Matt Brazil

5 November 2024 – Happy Election Day

Book Research News

My last newsletter was in February – apologies for being quiet for so long. I’m moving forward with chapters for the book on China’s state security structure and activities, and will shortly submit a proposal to a publisher. The revised table of contents includes chapters on:

• Enemies Within (sound familiar?)
• Taiwan and the United States as main espionage targets
• The CCP’s use of Hong Kong and Macau
• Operations in Europe and Asia
• The Cyber Revolution
• Research Challenges

About Those Research Challenges

That last chapter is meant as a guide for graduate students, and ambitious undergrads, seeking dissertation and thesis topics in national security studies and Chinese politics or history. Many of the proposed subjects would require skill in reading Chinese, but not all. As I mentioned in the last newsletter, we need an institutional effort to advance focused studies of China’s public security and state security apparatus! That would encourage the next generation of scholars to continue open-source studies of this important topic.

By contrast, if inquiries stay within the classified world, then the public outside of China will remain forever mystified about this topic, and easily bamboozled with exaggerations and lies.

One of those research challenges is the life of Ji Chaoding (冀朝鼎): Ji is widely known as an important PRC economist who died a premature death in 1963, but before the 1949 victory, he spent two decades as a secret agent directly reporting to Zhou Enlai, first from the United States and Europe, and then from inside the Kuomintang government in China during World War Two. Ji may have played a part in recruiting Frank Coe, a U.S. Treasury Department employee, to work for the Soviets (Comrade Coe fled the U.S. for China in 1958 and lived the rest of his life there, translating Mao’s works into English. Another topic: why did Coe choose Beijing instead of Moscow?).

Ji Chaoding was the older brother of the more well-known Ji Chaozhu, one of the principal interpreters for Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. In his autobiography in English, Ji Chaozhu acknowledged his brother’s secret intelligence duties, which Chinese sources tend to gloss over. See Ji Chaozhu, The Man on Mao’s Right, easily found via online booksellers.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of items about how the Chinese tech scene and the business environment for foreign firms are rapidly changing – as CCP espionage has long been focused on clandestine technology acquisition, these are important sub-topics in CCP intelligence history.

Interested in China’s Drive for Technology Supremacy? Listen to Craig Allen on Chinese “Re-Innovation”

Craig is the President of the U.S.-China Business Council. He gave a talk (YouTube, here) at Stanford in May about the often misunderstood nature of China’s innovative technology culture. Craig listed elements of China’s “new productive forces” that “distinguish Shenzhen from Silicon Valley.” Among them:

• China’s acute labor shortage will only get worse, so the government is stimulating factory automation and efficiency in mature industries (important in China’s success in dominating the mature semiconductor market, vital to military production everywhere);
• the creation of new industries (e.g. semiconductors, robotics, lasers, all important dual-use technologies), in a manner not constrained by the market, at almost any cost in money and engineers;
• an overwhelming preference for self-reliance and import substitution, meaning that the role of foreign companies has become limited to investment that helps China “re-innovate” and create its own original technologies (see Tai Ming Cheung’s 2022 book Innovate to Dominate, for a full explanation about “re-innovation (再创新) and China’s drive for technology supremacy;
• a high level of government support for advanced technology;
• a lot more engineers are available to do it all, compared to the U.S.

Hard Business Lessons in China, with the Former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank

Ken Wilcox, the former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, has penned a new book to be published next month. It’s available to pre-order, reasonably priced, and worth a look. The title is a good preview: The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That “Win-Win” Doesn’t Mean Western Companies Lose Twice. Ken gave a YouTube interview about his time at Silicon Valley bank here, and in print with The Wire China here.

Back to Spying: Excerpt, Talk on the Ministry of State Security

I gave a talk last month to the San Francisco Chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, with a slide show, about some of the basic things we in the unclassified world know about the MSS. Here is an excerpt, rewritten for the format of a newsletter. I invite your learned comments.

Chinese espionage organizations did significant work before the 1949 victory, playing an important role in the final years of the revolution,[1] including engineering a thorough infiltration of the Republic of China (ROC) establishment and planting a mole inside the US government—namely Larry Wu-tai Chin (金无怠). However, the early achievements of PRC intelligence organs in the 1950s and 60s were small in scope and number compared to those of the Soviets, the Americans, and other major powers.[2]

That situation has changed in the last two decades. Many of Beijing’s clandestine achievements are owed to their increasing use of cyber espionage beginning c. 2005, but their human intelligence (HUMINT) agent recruitment efforts seem also to have expanded both in volume and in international scope, as Beijing seeks to suppress dissident emigres, render criminals back to China, exert political influence abroad, and gather intelligence on a wider range of nations. Indeed, Xi Jinping’s more assertive foreign policy must be generating additional intelligence requirements. This is obvious, but we in the unclassified world who study these questions still know very little about the PRC intelligence cycle and the nature of tasking.

China’s IC (intelligence community) must fulfill requirements like those imposed on other major services, principally digging out secrets from foreign governments to inform Chinese Communist Party (CCP) decision-makers. However, China’s unique circumstances may influence intelligence tasking.

One of them is the legacy of the “century of humiliation” from the First Opium War through the 1949 communist victory. In part, that difficult time generated a need to catch up with foreign technological developments—by hook or by crook—creating a massive collection and reference system that involves not only the PRC IC but also wider parts of the Chinese techno-industrial complex, as described in the books by Hannas, Mulvenon, Puglisi, and Tatlow.[3]

Another is the insecurity in power of the CCP, not to mention their frail and fragile institutional ego. That and the longstanding tendency to perceive an endless selection of enemies within and abroad drives Beijing to spend enormous resources on goals unfamiliar to our concepts of national security. These include building a mass surveillance society at home, used to vehemently quash even the least significant opposition, and “the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world” applied across at least 36 countries, according to Freedom House.[4]

Chen Wenqing (front, left), Politburo member and the CCP’s top intelligence official, at a Party School meeting in October. At the center is General Zhang Youjia, Politburo member and vice chair of the Central Military Commission. At right: General He Weidong, also a Politburo member and vice chair of the CMC.

As recently revealed by the large leak of documents from the hacking and intelligence contractor iS00N in Chengdu (see my previous newsletter from February 2024), expanded tasking to follow events abroad, particularly of Uyghurs and Tibetans, has been contracted out to businesses like iS00N in significant volume. A great series of articles can be found online at the website of the group Natto Thoughts, easy to find with a simple web search, and you can search my name and Jamestown China Brief, or my name and SpyTalk to read more about this.

As Minxin Pei (Poli Sci Department, Claremont-McKenna College) points out in his new book The Sentinel State, the highly sophisticated mass surveillance state in China today had favorable conditions for its establishment with the foundation laid down by the Leninist CCP under Mao, which for a decade looked to the Soviets for inspiration. Though there was a relative relaxation in the 1980s, the party renewed its attention to domestic security affairs after the 1989 Tiananmen Incident. And under Xi Jinping, technology has been applied as a force multiplier that has made “real-time surveillance—long an aspiration of the Chinese police—a reality.“[5]

As in Russia, the Leninist state made China an ultra-hard target for foreign espionage services. With the mounting paranoia about spying, China is becoming hazardous for NGOs, businesspeople, students, and hypothetically, even tourists, particularly if their home country and China suddenly face a bilateral confrontation. Taking hostages has long been a part of the CCP playbook, and under Xi Jinping and his policies, the risk of arbitrary detention has risen.[6]

As Nigel Inkster said in a recent episode of the British podcast Chinese Whispers, the MSS officer Xu Yanjun, who was nabbed in Belgium trying to steal American aerospace secrets, was “more Inspector Clouseau than James Bond.” Xu was lured to Belgium, where he initially hesitated to go, and fell into an FBI trap. Xu had his work mobile phone with him, handing the FBI all sorts of details about him, his employer—the Jiangsu State Security Department—and his mission to steal aerospace technology from General Electric and other companies.[7]

Xu Yanjun, left, and his accomplice Ji Chaoqun. The captions read: Xu Yanjun, Deputy Chief, 6th Bureau, Jiangsu State Security Department. Ji Chaoqun, a Beijing Aerospace and Aeronautical University graduate, obtained a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The case of Xu and an agent in his network, Ji Chaoqun, revealed Xu’s use of commercial cover identities, his specific technology targets, and importantly, an ambitious task to recruit graduate students in the US who could go to work in American firms with the object of acquiring technologies of interest. These mistakes made by Xu were revealing, and one wonders if they will be repeated or rectified.

Professional espionage recruitment approaches on LinkedIn led to the case of Kevin Mallory, the former CIA officer and defense contractor who revealed defense secrets to China. Among the millions of unwanted “cold call” approaches, seen every week on that platform, almost all are plain old fraud attempts. But a small percentage are the real thing, a series that led to a public warning by the French government.

Analysts such as Nigel Inkster have long pointed out that most of the actual work done by the MSS is through their State Security Departments and Bureaus at the province and municipal and county levels, respectively—even the foreign intelligence work, as the Xu Yanjun case illustrates. In his 2016 book, Inkster listed the Shanghai SSB being focused on the United States, the Zhejiang SSD against Northern Europe, the Qingdao SSB against Japan and the Koreas, and so on.[8] But recent cases indicate that any neat turf divisions that once existed are being reviewed, possibly with assignments given to organizations that can simply do the mission as soon as possible. However, the iS00N case and others show that at least one Public Security Bureau tasked itself, or was tasked by Beijing, to keep tabs on its emigres abroad using a hacking contractor.[9]​

Finally, what can we make of all this? In the 1950s Zhou Enlai used secret annual conferences in Beijing to organize turf between the agencies to avoid duplication and conflict, an effort stymied by the Cultural Revolution. By the 1980s Hong Kong was a wild west of Chinese civilian and military intelligence organs, according to the memoir of Xu Jiatun – the head of Xinhua Hong Kong, and therefore the party’s senior cadre on the then British colony (he defected in 1990 and lived out his life in California).[10]

Xu Jiatun’s Memoir, Vol 2, published in Hong Kong but now only available secondhand.

It remains to be seen what Xi Jinping is trying to accomplish in the context of what appears to be a worldwide espionage and influence offensive. To make a long story short, other things that we might see as problems show little sign of changing. The uneven officer and agent training seen in the Xu Yanjun and Kevin Mallory cases may be representative of an astounding lack of care for officers and agents caught abroad (Xu, Chi Mak, Larry Wu-tai Chin, and many others).

One conclusion might be that top party officials may believe what they have now works for them, so why change it? Party propaganda about the revolution talks about their “nameless heroes of the hidden battlefront”[11] and Xi Jinping tells the youth of China that they ought to be more willing to “eat bitterness” and sacrifice for their country.[12] It may be that these elements will work together to prevent much change from what we see today, that is: escalating requirements, short-term albeit practical thinking, disregard for employees and recruited agents, and the lack of any hint of ethical conduct other than discouraging corruption—in a culture where corruption has so long been the norm.

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Footnotes are further below.

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​Matt Brazil

Non-resident Fellow, The Jamestown Foundation Contributing Writer, SpyTalk​
California, US

Email: matthew.brazil@gmail.com Encrypted: matt.brazil@hushmail.com
​https://www.mattbrazil.net/​
​https://www.usni.org/press/books/chinese-communist-espionage​

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​[1]开诚, 李克农 中共隐蔽战线的卓越领导人 [Kai Cheng, Li Kenong, Outstanding Leader of the CCP’s Hidden Battlefront] (Beijing: Zhongguo Youyi Chubanshe, 2011) 266-267.

​[2] Interview with Ambassador James R. Lilley at the American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, 2004.

​[3] William C. Hannas, James Mulvenon, and Anna Puglisi, Chinese Industrial Espionage: Technology Acquisition and Military Modernization (Routledge, 2013). William C. Hannas and Didi Kirsten Tatlow, China’s Quest for Foreign Technology: Beyond Espionage (Routledge, 2020).

​[4] Freedom House, “China” Transnational Repression Origin Country Case Study” https://freedomhouse.org/report/transnational-repression/china​

​[5] Minxin Pei, The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2024) 19, 177.

​[6] Christian Shepherd and Vic Chiang, “From Salesman to ‘spy’: An inside account of arbitrary arrests in China”. The Washington Post, 27 July 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/27/china-taiwan-arbitrary-arrest-prison/. Matthew Brazil, “Thinking the Unthinkable: Are American Organizations in China Ready for a Serious Crisis?” Jamestown China Brief, Vol. 17, Issue 7, 11 May 2017. https://jamestown.org/program/thinking-unthinkable-american-organizations-china-ready-serious-crisis/​

​[7] Cindy Yu and Nigel Inkster, “What Chinese hackers want”, the Chinese Whispers podcast, 28 March 2024. https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/what-chinese-hackers-want/​

​[8] Nigel Inkster, China’s Cyber Power (Oxon: Routledge, 2016), 54-55.

​[9] Matthew Brazil, “Foreign Intelligence Hackers and Their Place in the PRC Intelligence Community”, The Jamestown China Brief, 3 April 2024. https://jamestown.substack.com/p/foreign-intelligence-hackers-and​

​[10]许家屯 许家屯香港回忆录 [Memoirs of Hong Kong by Xu Jiatun] (Hong Kong: 聯經出版事業(股)公司,1999 ) 20, para. 6. https://www.google.com/books/edition/%E8%A8%B1%E5%AE%B6%E5%B1%AF%E9%A6%99%E6%B8%AF%E5%9B%9E%E6%86%B6%E9%8C%84/W_lrAAAAIAAJ?hl=en​

​[11] For example, Fujian Daily, “蔡威：隐蔽战线的“无名英雄” [Cai Wei: nameless hero of the hidden battlefront], 25 May 2016, dangshi.people.com.cn/n1/2016/0524/c85037-28375789.html

​[12] Li Yuan, “China’s Young People Can’t Find Jobs. Xi Jinping Says to ‘Eat Bitterness’” New York Times, 30 May 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/business/china-youth-unemployment.html

China Brief, Volume: 24 Issue: 7

By: Matthew Brazil

March 29, 2024

Executive Summary:

• Leaked files from iS00N reveal deep insights into the PRC’s intelligence operations, highlighting an intensified global security offensive as well as issues within the intelligence community.
• iS00N’s growth is tied to Xi Jinping’s aggressive policies and demonstrates the importance of private contractors in fulfilling the PRC’s increased intelligence and security needs.
• The leaks expose employee dissatisfaction and underscore iS00N’s critical role in intelligence gathering and job provision, reflecting the contractor’s complex relationship with the PRC government.
• The exposure raises questions about the role and regulation of hacking contractors in the PRC, potentially leading to investigations and reforms that could affect the PRC’s intelligence strategy and international relations.

In the month since the leak of over 570 files from the Shanghai-based hacking contractor iS00N (安洵信息), we have seen much reporting about their company culture, leaders and clients, whom they try to recruit, and what iS00N was actually doing (some of the best analysis on the leaks and the overall nature of the threat can be read at Natto Thoughts and Recorded Future).

At the same time, the leaks are an opportunity to advance our understanding of how the opaque PRC intelligence and security community is changing. The data, which continues to be mined by various analysts, provides a window into how Beijing’s intelligence and security community (IC) is using cyberspace to meet the many threats perceived by the party. It indicates continued issues in China’s IC regarding standards, training, and discipline, while also confirming the long-held idea in the West that Beijing’s worldwide intelligence and security offensive is intensifying, while the Chinese side continues to blithely deny everything.

For the rest of the story, click here (there is no paywall)

I enjoyed appearing this month with the experienced warriors of Eyes On to talk about modern-day MSS and other Chinese Communist operations abroad.

#China #Espionage

This year’s most popular poster at the MSS and the CCP Propaganda Department? Well, maybe only in the gift shop.

1. Sino Spies of the Baltic

Russian clandestine operations have long targeted the Baltic States and Scandinavia. But lately, the environment has become more crowded.

Interviews conducted in Europe since the last newsletter in July highlighted some interesting cases that will be detailed in the upcoming book. For example, in June 2023 Ms. Gerli Mutso was convicted of espionage on behalf of the PLA Joint Intelligence Bureau, the Chinese military’s human intelligence organization. She recruited an Estonian official with access to NATO classified information, traveling abroad several times for rendezvous to pass along data on “maritime” matters – probably related to the Arctic, where China seeks to build a presence.

That and other cases, some involving intimidating spying and influence operations in neighboring countries, are an indication of China’s proliferating worldwide espionage and influence activities.

An interesting wrinkle of the Mutso case: her handlers had her travel to China and Thailand to hand over the goods. They seem to have at least partly avoided potentially vulnerable electronic means of communication.

Thailand, incidentally, has been the scene of other CCP intelligence operations, which will be discussed in the upcoming book.

2. The comparative politics of spy trades

Interviews last year in Taiwan about CCP Intelligence operations revealed the same sort of agent-headquarters communication pattern. Chinese Communist operatives in Taiwan have long used couriers to communicate with handlers. Some other cases reflect this modus operandi. It seems to reflect a legacy of competence in clandestine communications going back to Chi Mak, Larry Chin (see below), and the Chinese Revolution itself. With the damage done to CCP Intelligence operations by the sloppy use of gadgets by at least one recruited agent and an MSS officer, courier-based communications may be making a comeback.

In various briefings over the past few years, I’ve included a list of similarities and differences between China’s premier civilian intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, and intelligence agencies in other countries.

The similarities include things like:

• collection against other countries’ state secrets in response to tasking by the national leadership;
• use by officers of both “legal” diplomatic cover and “illegal” non-official cover (NOC);
• false flag operations (pretending to work for a relatively palatable third country’s intelligence service);
• use of blackmail and monetary payments to facilitate agent recruitment.

But China’s services also stand apart from most other major powers. They:

• avoid acknowledging their foreign intelligence activity, almost always pretending that China is above it all. As Michael Schoenhals has pointed out, the UK also used to deny everything, albeit over a generation ago;
• pretend that China’s agencies eschew the “honey trap,” i.e. setups to enable sexual blackmail of a potential agent;
• reject spy trades to rescue their officers and assets caught abroad;
• prioritize state-led technology acquisition for military use and the commercial gain of PRC firms;
• enable public and private institutions and individuals to engage in industrial espionage and related activities.

One aspect that captures the imagination is Beijing’s continuing reluctance to admit that they engage in any foreign intelligence operations, and accompanying that stance, a reluctance to conduct spy trades when one of their own is caught abroad.

Yes, they traded Canada’s “Two Michaels” for the photogenic Huawei CFO, Ms. Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟), but it appears that no one in this unfortunate trio was likely engaged in intelligence duties. Moreover, the end game (the Michaels being released as soon as Meng was allowed to return to China after admitting to financial fraud) strongly suggested that Beijing was baldly taking hostages and releasing them for the ransom of allowing a confessed criminal to go free.

That’s typical because the Chinese side is long notorious for arbitrary acts of nastiness against foreigners at home and abroad, including hostage-taking and random accusations of spying.

Meanwhile, there arises an accusation that one of the Michaels (Spavor), who is a Canadian former diplomat, reported his conversations with Michael Kovrig about the latter’s travels in North Korea, including a conversation over drinks with Kim Jong-un.

Just my opinion, but – why wouldn’t he? Unfortunately, it is no surprise that the Chinese side turned typical diplomatic reporting into a spying allegation.

Will Beijing let Xu Yanjun die in prison as they did Larry Chin and Chi Mak?

Getting back to spy trades: if we examine only the U.S.-China bilateral, China has let a number of their people rot or die in custody, notably Larry Wu-tai Chin (金无怠), Bernard Boursicot, Chi Mak (麦大志) and most recently Xu Yanjun (徐延军). Beyond them, the list is long.

Mr. Xu, or at least his spouse and child, undoubtedly hope for a trade between Washington and Beijing involving Xu and an accused spy for America, John Leung, (梁成运) now held behind bars in China. But by making such a trade would Beijing be tacitly admitting to spying? And would Beijing then start grabbing hostages to trade for their imprisoned, recruited agents?

3. Pathbreaking Research from Australia

The case for an open-source intelligence agency, or at least something much larger than exists today, continues to be made in this understudied field by scholars such as Nick Eftimiades and Peter Mattis. Some excellent research has emerged in the last 18 months from Alex Joske, the young Australian scholar of modern-day Chinese Communist espionage and influence operations who relies primarily on carefully selected Chinese language open-source info. In Spies and Lies, reviewed here and elsewhere, Alex made a major contribution by showing how the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has, for decades, engaged in influence work abroad.[1]

A few months ago, he published another work about the formation of State Security departments at the provincial and municipal level in China: “State security departments: the birth of China’s nationwide state security system” (Deserepi 0, 2023). His paper has new information on the predecessor of the Ministry of State Security, the Central Investigation Department (1955-1983), the work it did inside China, and how Investigation Departments at the local level were an important foundation of MSS from the beginning in 1983-84.

Another of many findings: Contrary to conventional wisdom, Public Security organs “contributed expertise in foreign intelligence operations, surveillance, and technological research—not just counterintelligence and security work—to the state security system.”

And finally

The book is coming along but remains a work in progress. I’ve been doing some restructuring to make it more readable but it is still intended to start as a brief narrative history of CCP Intelligence with a more lengthy analysis of Beijing’s present-day intelligence community.

More later.

Thanks for reading. If you wish to subscribe to the newsletter with this content, leave me a message on the contact page of this website or write to matthew.brazil@gmail.co

If you follow developments in Beijing’s worldwide espionage and influence offensive, you’ve probably heard that the FBI opens a case regarding China every 10 hours (the 2020 figure) or 12 (2021). Doing the math, 8,760 hours per annum means something like 876 new cases a year, or in the updated version, 730.

The Communists have long had an espionage advantage over the Nationalists and their successors, but widespread Taiwan defeatism adds to their leverage.

These are only the new cases, not the total figure for open investigations—which could add up to several thousand, as such inquiries can last for months or years without resolution, public or private. Beyond the small number of cases the Justice Department brings to indictment and trial each year, it does not say how many cases it has closed.

The numbers suggest an overwhelming challenge, even as the Bureau bolsters its efforts to combat Chinese counterintelligence, counterespionage, tech transfer, and other matters—not to mention its drive to recruit special agents with Chinese language skills.

But if you think America has a tough nut to crack, consider our brethren in Taiwan. There, the Republic of China, as it’s formally known, is battling an astounding onslaught of Beijing’s spies. Such subversion raises the question of whether Taiwan will really be able to defend itself during an invasion until help arrives from the U.S.—or even whether it will fight.

In 2017, Taiwan’s National Security Bureau publicly estimated that 5,000 mainland spies were operating in Taiwan. When SpyTalk interviewed former ROC senior intelligence officers in Taipei in May, one of them said the real number is closer to 2,000 to 3,000. But even that more modest figure is a lot of spies for Taiwan, an island the size of Belgium with a population of 24 million.

Whatever, these numbers are not universally accepted, nor is evidence offered to support them. But occasional revelations do not contradict Taipei’s official claims, and some of those cases are alarming. One involved a former Taiwanese Navy rear admiral, and another earlier this year implicated a retired Taiwanese Air Force colonel and six accomplices. Other significant cases were described in a 2021 Reuters investigation.

For the full article, see www.spytalk.co, here.

Say “cheese.” Okay, don’t say cheese.

China’s semi-underground police station in New York, set up there by the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau, made headlines last month for good reason. It was completely illegal and was harassing dissidents, as well as chasing actual exiled criminals.

And there are hundreds more across the world.

For an eight-minute explanation of these stations, go here for my interview with Scott Tong on “Here and Now,” the award-winning radio program from National Public Radio and WBUR Boston. They do long-form interviews and dig deeper into contemporary affairs than other such shows, and are worth checking out.

More Details:

The Chinese Communist Party has always been a secretive organization. For their 98 million members, clandestine operations are normal. Even the headquarters building of the party’s all-important Organization Department is unmarked with standard signage.

The party is overly concerned with the slightest opposition, in part because China’s history of revolts and revolutions has many examples of fatal revolts rising from below. Whenever they find organized activity not controlled by themselves, the CCP moves to nip it in the bud. This was true before Xi Jinping rose to lead the party, and will continue after he departs the scene.

This includes Chinese dissent abroad. Party leaders no doubt remember that the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, did most of his organizing against the Qing Dynasty overseas before returning when the time was ripe in 1911 – as did Lenin to Russia a few years later.

So it is no surprise that the CCP takes dissent in the U.S. and elsewhere very seriously, even if it seems harmless to their powerful party-state (an important difference in perspective to keep in mind when observing CCP behavior). Thus, they have tasked the Chinese Ministry of Public Security (MPS) to have its subordinate Public Security Bureaus (PSBs) go abroad and tackle dissent, even by isolated individuals.

To be fair, the officers at these “secret police stations” also hunt for actual criminals that have committed fraud or worse. And today’s secret police stations have precedent, as shown by Matt Schrader in his January 2019 China Brief article on “Overseas Chinese Assistance Centers.”

Even older precedent: the openly established police posts in South Africa, set up beginning in 2004 for what appears to be good reasons with the agreement of the host government.

But the problem lies where such stations have been set up in secret, for reasons unacceptable to the host government, violating the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

Research in East Asia

During the entire month of April, I was in Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia conducting research and interviews for the upcoming book. I am writing more about the findings from that trip and will send along links to articles that result.

I was particularly intrigued to find that awareness of Beijing’s worldwide espionage and influence offensive is rising more or less at the same pace overseas as it is in the United States but with less hyperbole.

In the words of Taylor Swift, we all “need to calm down” and focus on the facts.

To subscribe to my newsletter about Chinese espionage, send me an email: matthew.brazil@gmail.com

US firms helped build Beijing’s ubiquitous surveillance systems

China’s anti-lockdown protests last month were the worst blow yet to the prestige of Xi Jinping. One moment, the Chinese Communist Party’s leader was riding high after securing a third term at the top of the party-state. The next, he was challenged by demonstrators in the streets to “step down,” a sentiment that protestors also chanted against the party itself.

The discontent with the CCP expressed by demonstrators exceeded that of the more massive 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square, albeit this time with much lower numbers: most of the 19 or more cities where protests erupted drew less than 50 people, while the other half in tier one cities with more foreign contact attracted over 50, some in the hundreds.

Though the numbers were small, it was a notable “political coming out of the closet,” (政治出柜, zhengzhi chugui), much discussed in Chinese social media. But to keep it in perspective,  the protests were not thousands of people openly defying authority, as the world now observes in Iran. As far as is known, these were limited actions by small groups in urban centers. 

However, the protests in China at the end of November were bold, as those who participated risked arrest or worse. And there is a chance that the demonstrators represented a larger and more cautious percentage of society. 

Though the party leadership rapidly (maybe too rapidly) eased the “zero Covid” restrictions that prompted this popular anger, those who spoke up soon learned who was boss.

A rough pattern of police response developed, with some similarity to the way some other protestors have been treated. Mere participants were summoned to police stations to explain themselves and sign statements saying they would never do it again. One demonstrator, perhaps typifying others, had tried to disguise himself with a balaclava and clothing change but was quickly tracked down by police. He was surprised at how easily authorities had picked him out of a large crowd, evidently using his phone data and their urban surveillance system.

Leaders of the protests were treated more harshly. At least one—the man who may have led the first “step down” chants in Shanghai—was apprehended at work and has since disappeared. He, too, thought he might not

be identified.

Years ago, well before Xi Jinping’s new era of paranoid surveillance, some citizens have been more clued in than others to the regime’s use of mobiles to keep tabs on users. Chinese citizens secretly working for a foreign intelligence agency were trained to, among other things, separate their phones from any incriminating activity.

Those just living lives removed from international intrigue, but who were tech savvy, also chose different ways to minimize surveillance, according to a Chinese American author who has regularly returned to China for research. They would “put their cell phones in another room when they talk, or take out the SIM cards, use different cell phones to contact different people,” similar to the tactics of protestors in the U.S. to avoid surveillance and police use of data.

See here for the rest of the article in SpyTalk

Excerpt from “China, The Fearful Intelligence Culture,” By Matthew Brazil

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has placed priority on its intelligence and security operations for almost a century. This core business of the party significantly contributed to the CCP’s 1949 victory and to the maintenance of its current power.

Most recently, the internet and artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled previously unimaginable foreign espionage successes. Yet there are cracks in the façade: unending existential fear about enemies within; fear of being caught between CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s never-ending anti-corruption drive and a culture that still fosters graft; as well as fear of being insufficiently loyal to Xi’s “thought” and to his status as the CCP “core.”

Drawing from Chinese language publications and interviews with former western security officials who had regular contact with their Chinese counterparts, this chapter argues that these are old problems, but under Xi, have become more pronounced than in recent decades. It shows how China’s espionage organs will likely continue to achieve successes in cyber espionage, agent recruitment, and technology theft, but dispassionate intelligence analysis may be hindered by pressure to conform to the party line. Thus, Chinese intelligence culture in the 2020s may sometimes make it difficult for Beijing’s senior leaders to see the forest through the trees.

The above is an excerpt from “China: The Fearful Intelligence Culture”, in Ryan Shaffer, ed. The Handbook of Asian Intelligence Cultures (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, October 2022). This chapter on China has six sections:

• The Shellshocked Roots of Chinese Communist Intelligence and Security
• Corruption, Anticorruption, and Power Struggles
• State Security, Not National Security
• The Lasting Leftist Influence of Mao Zedong and Kang Sheng
• Competent Spy Versus Rear Area Ideologue
• Conclusion: Beijing’s services may be developing a superior understanding of big data compared to their Western counterparts as cyber operations garner an ever greater share of resources. Meanwhile, during the 2020s and 30s the ranks of State Security and military intelligence will fill up with recruits born during and after the 1990s, raised in an era of heightened nationalism and suspicion of foreigners. If the legacy of fear persists while raw data from cyber and other operations keeps piling up, Beijing’s ability to make sense of the outside world and future domestic developments may decline.

The Handbook of Asian Intelligence Cultures has 30 chapters, one for each Asian nation, and can be found on Rowman.com and Amazon.

The above article is also available on LinkedIn here.

Here are two very recent forums where I had opportunities to reflect on the intersection between China’s security and intelligence apparatus and the nationwide lockdown protests:

https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next/2022/12/what-zero-covid-protests-reflect-about-xi-jinping

https://www.spytalk.co/p/do-china-protests-reveal-beijing

As a result of the tragedy in Urumqi, protestors in China are almost certainly motivated by the fear that they themselves might become fire, earthquake, or flood victims should they need to evacuate a locked-down location.

Secondly, if demonstrators did not previously understand the extent to which their mobile phones were miniature spies-in-the-pocket, they certainly do now. That realization could alter the way people in China handle their cell phones. Imaginative ways to circumvent the surveillance system could develop.

Finally, the protests will probably soon be suppressed. But if they continue, the next step could be to call in the  People’s Armed Police  (PAP), which is a different organ of state security than the Public Security Bureaus around the country. The PAP is little understood outside of China – but is an extremely powerful tool with vast resources. They are trained to quickly put down mass civil disturbances with overwhelming force, but to do so without resorting to the June Fourth, 1989 solution of machine-gunning the citizenry in the streets.

Regards,

Matt

Non-resident Fellow,  The Jamestown Foundation  and Contributing Editor,  SpyTalk  San Jose, CaliforniaMobile (Signal enabled): +1-408-891-5187

Encrypted:  matt.brazil@hushmail.com   https://www.mattbrazil.net/   https://www.usni.org/press/books/chinese-communist-espionage