China's Magic Weapon, review: Jane Corbin's documentary played out like a sickening true-life thriller

John le Carré would have done well to conjure an organisation as shadowy and chilling as that profiled in This World: China’s Magic Weapon (BBC Two). The subject of Jane Corbin’s gripping and unnerving documentary was the United Front Work Department – a branch of the Chinese Communicate Party which, it was asserted, works covertly to spread Chinese influence around the world and to target exiled dissidents and pro-democracy campaigners.

The film played out like a sickening true life thriller. From its unsettlingly banal name to what Corbin argued was a ruthless determination to infiltrate and subvert Western democracies, the United Front Work Department was portrayed as a clandestine conspiracy with tentacles everywhere.

Nobody was beyond its reach, it was suggested. In the UK, China had its hooks in academia and scientific research. “Most of the top two dozen universities in the United Kingdom have some form of research or sponsorship arrangement with a Chinese military linked organisation,” said Dr Radomir Tylecote, of the Defence and Security for Democracy unit of the Civitas think tank.

Britain is not the only country targeted by the United Front Work Department, it was claimed. In America, China had sponsored industrial espionage on a grand scale, said John Demers, a former Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the US Department of Justice.

“The Chinese Government practices a rob, replicate and replace approach to economic development,” he said. Having purloined a company’s research, Beijing’s ultimate goal was to “replace that company on the global market”.

There were dissenting voices, however. The detention of Harvard University chemistry department chair Charles Lieber, amid claims he was working for the Chinese, had sparked protests from fellow academics. Lieber was the victim of a power-play between the United States, China and Harvard, said his Harvard colleague, Professor Stuart Schreiber. “To have one’s life destroyed, an impeccable reputation destroyed, is unfathomable,” he said.

Claims made in the documentary were rejected by the Chinese government, which accused its detractors of “a typical Cold-War mentality”. But the warning from Australia, which has been rocked by a series of scandals in which politicians were found to have a compromising relationship with Beijing, was stark.

“This is not a big cuddly panda,” said Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University Canberra. “This is a fire breathing dragon… and we better get used to defending ourselves.”