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Opinion: China’s mega-embassy and the question Britain should really be asking

By Stephen Saunders MBE Aug 27, 2026 6:35am

Royal Mint Court has become a test case for what sovereignty means in an age of globally interconnected infrastructure.
Britain is intensely focused on Chinese control risks while accepting much larger dependencies on American technology platforms.
The defining sovereignty question is no longer where infrastructure is located, but who ultimately controls it.

China’s new mega-embassy at Royal Mint Court in London has kicked off an entirely predictable bout of uproar among politicians and media types.

The site sits close to — possibly even atop — fiber serving BT’s Wapping exchange, which, as its name suggests, is both big and strategic. Critics say that creates an unacceptable espionage risk. Others point to the obvious concerns around protests, surveillance and the treatment of Chinese dissidents in Britain.

Fair enough.

But I still think the government was right to approve it.

The reason is that Royal Mint Court is actually a very good example of how sovereignty works in the 21st century.

The old model was simple. Draw a border around something and control what happens inside it.

Digital infrastructure has broken that model.

You can draw a border around an embassy. You cannot draw a border around a 21st-century network.

There is no evidence that China intends to interfere with the cables near the site. But Britain would be bonkers to ignore the possibility. So the job of government is to assess the threat, understand the vulnerabilities, put safeguards in place and decide whether the remaining risk is acceptable.

That is what the new sovereignty — operational sovereignty — looks like.

It does not mean banning anything foreign, walling off the country or pretending that Britain can eliminate every external dependency. It means knowing where the dependencies are and retaining enough control to deal with them when things go wrong.

The irony is that politicians seem to understand this perfectly well when the threat comes with a Chinese flag attached.

They are rather less exercised when exactly the same problem appears elsewhere in the technology stack.

Britain is pouring water, electricity, land, fiber and public money into a new generation of AI infrastructure, much of it controlled by American Big Tech companies.

The data center may be in Britain. The power may come from the British grid. The fiber may be British. The water certainly is.

But who controls the platform?

Who holds the administrator keys? Who decides what happens to the workloads? Who can change the system, restrict access or withdraw a service? Who has their finger on the off switch?

Those are operational sovereignty questions too, and in many ways, they matter far more than whether somebody might one day try to interfere with a cable under Royal Mint Court.

That is why the embassy debate is useful. It exposes the weakness in the way Britain still thinks about sovereignty. We remain fixated on geography: borders, buildings, ownership and physical location.

But modern sovereignty is increasingly about control. The real question is not whether a system sits on British soil but whether Britain can still control what happens when that system matters.

Royal Mint Court is not just a story about China.

It is a reminder that, in the digital age, the most important question is becoming very simple:

Who controls the systems that control everything else?

Opinion: China’s mega-embassy and the question Britain should really be asking

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