A bit absurd, if not laughably embarrassing that this is even news to Bethany.
British NSA Jonathan Powell spent much of his career at the Foreign Office, so he got extensive experience working alongside and negotiating against intelligence officers operating under official covers, assuming he wasn't one himself. For guys like him, it's a part of the job description.
Think tanks like the Grandview Institution and Bethany's very own employer ASPI tend to be stacked with all sorts of former(-ish) intelligence professionals and assets, and in no small part exist so such characters may engage with their foreign colleagues of both the friendly and adversarial varieties.
Therefore, Bethany almost knows than few characters herself!
So homegirl there is either terrible at feigning outrage, or perhaps deeply bitter about a past run-in with the MSS or one of its sister agencies . . .
The propaganda funding got restored. Goes to show how quickly you could shut the whole thing down (all the China bad propaganda on social and actual media) just by inflicting a devastating or terminal financial blow.
Vetoed
Sounds like a you problem. Shanghainese are perfectly fine Chinese citizens and represent a huge part of Chinese economic, technical, and cultural power. Anyone denying that are seriously just deluded.
Because in the end its always all about the economy (not calling you such, I'm using the idiom here) stupid. Unless its a threat right on their doorstep, plebs rarely care about foreign policy while 90% of the time their wallets are on their mind. And if politicians can't deliver on that front, they lose their jobs no matter what kind of foreign policy boogeymen they drum up.
You're not arguing in good faith here. Germany's car industry was brought to a standstill and they practically begged on their knees to the Netherlands to hand Nexperia back to China, which they did. China won that standoff. Or do you think the only acceptable retaliation would've been to send a PLA brigade to Donbass?
Marcos played chicken with the Chinese coast guard, but rather than being a hero he's now staring down a 33% approval rating and hundreds of thousands of protesters demanding his government's resignation over corruption.
China first and foremost is a land power unlike any other, to assume that they could get the endless amounts of 2nd class Chinese forces that would most likely be doing nothing caught up is really silly. China could easily defend all of Russia just by itself.
It's important to bear in mind that China is winning right now, and winning very hard at basically everything. The American-led counterattacks have all failed; some quite spectacularly. The more this trend continues, the more it favors China so why start a military conflict and risk everything. The calculus would be different if China were losing right now, but that's far from the case.
As they say