How China spies

Most states spy. In principle there’s nothing to stop them. But China’s demand for intelligence on the rest of the world goes far beyond anything western intelligence agencies would typically gather. It encompasses masses of commercial data and intellectual property and has been described by Keith Alexander, a former head of the National Security Agency, as “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.” As well as collecting data from government websites, politicians, universities, think tanks and human rights organizations, China also targets Chinese diaspora groups and individuals.

Congress has just cracked down on the Chinese-owned TikTok, which has admitted that some of its employees had been spying on American journalists. Chinese cyber intrusions have targeted British Members of Parliament, meanwhile, and stolen population-level data from the UK Electoral Commission database.

Three Germans were arrested in April for trying to transfer military information and procuring a special laser that was sent to Beijing without authorization. On the same day, two British nationals, including a Tory parliamentary aide, were charged with breaking the UK Official Secrets Act by allegedly passing “prejudicial information” to China.

Xi Jinping talks as if China is at war — on the occasion of “National Security Education Day” in mid-April, he said that every citizen must be vigilant for signs of espionage. “Foreign spies are everywhere,” says a public service broadcast by China’s powerful civilian spy agency, the Ministry of State Security, or MSS. “They can be disguised as anyone.”

The MSS is responsible for domestic security, counterespionage and collecting foreign intelligence. Although formally a state institution rather than part of the Chinese Communist Party, its main job is to guard against threats to the system. A key criterion for employment is a commitment of absolute loyalty to the CCP.

As with many Chinese institutions, the structure at MSS headquarters is replicated at the provincial and municipal levels, and it’s the regional offshoots that do the bulk of foreign intelligence gathering, monitoring states with which they have historical, geographical or commercial links. The Shanghai state security bureau principally targets the US; the Zhejiang bureau focuses on western Europe; the Tianjin bureau collects on Japan and South Korea and the Guangdong bureau on Southeast Asia.

The harvested data serves a variety of purposes. Stolen medical data, for example, is used for biomedical research — which almost certainly includes not just pharmaceutical but biowarfare programs. Huge amounts of foreign data are used to train Chinese AI large-language models.

The CCP also employs private cyber companies to supplement its own activities. The UK Electoral Commission was hacked by the Wuhan-based Xiaoruizhi Science and Technology cyber company. In February, a leak revealed that a Shanghai-based company, I-Soon, was hiring hackers for various missions run on behalf of the Chinese government. The yield was astonishing in range and ambition: from ninety-five gigabytes of Indian immigration data to the passenger records of a Vietnamese airline. Other targets included NATO, the British Foreign Office and the Chatham House think tank.

China has been spying on an industrial scale for years, of course: when Xi visited Washington, DC ten years ago, Barack Obama openly asked for it to stop. Instead the country has deepened its cyber capabilities, while continuing to build on old-fashioned human intelligence operations. In the past, Chinese intelligence agencies tended to rely almost exclusively on ethnic Chinese agents from the 60 million-strong diaspora community worldwide. One such was Chi Mak, a naturalized US citizen working in the US defense sector, who was sentenced in 2004 to twenty-four years’ imprisonment for attempting to pass to China details of a radar system used to protect military ships.

Now, however, China worries that its diaspora includes anti-CCP activists and opponents — so another large part of China’s intelligence agencies’ work is to monitor (and, where necessary, coerce into silence) those Chinese abroad who are critical of the CCP. This coercion usually takes the form of putting pressure on relatives back home, but it can also involve China’s intelligence agencies and their proxies — criminal groups or local private detectives — taking more direct action to silence crit- ics.

Then there is Operation Fox Hunt, a secretive global operation to hunt down Chinese officials suspected of corruption who have fled to other countries. An April report says 12,000 people have been found in so-called “fugitive recovery operations” in 120 countries over ten years. Beijing has quite a budget for its global manhunt; it enlists private investigators like Michael McMahon, a former New York police officer convicted last year of “interstate stalking” and acting as “an illegal agent of the PRC [People’s Republic of China].” One of the targets had a note put through their door that said: “If you are willing to go back to the mainland and spend ten years in prison, your wife and children will be all right. That’s the end of this matter!”

Another section of China’s global law enforcement network involves covert “police stations” established in more than fifty countries, mostly liberal democracies. They’re a flagrant violation of diplomatic norms as well as often illegal. Officials insist these entities exist to assist Chinese nationals with a variety of bureaucratic procedures. But surely that is what the legitimate Chinese consulates are for? The reality is that these “police stations” primarily exist to monitor and suppress anti-regime activity.

Most Chinese embassies house an MSS station, which is normally not declared to the host government. There will also be a defense attaché’s office with a remit to collect intelligence. These will be supplemented by officers under journalistic and commercial cover. But the majority of agent recruitment running is done from within China, where the intelligence agencies can avail themselves of the full gamut of state capabilities, adopting identities in state-owned enterprises, universities, think tanks and a variety of party and state organizations charged with developing and maintaining contact with the outside world.

China’s intelligence agencies used to be circumspect about recruiting foreigners and using techniques such as honey traps. Now they appear to have fewer constraints. Nor are their endeavors limited to people who have obvious access to intelligence. There’s growing evidence that within China, foreign students are being approached in the hope that they might, in time, be maneuvered into positions of influence within their home countries. This is the holy grail for any intelligence agency. In most cases, targets are approached by someone with a seemingly innocuous background, with an offer of money in exchange for something quite uncontroversial. In due course, this progresses into more sensitive information requests.

A similar approach is taken with targets outside China, who are initially contacted through social media sites such as LinkedIn and offered an expenses-paid visit to take part in (usually) an academic conference or similar event. Take the former CIA officer Kevin Mallory. Heavily indebted, behind on his mortgage and out of work, he responded to an invite on LinkedIn from someone posing as a Beijing-based headhunter. He hadn’t written that he was formerly CIA, but his résumé left little doubt to those who knew what to look for. He was given what seemed to be a phone-based secure communications system to report information gleaned from his former colleagues to his case officer. He was later caught and given a twenty-year prison sentence.

China’s intelligence agencies have ample funding — and agent payments can be surprisingly generous. The downside is that if you’re caught, you’re on your own: Chinese intelligence agencies provide no support, nor will they attempt to secure your release. Chi Mak was left to die in prison; the same is likely to be true for Xu Yanjun, an officer of the Jiangsu State Security Bureau, who was arrested in Belgium where he went to meet a US aerospace worker. It was a set-up: he was caught, extradited to the US and sentenced to twenty years. “Just the latest example of the Chinese government’s continued attacks on American economic security,” said the FBI.

It’s wrong to think of the MSS as China’s KGB or MI6, a single intelligence agency with a spy chief. Espionage is a regular part of Chinese bureaucratic life, embedded in various agencies. The CCP is a Leninist organization which was forged in a crucible of clandestinity that has remained central to its culture. Within the CCP there are various departments — from propaganda to international liaison — all of which pursue strategic objectives. All use a range of techniques from the fully overt to the totally secret.

From China’s perspective, it is just doing what US and UK intelligence agencies have been doing for years. Neither make a secret of the fact that they collect intelligence on China, for reasons of national security and advantage. And while no western spy agency is actively seeking to subvert the CCP (though the Trump administration came close), China perceives the activities of critical western media and pressure groups as having subversive intent and enjoying at least a degree of government concurrence.

The scope and intensity of China’s espionage is overwhelming western defenses. The FBI has admitted as much. And if this is true for the FBI, how much more so must it be for small services such as the Belgian Sûreté, which is facing a tsunami of Chinese intelligence activity? Western intelligence agencies also lack a critical mass of relevant language skills and regional expertise. During the Cold War, the West was full of Russian speakers and experts in Soviet culture. By comparison, there is little knowledge and understanding of China.

This is not (yet) another Cold War. It’s important to discuss the nature of the challenge China poses without creating a mood of latter-day McCarthyism, or suggesting that everyone of Chinese ethnicity should become the object of distrust. China is not an adversary, says the UK government, but a “strategic challenge.” Managing that challenge will, for the foreseeable future, need to become an intrinsic part of western political thinking. We can do a lot better.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2024 World edition.