How Western countries have countered the threat of Chinese espionage

Recently, U.S. and European officials have acknowledged that Russia’s resurgence and the Israel-Gaza war have become more pressing issues.

At the same time, there is pressure from both governments and businesses to focus on securing access to China’s huge market, rather than addressing the security risks it poses.

Political leaders often preferred not to criticize China by name, telling the intelligence chief. And companies don’t want to admit that their secrets are being targeted.

“The pendulum has swung sharply in the direction of economic and commercial interests,” says Nigel Inkster.

He said Chinese intelligence agencies were already conducting industrial espionage in the 2000s, but Western companies typically kept quiet. “They didn’t want to report because they feared it would jeopardize their position in the Chinese market,” he says.

Another major challenge is that Chinese espionage is different from that in the West. This makes it difficult to recognize and confront its activities.

A former Western spy said he once improbably told a Chinese spy that China was doing the “wrong kind” of spying. What he meant was that Western countries prefer to focus on gathering the kind of intelligence that helps them understand their adversaries. But Chinese spies have other priorities.

The main focus is to protect the Communist Party’s position. “Regime stability is their number one goal,” explains FBI counterintelligence official Roman Rosavsky.

To achieve this, we need to achieve economic growth. Chinese spies therefore view acquiring Western technology as a top national security requirement. Western spies claim that Beijing’s spies share the information they collect with Chinese state-owned companies in a way that Western intelligence agencies do not share with their own domestic companies.

“My agency is busier than it has ever been in its 74-year history,” Mike Burgess, head of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organization (Asio), explained to me in a matter-of-fact tone.

“I rarely criticize countries because when it comes to direct espionage, we do it against them,” Burgess told me. “Commercial espionage is a completely different matter, which is why China receives special treatment in this area.”

He acknowledged that Western allies were slow to understand the threat. “I think it’s been going on for a long time, but overall we’ve missed it,” he admits.

Last October, we sat together in California, where he gave the first public appearance by the security chiefs of the so-called Five Eyes, an intelligence-sharing alliance made up of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, and newcomer nations. was participating in the event. Zealand.

This unprecedented gathering was a very deliberate attempt to raise the volume of the warning against China, out of concern that many businesses and organizations are still not listening. The Silicon Valley location was also carefully chosen to highlight China’s attempts to steal technology, sometimes through cyber espionage and sometimes through insider recruitment.

China’s resources for this are different in scale. Western intelligence officials estimate that China has about 600,000 intelligence and security personnel, more than any other country in the world.

Western security agencies cannot investigate every incident. According to MI5, the British intelligence agency, more than 20,000 people in the UK alone have been approached by Chinese spies through professional networking sites such as LinkedIn and have established relationships with them.

“People may not realize that they are actually corresponding with intelligence agents from other countries, but they ultimately find themselves passing on information that ruins their company’s future.” Ken McCallum, head of MI5, told me at a gathering in California. .

Ken McCallum said these were “epic” campaigns that could have significant national security implications as well as economic consequences.

Although much of China’s large apparatus focuses on domestic surveillance, it also uses spies to limit criticism of its actions abroad.

There have been recent reports that Chinese spies are targeting Western politics, with arrests in the UK, Belgium and Germany, and an ongoing investigation in Canada.

There are also reports that there are Chinese “overseas police stations” in Europe and the United States. When it comes to tracking Chinese dissidents in the West, Beijing’s agents typically use spies on the ground physically, such as hiring private detectives or making threatening phone calls, security officials say. Instead, they will act remotely.

In fact, the first cyber incident targeting British government systems in the early 2000s came from China, not Russia, and was aimed at gathering intelligence on overseas dissidents, such as Tibetan and Uyghur groups.

Australia is at the forefront of concerns about political interference. According to Asio, it began detecting activities such as candidate promotions in elections around 2016. Mike Burgess told the BBC: “They are trying to push their own agenda, which they have a right to do. We don’t want them to push it through covert means. Only,” he said. Australia passed a series of new laws in 2018 aimed at combating this.

In January 2022, Britain’s MI5 issued an unusual interference alert against British-based lawyer Christine Lee, alleging that she had made donations to various British political parties as part of a campaign to promote Chinese government policies. did. She is currently taking legal action against MI5 over the claim. It was in 2023 that the UK passed a new national security law giving it new powers to deal with foreign interference and other activities. Critics say they came late.

Of course, just as China spies on the West, the West also spies on China. But for Western intelligence agencies such as MI6 and the CIA, gathering intelligence about China poses unique challenges. The pervasiveness of domestic surveillance thanks to facial recognition and digital tracking has made the traditional human intelligence model of face-to-face contact with an agent nearly impossible.

Ten years ago, China wiped out a large network of CIA agents. It is also a technically difficult target for GCHQ and the US National Security Agency (NSA), which intercept communications and collect digital information, in part because they use proprietary rather than Western technology.

“We really don’t know what the[China’s]Politburo thinks,” one Western official admitted.