Comment: Beware of shipping Britain’s best brainpower to Beijing

Forgive me for not joining the celebrations triggered by Imagination Technologies’ new shareholder.

Imagination is one of the few major research-led British technology companies.

The microchips it designs have revolutionised the graphics in our mobile phones and tablets, creating the kind of speed and definition phone designers could only have dreamed of.

So critical are Imagination’s chips that Apple recently considered buying it.

Yet today, a very different prospect emerged: a takeover by the Chinese government. Tsinghua — the state technology investment fund — opened its offensive with a 3% stake, but the City anticipates a full bid soon. Although investors would pocket a fast buck from such a deal, surely in the long term Britain as a whole risks being short-changed.

China — which is hardly an uncontroversial political ally — is desperate for our most advanced innovations: where it can’t copy, it will buy.

But why should we let it? Shipping our greatest intellectual property and brainpower to Beijing only risks weakening Britain as a technology hub and shaking our self-confidence.

Do we really want China to dominate the research end of the technology world like it already rules manufacturing?

In the US, China’s tech ambitions have received short shrift: Tsinghua last year tried and failed to buy Micron for $23 billion (£16 billion) largely because it would have been blocked for security reasons by Washington DC’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the US. Multibillion-dollar Chinese tilts at US tech giants Fairchild and Western Digital were scuppered on similar grounds.

Troubled by more than $20 billion of Chinese bid approaches for US firms already in 2016, the US is getting increasingly robust in its opposition.

That can only send the great wall of Chinese money to other countries such as Britain with deals like today’s. Yet we have no policy on how to respond.

The UK is a far smaller economy than that in the US, so we can’t be as choosy as them when we seek inward investment. Indeed, we should welcome Chinese investment in non-strategic assets.

But having already let Chinese entities embed themselves in our telecoms and nuclear industries with practically no public debate, surely it’s time for a full government review of what “strategic” means.

We need to ask ourselves, when it comes to a politically controversial superpower such as China, which areas of British life do we want to protect, and which are we happy to share?