Be alert: China enlists the public in push back at US spying efforts

The public outreach effort dovetails with a broadening of the Counter-Espionage Law that took effect last month and comes as relations with the West worsen.

But observers have questioned the value of the vague legislation and the public push, saying they add up to more uncertainty for foreign businesses in China and blur the lines of national security.

China needs to ‘proactively defend’ against spies, state security minister says

In the decade since Chinese authorities reportedly detained or killed at least a dozen US informants, the United States has made progress in rebuilding its spy network in China, according to Central Intelligence Agency director William Burns.

“We’ve made progress and we’re working very hard over recent years to ensure that we have strong human intelligence capability to complement what we can acquire through other methods,” Burns told the Aspen Security Forum.

He also said the CIA was working to ensure it could provide early warnings about any plans to attack Taiwan “if that day ever comes”.

Li Wei, a retired national security researcher at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), said the ministry’s publicity offence was in part motivated by Burns’ comments.

“Spy activities against China by some countries, led by the US, are getting more and more rampant,” said Li, whose think tank is associated with the Ministry of State Security.

“This kind of espionage is also a great threat to China’s national security interests, so to maximise the defeat of intelligence espionage activities carried out by some countries against us, China must involve the public,” he said without saying how he knew foreign espionage was becoming more active.

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To deal with that threat, China’s anti-spying law expands the definition of espionage to include any document, data and information “related to national security and interests”.

Ilaria Carrozza, a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, said it was very worrying that “pretty much anything can be interpreted as being intelligence”.

“But that, in my opinion, helps explain why the public also becomes involved, because now it’s not just state secrets any more, it’s any document or material,” Carrozza said.

She said intelligence gathering had become more prominent as US-China ties became fraught, causing China to call out the US more explicitly.

She also said the ministry’s message was not only for the domestic audience and the Chinese diaspora that used WeChat heavily, but also people outside China.

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The ministry is not alone in its efforts. Local police departments have also been using social networks to tell younger people to look out for spies and report suspicious activities to the ministry’s national security hotline.

Calls on people to spot spies have also spurred the meme of “walking 500,000 yuan”, an amount equivalent to US$69,000 and the highest reward offered by the Beijing municipal national security bureau since 2017. The phrase has become a code word for spies, propagated by internet influencers and the police.

In the southern city of Foshan, railway police have deployed memes on Douyin, the Chinese counterpart to TikTok, to warn the force’s 1.9 million followers that spies could be everywhere, carrying cameras to take pictures and videos of military facilities. People who post “inappropriate comments” online could also be spies, it said.

Another Douyin video, uploaded by the police department of Tongbai county in Henan province, showed a policewoman trying to identify spies by quizzing pedestrians about lines from sketch shows that only Chinese people – but not foreigners – would know.

Carrozza said that such use of WeChat and other social media platforms might appeal to younger people but would do little to contribute to catching more spies.

“I can’t imagine how a layperson can do something in a more sophisticated way or can pick up on spies more than the actual intelligence services can,” she said.

“This is more of a publicity effort. We should see this as in the context of raising awareness among the domestic public.

“I see it matching the media offensive that we’ve seen over the last few years under the rule of [President] Xi [Jinping].”

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But she said the broader legal definition of spying and greater public involvement in spotting suspected spies would have one big impact – it would blur the lines of what counted as unlawful intelligence work in China, putting foreign businesses at more risk.

The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China said the ministry’s call on the public to report spies added to the uncertainty faced by European firms and “forces foreign businesses to question what kind of relationship China wants to have with them”, as they looked for clearer signs and tangible steps from Beijing to restore confidence among foreign businesses.

The new law and the ministry’s anti-spy campaign “have done little to help reduce the perceived politicisation of business and pose potential compliance challenges”, it said.

The chamber also said European businesses might become more hesitant about investing in China in the future without clarification on “key terms” in the law.

South China Morning Post