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China has penetrated every sector of the UK's economy as well as academia.

Not my judgment, but that of Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee

in a report published last week.

Resources dedicated to tackling the threat posed by China were labelled completely inadequate.

So what exactly is the threat?

And why is it so hard to deal with?

Step inside the briefing room and together we'll find out.

Before getting into the weeds of the report, I want to explore the rise of China's strategic use of non-military power to achieve its national goals.

Joining me now in the briefing room is Isabel Hilton, visiting professor at King's College London and long-time China watcher.

Isabel Hilton, an almost kind of impossible question to Pracey, but what is the strategy behind Chinese foreign policy?

Well, China wants to make China great again, essentially. China regards its current position as better than it was,

but essentially it was pushed into subservience in the 18th and 19th century. That's the Chinese

narrative. The Communist Party has brought China back, as it were, to strength, and Xi Jinping is

determined to make it a superpower. So foreign policy is in the

service of the Communist Party's ambition for China. And that's a full spectrum ambition,

which goes across culture, economics, technology, and indeed hard power. Right. But we're

specifically here, I think, concentrating on what they call soft power.

Now, in the first instance, can we just know where the phrase soft power originated from?

Soft power comes from Joseph Nye.

He wrote a book analysing the nature of power in which he pointed out that we tend to concentrate on military numbers and

you know strategy of that sort but certainly in the case of the united states for example the

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