They are masters at hacking and bullying dissidents. Other areas still leave a lot to be desired.
Western authorities have been warning of Chinese espionage for years. In short, China’s spies are becoming bolder and better at what they do.
They are accused of, among other things, hacking Microsoft’s Exchange email service, stealing Western defense and business secrets, harassing Chinese opposition figures overseas and bugging the African Union headquarters (all of which China denies). However, when overwhelming evidence of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine emerged, the spies seemed to have failed at the crucial moment.
Whatever was said in the Feb. 4 talks between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in Beijing, China seemed unprepared for the Russian invasion three weeks later. One indication of this was the failure of evacuation plans for Ukraine’s own citizens.
The advice from the Chinese embassy was initially to stay at home or to display a Chinese flag “in a conspicuous place on the car”. If Chinese officials were thinking of “Wolf Warrior 2” – a nationalist film in which the hero sneaks past the front lines of an African conflict by raising a Chinese flag – they have been disappointed.
Parroting Russian propaganda has not endeared China to Ukraine. Just two days later, the embassy replaced its advice with a warning: “Do not reveal your identity or wear recognizable symbols”.
Meanwhile, Chinese diplomats at the United Nations struggled to formulate a coherent statement. China also appeared surprised by Ukrainian opposition to Russia and Western support for Ukraine.
After the invasion, Chinese officials asked their foreign counterparts about the situation on the ground. A foreign diplomat from Beijing recalls Chinese interlocutors admitting to their limited knowledge of Central and Eastern Europe before the war began – but they were lucky that the Russians provided them with explanations.
But other countries did not foresee the invasion either. It is possible that Putin gave Xi Jinping a warning while assuring him that the invasion would be completed in a few days.
On the other hand, given China’s supposed skills, the lack of contingency planning and situational awareness point to a serious failure of the intelligence services. The encouraging conclusion for many Western governments is that China’s spies do not always live up to their reputation.
According to intelligence officials, China has actually expanded its espionage activities and capabilities in recent years. Much of this activity is aimed at stealing technology from industries that China is trying to dominate, such as robotics, aerospace and biopharmaceuticals. Chris Wray, the director of the FBI, reported in January that his agents opened a case related to Chinese counterintelligence about every 12 hours.
According to Wray, China’s cyber-espionage activities are a particularly shameless practice that eclipses the methods of any other country. According to the report by cybersecurity firm Mandiant, in 2020 and 2021, China’s cyberspies have shown “higher risk tolerance” than before.
China has also made progress in human intelligence. Some American officials attribute the detention and execution of scores of CIA informants in China between 2010 and 2012 to a Chinese mole and an infiltrated communications system. China’s spies have outgrown the Chinese sources they once relied on.
They now often use stolen data to identify vulnerable individuals, which they then approach via LinkedIn and other social media. China has also expanded its efforts to secure political influence in democracies, mostly by offering politicians financial support or favors. Such activities are usually controlled not by the spy agencies but by a branch of the Communist Party, the United Labor Front Central Department.
Yet China’s global interests have expanded so rapidly over the past three decades that Chinese intelligence agencies have found it difficult to prioritize where and how to gather information. “Even if you pull every single set of data from the Kremlin and Putin’s dacha, you still have to sort through the data before you find the information you’re really interested in,” said former CIA analyst Peter Mattis, now with NRO Special Competitive Studies Project operates in Virginia.
“When searching in huge amounts of data, the results are only as good as the queries”. China’s focus on defense and trade technologies often comes at the expense of understanding decision-making processes in foreign capitals, other experts say.
China could also improve in the area of analysis. This is thwarted by a political culture that offers few incentives for initiative or challenging orthodox views. Junior and average Chinese intelligence officials do not have the status to make potentially risky decisions when interpreting raw data.
As a rule, this task falls to civil servants with the rank of deputy minister or higher. But even they must not pass on assessments that contradict Xi’s wishes or worldview. “Similar to the KGB, the difficulty is sharing the truth with power,” explains China expert and former deputy chief of British intelligence Nigel Inkster. As a result, Chinese spies, unlike the majority of their Western counterparts, often ask their informants for written analyses, which can be passed on to higher authorities, but which ultimately can be traced back to the informant and not the secret service agent.
A related problem is that while Chinese spies focus on important targets, they tend to recruit fringe figures – often retired foreign officials or academics – from within China. Former US intelligence official Nicholas Eftimiades says this makes them less successful in accessing these difficult targets. To understand the situation in Ukraine, “you would need someone in the Polish government or in the Polish or Ukrainian military who could tell you what going on,” he says, and it’s pretty much in real time.
Handling such resources requires a certain espionage skill, also a long-standing Chinese weakness (although it has improved). A study of 595 documented cases of Chinese espionage, mostly since 2000, showed that in 218 cases the organizations and individuals involved used little or no sophisticated techniques or made no significant attempts to cover up their activities. Just last year, China suffered an embarrassing defeat when Afghanistan expelled around a dozen suspected Chinese spies.
For China, espionage in the Russian space poses a particular challenge. Despite recent successes in recruiting Russian intelligence sources, China probably has less insight into the Kremlin’s mindset than Western countries, which have spied on the Soviets for decades.
But China, too, had a falling out with the Soviets in the late 1950s, but lacked the resources for full-scale espionage. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has attracted far more Western investors than Chinese. And unlike China, there are many politically connected Russians living in western countries.
Such obstacles may bring some reassurance to those concerned about China’s advance. However, they also point to a rather sobering conclusion: Xi appears to be making decisions of enormous importance based on questionable information. It is unclear whether the cause lies in the information itself, in its applied analysis, or in the way in which it is passed on to the Chinese leadership. Either way, this could lead to deadly miscalculations.
Imagine a dispute over the democratic island of Taiwan, which China claims as its own and which it is threatening to take back by force. Chinese spies have plenty of resources there, but these are more likely to belong to the pro-unity than to the current rulers. Should Xi consider a military operation, he would have to let his intelligence services estimate when America might intervene. China’s spies have far more sources in America than in Russia and have better access to those influencing government decisions there. At the same time, they might find it difficult to predict what American steps would be taken in a crisis. But even if they do everything right, the question remains: would they make an assessment that contradicted Xi’s?
