Why aren’t we more afraid of China?

Electric cars made in China could be turned off remotely, immobilising them instantly and crippling the West. That terrifying prospect was highlighted by Professor Jim Saker, president of the Institute of the Motor Industry. ‘The car manufacturer may be in Shanghai and could stop 100,000 to 300,000 cars across Europe thus paralysing a country,’ Saker warned. Yet few people seem bothered.

Nor was there much reaction to Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith’s claim on LBC this week that Beijing may have used a hidden device in Rishi Sunak’s car to track the PM’s movements. If this allegation involved another country it would likely have lead the headlines for days. But, because it’s China, nobody is alarmed. 

During the height of the Cold War, it was hard to escape from the ‘Red Scare’. Films and TV during the 1950s and 60s were bristling with sinister communist spies and agents, fiendish Russian plots and defections and men meeting on park benches whispering ‘the swallows are flying backwards over Prague this year’.