneficial investments and those that raise security concerns, just as laws in other countries do.”

Notably, China has also invested into the education sector. As reported by the Daily Mail in February, corporations with ties to the state acquired 17 private schools in a so-called “feeding frenzy” exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Of the 17 schools acquired by Chinese firms, nine are owned by firms associated with senior Communist Party members, including Princess Diana's preparatory school. Bright Scholar, the largest operator of international schools in China owned by Chinese billionaire Yang Huiyan, bought CATS Colleges for £150 million in 2019. Indeed, Yang Huiyan’s ‘Country Garden Group’, Bright Scholar’s parent company, was founded by her father Yang Guoqiang - a member of the CCP’s highest-ranking council. Two more schools - Kingsley School in Bideford, Devon, and Heathfield Knoll School in Worcestershire - are owned by China First Capital Group, which has senior Communist Party members on its board.

As reported by Breitbart, an investigation in February found that Chinese-owned schools were presenting students with a “whitewashed” version of China. Notably, one school openly admitted to the propaganda angle behind the investment in British education, which fell under the CCP’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ global influence plan. Former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage said at the time, writing for the Daily Mail:

“The world is being taken over by stealth by the Chinese Communist Party. Under a neo-colonial project, President Xi Jinping hopes to achieve global economic domination via massive international investments … Particularly at risk are private schools. Inflation has meant that fees have risen rapidly over the last two decades and so they have become unaffordable to all but the richest. As a result, such schools - especially those with boarders - are reliant on Chinese students to help balance the books.”

Professor Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute, said:

“We look at trade in a commercial way. The Chinese government sees it as part of national strength, and therefore has no hesitation in using it for political, national interest and diplomatic purposes.”

Moreover, British universities have been increasingly implicated in the leaking of weapons technologies to the CCP. As reported by Al Jazeera, “some of the [UK’s] most prestigious universities” and 200 British academics are under investigation by MI6 for “unwittingly helping the Chinese government build weapons of mass destruction.” Additionally, research from Civitas in February revealed that 15 British universities worked in conjunction with 22 Chinese military-linked universities, companies, and weapons suppliers. In August 2019, China General Nuclear - which has shares in British nuclear plants as reported earlier - was blacklisted in the United States after the US Department of Commerce placed the group on the so-called ‘entity list’. The Department of Commerce cited CGN’s alleged “engag[ment] in or enabled efforts to acquire advanced US nuclear technology and material for diversion to military uses in China.”

Speaking about the revelations to Breitbart, George Magnus, a research associate at Oxford University’s China Centre, blamed the increase in Chinese investment in the United Kingdom on the so-called ‘Golden Era’ policies implemented by the former prime minister David Cameron and his Chancellor of the Exquecher, George Osbourne.

“I think it makes them look chronically naive. I think they genuinely believed that this was the way to go and I think they did it because they completely misunderstood the nature of Xi Jinping’s China.”

In April, the Guardian revealed that the former Prime Minister had used his connections to secure government approval for a $1 billion UK-China fund - a fund he later became Vice-Chairman of. In 2015, Xi Jinping and Cameron were pictured drinking beer at a Greene King owned pub in Cadsden, Buckinghamshire. The institution was bought a year later by a Chinese investor, and the sale of Greene King itself to Hong Kong businessman Li Ka-Shing for £4.6 billion followed shortly after. 

Speaking to the Times, the former Conservative Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith castigated the developments. 

“This demonstrates that successive governments have been asleep on the watch. This evidence today shows how dangerously we are sailing towards Chinese control of key aspects of our business. China poses the single greatest strategic threat to the UK and the free world and we must make sure that we understand exactly how they set about essentially controlling key areas of economies, not only in the UK but also abroad.”

In March, Lotuseaters.com reported Prime Minister Boris Johnson being labelled “naive” by Members of Parliament following the publication of the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy. The 114-page document named China as a “systemic competitor” and “the biggest-state based threat to the UK’s economic security.” Senior Tory MPs attacked Johnson and cautioned him against returning to the conventions of the David Cameron years with Julian Lewis, chairman of the intelligence and security committee, calling China a “communist adversary.” Sir Alex Younger, former head of MI6, said that the state represented a “generational threat” and the idea that the UK and China could develop harmoniously was “clearly for the birds.” Later, China placed sanctions on nine UK citizens who the regime said had “maliciously spread[ed] lies and disinformation” regarding Beijing’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims. Member of Parliament Nusrat Ghani, who was one of those sanctioned, told BBC Radio 4 at the time that she would not be intimidated and labelled the ban “a wake-up call” for Western countries. Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted: 

“The British citizens sanctioned by China today are performing a vital role in shining a light on the gross human rights violations being perpetrated against Uighur Muslims. Freedom to speak out in opposition to abuse is fundamental and I stand firmly with them.”

Calling the findings of the Times’s report “incredibly alarming,” the founder and chairman of Hong Kong Watch, Benedict Rogers, called for the urgent disassociation from China.

“This is precisely why we urgently need decoupling, ending strategic dependency and to disentangle ourselves from the clutches of the Chinese Communist Party. To allow this to continue is profoundly stupid and profoundly dangerous.”