Russia does not stand alone. Only weeks before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow and Beijing proclaimed a partnership "without limits" – and China has since become the decisive enabler of Russia's war. Where Russia confronts, China cultivates.

The grey-zone toolkit is the same: disinformation, elite capture, cyber espionage and the deliberate creation of economic and technological dependencies. But China deploys it quietly, patiently and with far greater resources – exploiting the very openness of democratic societies and market economies.

This book examines how China is already projecting this threat across Northern and Western Europe – from undersea cables in the Baltic Sea to solar inverters in Germany, from Whitehall to the Faroe Islands – and sets out what Europe must do to prepare for a future in which Russian and Chinese pressure arrives at the same time.