China’s planned “mega-embassy” in London has drawn plenty of consternation from critics of Beijing, who fear the site could become a nexus for Chinese espionage operations in the UK.
While Chinese spying is a real problem, these worries are misplaced. Beijing’s espionage operations aren’t centralised and certainly not out of a single location. They’re widespread, messy, surprisingly incompetent and often driven from below.
While China’s Ministry of State Security gets the most attention, intelligence gathering is done through multiple agencies, largely due to reasons at home. The Chinese Communist Party’s chief concern is always domestic security, even when it comes to foreign affairs. As Keir Starmer met with Xi Jinping last week, for instance, the Chinese president’s mind was likely not on folding bike imports but on his risky purge of top military leadership.
In foreign intelligence, this means that the great majority of Chinese espionage work is directed not at foreign states but at the Chinese diaspora. The revolutionaries who made modern China often spent time abroad building up resources, whether in the US, France or the Soviet Union.
Current leaders have no desire to see revolution grow again and spend a great deal of time and effort infiltrating diaspora groups, especially ethnic minorities, as well as taking over Chinese-language media and threatening dissidents.
More sympathetically perhaps, they also heavily target officials who have fled the country with embezzled money.
The people carrying this out often aren’t state security officials. They are representatives of provincial police departments, the primary line of internal security at home.
This often means two or three-person teams travelling abroad with little experience or understanding of the target country and operating entirely outside any connection to the embassy. Local cops do not make good spies. Rather than a sophisticated campaign of espionage, they instead end up recruiting members of the Chinese diaspora to act as (often incompetent) interlocutors, or even hiring private investigators to do the dirty work for them.
Starmer and Jinping shake hands before their meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing (Photo: Carl Court/AFP/Getty)The Ministry of State Security is also far less capable than you might think, mostly because it is used to operating at home in an environment it controls. My impression when I met with open state security officials in Beijing via Chinese contacts was that they were faintly pathetic men, often former cops. One complained vigorously over dinner that the Soviets had had “sex camps that trained beautiful women” and why didn’t they have that?
In one 2021 court case in the US, the defence tried, unsuccessfully, to argue that the defendant couldn’t be a professional Chinese spy because his tradecraft, such as using an iPhone to send sensitive messages and travelling under his real name, had been so sloppy.
But Chinese officials make use of wide-ranging diaspora contacts, such as the three students given prison sentences in 2020 for espionage in Florida after blundering onto a naval base and taking photos.
Even more common, however, are members of the diaspora taking the initiative to gather information themselves. Information and political contacts are a commodity in China, a deeply opaque country where even routine business inquiries can be criminalised. That same approach is taken by people I call the “intelligence entrepreneurs”, effectively self-made spies who look to trade supposed inside information on foreign countries in return for favours from the security state back home.
These intelligence entrepreneurs have a strong interest in exaggerating the value of their product – much as figures like Russian-born British spy Sidney Reilly did in the early days of modern espionage.
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