CONTENTS

LIST OF ACRONYMS

CASS Chinese Academy of Social Sciences CIA Central Intelligence Agency (US)

CICEC China International Culture Exchange Center

CICIR China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations CID Central Investigation Department

CIIDS China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy CISM China Institute of Strategy and Management

CCP Chinese Communist Party

ESRI Economic System Reform Institute FBI FederalBureau of Investigation (US)

MSS Ministry of State Security

NSA National Security Agency (US)

PLA People’s Liberation Army

PRC People’s Republic of China

SSSB Shanghai State Security Bureau UFWD United Front Work Department USCPF US–China Policy Foundation

INTRODUCTION

ONE APRIL DAY in 2001, Lin Di sat before an exclusive audience in Washington, DC. His host, the former US government China expert Chas Freeman, gave only a brief introduction to the talk. Lin was well known to Freeman and the many foreign policy luminaries gathered at the National Press Club. As secretary-general of a key Chinese cultural exchangeorganisation, Lin had established contacts across America’s policymaking circles and Chinese communities. In Beijing, he’d warmly welcomed dozens of American officials, China scholars, congressional staffers and retired diplomats.1

A slightly built man with his face fixed in a disarming smile, Lin began

his address in a shaky voice. ‘I’m a little bit embarrassed to speak in front of a camera, and in English,’ he admitted. He had studied the United States extensively, including at the China campus of Johns Hopkins University, but politely professed that he was no America specialist. Instead, he’d come to talk about China.

Lin’s optimism surprised the audience. China, he declared, ‘is deepening her reform to build a more open, prosperous, democratic and modernised nation’. Despite political disagreements between China and the United States, he said that China wished to focus on the overwhelming positives in the relationship. ‘It is my sincere hope that in this new centuryour two great countries will work together to build a healthy and steady relationship for the lofty cause of world peace and progress of human civilisation,’ he said. People-to-people exchanges through his organisation would provide a crucial foundation for this endeavour. Closing off his speech, he described an idyllic future in which his children would look backand have no memory of a time when there was anything but friendship between America and China.

It was all a lie. In reality, Lin was chief of the Social Investigation Bureau of China’s premier intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS). He was a spy. At thetime, his bureau was the primary US operations unit within the MSS, and he personally oversaw an extensive network of clandestine assets across the country. In between these public engagements he’d rendezvous with agents, like one woman the Federal Bureau of Investigation mistakenly viewed as their star source on China.

Yet handling double agents and spies wasn’t the most impressive part of Lin’s job. Far more impactful was the influence and leverage MSS spies carefully developed over elites around the world, and especially in the United States. This involved schmoozing, making friends and opening doors, and much less of cloak and dagger. It’s exactly what Lin did that day in Washington, DC. With their high-level connections inside the Chinese CommunistParty (CCP), Lin and other undercover MSS officers claimed to have insider knowledge of China’s direction and could offer meetings with Party leaders to a chosen few.

Over decades, the MSS has deployed these techniques to mislead world leaders about theCCP’s ambitions, lulling them into the comfortable belief that China would rise peacefully – maybe even democratically – and slot itself into the existing international order. Its targets have included former presidents and prime ministers, multinational corporations, businessleaders, Buddhist monks, influential think tanks and respected China scholars. It’s aninfluence operation that continues to this very day.

This is the first book to reveal the MSS’s influence operations: this most potent part of the CCP’s intelligence work has been the most overlooked, misunderstood and ignored. The few books on the Party’s intelligence apparatus glide over the issue of influence operations. Dedicated studies of China’s influence operations have only speculated about MSSinvolvement.2 Even within counterintelligence agencies that try to interrupt the plans of China’s spies, the significance of these activities has long been downplayed, and little has been done to impede them. This knowledge gap exists in part because the covert nature of MSS work means that its influence operations are often mistaken for those of more visible Party organs, such as the United Front Work Department (UFWD). On the contrary, this book suggests that most of the CCP’s high-level influence operations are orchestrated by intelligence officers.

Instead, it’s the more conventional parts of the MSS that attract the most scrutiny and have contributed to the perception of the MSS as an aggressive but unsophisticated intelligence agency. A recent deluge of court cases, leaks and media exposés has revealed the MSS’s appetite for trade secrets, sensitive technology, and intelligence on foreign politics and dissident communities. Often these operations were exposed because the MSS officers involved in them made basic mistakes, like using unsecured phone lines to communicate with agents. Since the 2000s, greater numbers of MSS officers have been expelled or quietly barred from countries including the United States, Sweden and Germany. Starting in late 2017, governments started to publicly accuse the MSS of far-reaching cyber espionage campaigns against companies, individuals and government agencies.3

The immensity of the CCP’s intelligence community is another distraction from itsinfluence operations. Alongside the MSS, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has three main intelligence agencies, roughly responsible for eavesdropping and hacking, human intelligence operations and analysis, and political warfare.4 China’s Ministry of Public Security, nominally a police agency, also has a long history of foreign intelligenceoperations, including an unsuccessful attempt to influence the Trump administration in 2017.5

Even within the MSS there are subordinate units in every region and major city of China that often take the lead on foreign operations. Put together, these local counterparts likelyhave well over 100,000 employees

– perhaps ten times more than the MSS’s headquarters.

Sitting around these core agencies, additional Party-state organs, private and state-owned companies and lone actors appear to feed into the Party’s intelligence system. Chinese companies have been caught encouraging employees to bring back proprietary research from foreign rivals. A Chinese official might opportunistically glean sensitive informationfrom a friend or relative in America. From the outside, it looks like an incoherent mess of overlapping responsibilities and unprofessional intelligence operations. And sometimes it is.

If you’re looking for Chinese state intelligence activity, there’s plenty of it – enough to keep you busy without having to step back and worry about influence operations.

What this shows is that the CCP supervises an extensive array of professionalintelligence agencies and calls on hundreds of thousands of

intelligence officers to do its bidding. Though coordinating this web of agencies and spies is a nearly impossible task, intelligence operations are a fundamental source of power andinfluence for the Party. Their activities are deliberately hidden, making them easy to forget and overlook, but their significance is difficult to understate. Peter Mattis, an expert on China’sintelligence services, argues that delving into these organisations does much more than help catch spies. Properly analysed, MSS activities offer unrivalled insights into the Party’s inner workings and ambitions.

Understanding the operation of the Party’s intelligence apparatus is essential tounderstanding China’s past, present and future.6

The prevailing view until recently was instead that the Party used a ‘thousand grains ofsand’ approach to gathering intelligence. This theory has since been thoroughly debunked, and its flaws help in understanding why the MSS and its influence operations have received so little scrutiny.7 The ‘grains of sand’ analogy explains that if Russia needed to gather athousand grains of sand from a beach (that is, a thousand pieces of intelligence), it would send a submarine to deploy a highly trained team of clandestine agents to shovel up sand in the dead of night. In contrast, China would send a stream of tourists to the beach in broad daylight, each picking up a single grain. Back in Beijing, each grain of sand is then analysed and aggregated to form a brilliant picture. The central claim of this theory is that China relies on ad-hoc masses of ethnic Chinese amateurs to steal huge amounts of low-grade information, with relatively little involvement by professional spies and intelligence agencies.

It’s a catchy narrative with amusing imagery, but that’s about all it offers. Instead of lookingfor the structure, mission and intelligence officers behind the CCP’s influence efforts, the ‘grains of sand’ theory makes it easier to assume they’re largely autonomous and driven byethnic Chinese patriots.

Peter Mattis criticised the theory for wrongly framing the threat in racial terms, when China’s intelligence agencies have comfortably recruited people without Chinese heritage.8When Western governments also treated harassment and surveillance of ethnic Chinese communities as a minor concern, this helped the MSS face little resistance as it built up extensive foreign intelligence networks.9

My research into the CCP began from a similar position of ignorance about its intelligence apparatus. My entrée was the UFWD, a Party agency that had long been neglected by China scholars.10 The department plays a

leading role in efforts to co-opt important groups and individuals in China. Internationally, itseeks to manipulate and claim the right to speak on behalf of ethnic Chinese communities, which includes managing Chinese student organisations.

In 2016, I was a university student in Canberra studying China and working on myChinese-language skills. After living in China as a teenager, I was surprised to discover CCP influence on campus. The previous year, the president of a Chinese government–backed student association threatened the university pharmacy until it stopped stocking copies of adissident Chinese newspaper. Media reports claimed that similar groups were used by the Chinese government as informant networks to collect intelligence on students, fearful that they might bring Western ideas or verboten religious beliefs back to China.11 After I published articles in the university newspaper about these findings, members of the same student association responded by aggressively following me around at an event, including into the bathroom, and accusing me of racism.12

It was terrifying and exciting to me, and I later had the opportunity to focus on this issue when I helped Clive Hamilton research his 2018 book Silent Invasion: China’s influence inAustralia.13 Examining recent cases of what looked like CCP efforts to covertly influence Australian politics, media and society, we quickly found that the UFWD was connected tomany of them. Billionaire property developers, self-appointed community leaders and numerous political candidates who had a history of alignment with the CCP’s interests were almost invariably members of organisations controlled by the UFWD.

At the same time, a handful of scholars around the world were

documenting the CCP’s footprint in their own regions. From Europe to New Zealand and the United States, we saw similar patterns of UFWD influence on politics, media and academia.14 One politician in New Zealand had worked for Chinese military intelligence earlier in his life, and it later emerged that he’d obscured that from the New Zealand government.15 Media investigations into the activities of one UFWD-linked billionaire ended the political career of an up-and-coming Australian senator, who’d been swayed by political donations into siding with China’s position on the South China Sea.16

It looked as if the UFWD were controlling the strings of Party influence

abroad, but something didn’t add up. The department has far less expertise

in foreign politics than other wings of the Party. Its officials didn’t appear to have the sort of leverage or resourcing you’d expect for targeted operations against political elites, even if they do give orders to sympathisers abroad.

On top of this, some key agents of influence didn’t have significant links to the UFWD and instead had friends in the military, police or propaganda apparatus.17

One missing piece stood out: the Party’s intelligence apparatus. Far more powerful and resourceful than the UFWD, intelligence agencies like the MSS combine unchecked coercive powers with a penchant for clandestine operations. China’s intelligence agencies are now the world’s largest and dedicate themselves to protecting the Party’s interests while projecting itspower abroad. If I had only rarely seen the fingerprints of these organisations in CCP influence operations, was I simply not looking hard enough?

Investigating clandestine activities is intrinsically hard. I began to hoard information on the MSS, starting with historical sources like memoirs, old court cases and retired intelligence officers who would agree to interviews. These pointed to a long tradition of hiding intelligence operations through united front work. Party leader Zhou Enlai, the father of China’s intelligence community, advocated ‘nestling intelligence in the united front’ in 1939, when the Party formed a tactical coalition with the Kuomintang against the Japanese invasion.18 Then, as the CCP conquered China in 1949, some of its intelligence agencies outwardly called themselves UFWDs to obscure their secret operations.19 Through the 1980s, Chinese intelligence agencies continued to embed spies into united front groups, media organisations, trade agencies and cultural exchange bodies, exploiting their networks for influence and espionage.20 This is not ‘united front work’ but professional intelligence work masquerading as something else.

These footholds from history led to the discovery that, today, the MSS’s symbiosis with united front networks, business empires, public diplomacy and universities is as strong as ever. Only one in a hundred clues led me to meaningful discoveries, but a few strong anchors were enough to begin identifying covert operations currently active across the globe. Recognising a handful of key individuals as undercover MSS officers and then tracing them from front group to front group eventually unravelled decades of covert influence operations, more sophisticated with each iteration. These

operations are widespread, targeted and handled with direct involvement from Party leaders. More than anything else, this is what China’s intelligence agencies excel at.

The greatest of these covert operations was the MSS effort to convince influential foreigners that China would rise peacefully and gradually liberalise. It was stunningly successful. Stepping back, it’s clear that the MSS has woven itself into the very fabric of China’s relationship with the world. It is the invisible thread that bound the United States to ideologies of engagement and mythologies of China’s liberalisation. In these pages you will meet the plain-clothes MSS intelligence officers and agents who continue to broker access to information about China and its leaders. You will also meet the who’s who of American and international politics, business and academia who they courted and fooled while Westernintelligence agencies failed to understand and disrupt these influence operations.

‘All governments are run by liars’, to quote the journalist I. F. Stone – himself a target of failed KGB cultivation – but few lies and attempts at manipulation have shaped our world as much as those spun by the MSS.21 This book tells the story of those lies.

CHAPTER 1

GEORGE SOROS, THE CHINA FUND ANDTHE MSS

LIANG HENG PUT on his navy-blue Mao jacket and threw a Chinese ‘Serve the People’ satchel over his shoulder as he walked onto the streets of New York. It was 1984, and ever since thepublication of his memoir he’d been run off his feet giving talks and interviews while trying to finish graduate studies at Columbia University.1

Liang’s Son of the Revolution was a bestselling personal account of a China that had only just reopened to the West. It revealed how his family suffered in the Anti-Rightist Movementof the late 1950s, shortly before the country was plunged into famine by the Great Leap Forward. Liang was forced to forage for edible weeds in a local park. At twelve, he was swept up in the Cultural Revolution as one of millions of Red Guards and journeyed to Beijing to witness Chairman Mao Zedong in the flesh.2 Entering university after Mao’s death, Liang fell in love with a visiting American language teacher, following her back to the United States where they co-authored his memoir.3

Most importantly, Son of the Revolution brought Liang to the attention of George Soros, the billionaire investor. With their shared vision of a more liberal and open China, the pair boldly worked with reformists inside the Party to shape the nation’s future, only to meet a catastrophic end courtesy of the MSS. It was the first in a long series of efforts by the intelligence agency to manipulate foreign elites, turning their hopes for China into tools forinfluencing and infiltrating the West.

George Soros read Liang’s memoir and reached out to the publisher. He wanted to meet theauthor himself. ‘A businessman? I’m flat-out every day. Why should I see this businessman?’ Liang thought. He hadn’t heard of Soros before but agreed to the meeting anyway. Now hewas on his way.4

They met for lunch at an upmarket French restaurant where Soros was a regular and had his own private booth. After nearly two hours of discussion about Liang’s life, Soros began explaining his own philosophy and political work. His attention was increasingly focused on supporting liberal and progressive political causes in communist countries. Just that year he’destablished his first ‘open society foundation’ in his country of birth, Hungary. The foundation partnered with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and pushed boundaries behind the iron curtain, funding projects on issues as diverse as Western economic thinking to the plight of the Roma Gypsies. ‘I got hooked on what I like to call “political philanthropy”,’ Soros later explained.5

Over cheeses and fruit, Soros finally got to the point. ‘Does the China of today have opportunities for you to do something for it?’ he asked Liang.

Liang believed they were at a key juncture in Chinese history, one that he wanted to take part in. He wanted to turn what he’d learnt through years of hardship during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution into something positive. At the time, he was preparing to set up a magazine for overseas Chinese intellectuals, but much more could be done. ‘Liang,’ said Soros, ‘I support what you want to do. I also feel that China is undergoing great changes, and these changes will influence the whole world.’

Then and there, Liang agreed to work as Soros’s advisor, helping him exploreopportunities in China to replicate his efforts in Hungary by also setting up a foundation there.6

Soros needed partners in China he could trust. Out of all the officials and organs of the Chinese government (for no entirely independent institutions existed at the time), he needed Liang to find the right ones to back, those who both believed in his vision and had the political power to see it realised.

It was no easy task that Soros had given Liang. Neither fully understood the monumental political struggles they were about to find themselves in the middle of.

The China Fund

The kind of funding and opportunities Soros promised were almost unheard of in China, and it wasn’t long before Liang secured introductions to reformist circles. Respected and politically connected economists like He Weiling and Zhu Jiaming (a friend of future vice president Wang Qishan) were eager to take part in the project.7 With Soros’s backing, Liang also metwith a senior Party official to explain Soros’s work and his idea of establishing a foundation to promote ‘reform and opening’.

The key was to find a local Chinese partner institution, a requirement of operating in China, and Liang quickly made the right connections. Scholars from the Economic System Reform Institute (ESRI), a hub of progressive thinking backed by segments of the Party leadership, convinced their bosses to team up with Soros.8 Soon, what became known as the Fund for the Reform and Opening of China, or the China Fund, was born. Its very name was a nod to the Party’s official policy of reform and opening. As Soros’s biographer Michael T. Kaufman wrote, ‘[Soros] sensed that within the extraordinary turbulence of Chinese society, he had luckily found the right people.’9

Soros’s excitement was shared by the economists of the ESRI. A trip to Hungary, funded by Soros, electrified these young thinkers as they attempted to carve a new path for China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Many were travelling abroad for the first time. Theirconversations with Hungarian economists, who were wrangling with similar puzzles of taxation, market competition and private enterprise, were ‘like a chemical reaction – soinspiring’, said one participant. The visit helped drive the confidence and creativity of Chinese reformists, spurring forward their advocacy of economic reforms, he said. ‘Maybe too fast.’10

In October 1986, Soros travelled to China for the first time to formally

open the China Fund in a signing ceremony at Beijing’s Diaoyutai State Guesthouse.11 His bold vision to kickstart true people-to-people exchanges between China and the West that would promote civil society, liberalism and economic reform was filled with optimism from his successes in Hungary. Liang Heng began spending most of his time in Beijing as Soros’srepresentative, setting up a small office for the China Fund. Entrusting an enormous budget by Chinese standards to the ESRI, the fund ‘was an institution unlike any other in China. On paper, it had complete autonomy,’ Soros recalled.12 The ESRI was close to the reformistpremier Zhao Ziyang,

who became the Party’s general secretary the next year, and Zhao’s personal secretary, BaoTong, cut through red tape to champion the joint venture.

The China Fund’s achievements were impressive. Soros afforded Liang and his staff in Beijing a great deal of autonomy as they worked through the growing mass of funding applications that arrived in the cramped courtyard house they used as an office. Within a year of its establishment, the foundation had set up an artists’ club in Beijing and an academicsalon at the prestigious Nankai University in Tianjin, supported the study of folk art in the Yellow River basin, and backed research on Thailand’s efforts to attract foreign investment and on Boston’s high-tech industry.13 In its first two years it awarded more than 200 grants and received thousands of applications, making genuine contributions to the preservation and study of Chinese culture.14 As in Hungary, it pushed boundaries by funding research on sensitive topics such as the Cultural Revolution – still carefully censored to this day – including a project to collect oral histories of people’s experiences through the turmoil.15Influential journalist Dai Qing compiled Yangtze! Yangtze!, her tour de force of opposition to the ecological and social wrecking ball that the Three Gorges Dam would be, with supportfrom Soros.16 The China Fund’s financer was particularly excited to support a conference on the philosophy of Karl Popper, his old doctoral supervisor whose writings on open societywere the inspiration for his philanthropy.17

The end of optimism

Almost as soon as it emerged, the China Fund ran into a challenge that proved fatal.General Secretary Zhao Ziyang’s aide had made a dangerous political gamble by backing the venture. ‘Bao Tong was hated by many,’ said one former Chinese government economist.18 According to Soros, ‘opponents of radical reforms, who were numerous, banded together to attack [Bao Tong]’. Bao and the ESRI had stuck their neck out too far.

Hardline sceptics of economic liberalism and exchange with the West saw their chance to strike. And Zhao’s influence as general secretary, nominally the Party’s most senior leader, wasn’t enough to insulate Soros’s venture from the growing resistance of conservative Party elders. Liang rushed back from New York to Beijing, only to find that their Chinese partners had already decided on the next steps.19

In the face of complaints from Party elders about the China Fund, Zhao Ziyang ceded its control to new management. It wasn’t a fight he wanted to pick, nor one he could dare to. Zhao agreed to sever ties between the ESRI and the China Fund, bringing in the China International Culture Exchange Center (CICEC), a group under the Ministry of Culture, as its new partner institution.20 Things weren’t all bad, or so it seemed. CICEC had the backing of senior Party leaders, including Xi Jinping’s father, and served as one of the only official channels for cultural exchanges with the outside world. Its strong ties to officialdom couldinsulate Zhao and the China Fund from those who wished to see it destroyed.21

By the time this decision had been made, neither Soros or Liang had even met with representatives of CICEC. The ESRI’s director quickly arranged a meeting between Liang andthe head of CICEC, Vice Minister Yu Enguang. Yu quickly convinced him of the merits of this new arrangement and told him he believed in the importance of friends like Soros who could support China’s modernisation. ‘Once I heard about this plan, I understood that at the time there was no other choice,’ Liang reflected. They had to agree to work with CICEC if they were to survive.22

Soros took these changes in his stride, accepting some degree of political interference as a necessary compromise when operating in China. In February 1988 he travelled to Beijing to reconfirm his commitment to bankroll the foundation and sign a revised agreement with Yu Enguang, his new Chinese co-chair. As Xinhua News Agency reported at the time, ‘academic research on reform and opening, and funding activities by non- governmental organisations’ remained priorities for the China Fund. The article described Soros as a ‘friendly American figure’, perhaps a rung below the coveted title of ‘old friend of the Chinese people’, a term used by the Party to recognise foreigners who’ve made major contributions to its efforts.23

Soros was initially pleased with the China Fund’s new management from CICEC. He got along well with Yu Enguang at a personal level. This impeccably well-connected interlocutor helped Soros secure a rare meeting with a Party leader in Beijing’s Zhongnanhai leadership compound.24

But cracks quickly emerged. ‘I was taken to visit one of our projects, a mobile library unit operated by the Young Pioneers, and was appalled,’ Soros recalled. ‘It was a formal affair, the children in uniform, the instructors making stiff, meaningless speeches, the children forming a

tableau vivant to demonstrate the use of the library. Worst of all, the secretary of thefoundation was so pleased that she had tears in her eyes.’25

Liang was disappointed too. His friends in Beijing mentioned that fewer and fewer people were applying for China Fund grants. Under CICEC, the China Fund continued supportingcultural activities, but none were true civil society initiatives. Instead, CICEC used Soros’smoney to fund its own officially sanctioned exchanges with foreign organisations.26 It made acomplete 180-degree turn from the project’s original goal of promoting open society. CICEC’s 1988 yearbook inadvertently offered the most apt summary of the situation when itpromoted its new partnership with the man it called ‘George Sorrows’.27

The Soros incident

The year 1989 brought the death of Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang’s predecessor as the Party’sgeneral secretary and an inspirational reformist, a figure still widely respected by the Chinese public despite being purged in 1987. Hu’s passing in April catalysed gatherings that grew into the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and ended with the massacre on 4 June.

In early 1988, Chinese intellectuals had already begun to be scared off by political interference in the China Fund.28 The next year, Soros received a letter from the journalist Dai Qing, one of the grant recipients, alerting him to how the program had been infiltrated by security operatives.29 China’s security agencies had in fact been scrutinising Soros’s activities from the beginning.

Amid the chaos of the Tiananmen massacre, the Party’s security operatives attacked decisively. The China Fund and Soros’s hopes of influencing China collapsed as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang was stripped of power and placed under house arrest. As Soros told the audience at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2019, ‘[Party conservatives] claimed that I was a CIA agent and asked the internal security agency to investigate.’ The China Fund’s Beijing-based manager, Liang Congjie, was arrested and interrogated after themassacre. At least fourteen researchers from the ESRI, the fund’s original partner organisation, were detained too. Chinese reformists feared their rivals were seeking to use the allegation that China Fund was a CIA front to brand them counterrevolutionary traitors and help justify the brutal crackdown.30

Soros, pessimistic about the direction of Chinese politics, wrote to Yu Enguang to swiftly shut down the China Fund just before the Tiananmen massacre, to Liang’s frustration and disappointment.31 ‘You’re using an investing mentality to go about politics,’ Liang complained. ‘You have no political loyalty – you should know how many of our Chinese friends will pay the price and be placed in danger because of you entering and then pullingout of China.’ They didn’t see each other for another three years.32

Chen Yizi, the original Chinese chair of the fund and president of the ESRI, went into hiding and was smuggled out of the country a few days after 4 June because of his close association with Zhao Ziyang. Months later, from his refuge in Paris, he shared what heknew of the inside story: ‘In July 1987 the then Minister of Public Security Wang Fang wrote a report to Zhao Ziyang, saying Soros is a steadfast anti-communist and supported the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. He instigates unrest in socialist countries and his fund’s people have ties to reactionaries.’33

In November, Minister Wang followed up with another report. This time, he doubled down on his accusations, specifically pointing fingers at Chen Yizi and other allies of ZhaoZiyang.34

It was these pointed accusations, more than mere grumbling from conservatives, that had really forced Zhao to hand the China Fund to CICEC back in 1987.35 Though Zhao Ziyang was nominally the party’s highest leader, Minister Wang had backers in highplaces.

Black hands

But that’s only a side of the truth, one that leaves the most secret and mysterious arms of Party power unexposed. Even for a defector like Chen, some things are still best left unsaid.36 As one former Party official explained, the Soros incident remains a taboo topic even now.37

Investigating Yu Enguang, the China Fund’s co-chair from CICEC, reveals exactly why it’s such a sensitive story.38 Yu was a member of China’s National People’s Congress,serving on its foreign and legal affairs committees. He also worked in London and Washington, DC, for China’s Xinhua News Agency, becoming fluent in English.39 Yet for someone who held such senior positions, there’s remarkably little information about himavailable.

Soros and Liang thought Yu and CICEC could help protect them from the Party’s conservatives. Other evidence indicates Yu was deeply distrustful of the capitalist world and spoke out against the threat democratic countries posed to China. In 2000, for example, he warned China’s congress that ‘Internal and foreign hostile forces are taking advantage of the internet to engage in reactionary and damaging activities, taking advantage of the internet tospread the West’s so-called democracy and human rights.’40

Yu clearly did not share Soros’s vision for China, so why did he stick his neck out to lead the China Fund? One clue comes from the Paradise Papers, a trove of more than 13 million financial records leaked to the media in 2017.41 Among the leaked documents is one from the early 2000s that names none other than Yu Enguang as the director of a company registeredto the Caribbean territory of Bermuda.42 It records Yu’s personal address as an apartment in ‘100 Xiyuan’ in Beijing’s Haidian District.43 The Xiyuan or West Garden compound occupies an entire block just east of the Summer Palace, an opulent imperial resort that was looted by foreign armies during the Boxer Rebellion. Street imagery from Chinese internet giant Baidushows its guarded entrance decorated for the Spring Festival and large golden letters giving another name for the compound: Yidongyuan, the East Summer Palace Garden. Few touristswandering past its modest walls would know that it houses the headquarters of the MSS, China’s peak espionage agency.

According to George Soros, Yu Enguang, co-chair of his China Fund, was in fact an undercover ‘high-ranking official in the external security police’ – the MSS.44 The fund’s partner organisation, CICEC, had never really been part of the Ministry of Culture. It was MSS, through and through.45 Under the pretence of protecting their China Fund, Yu hadpersuaded Soros and Liang to hand over control of the venture to this intelligence agency.And Yu’s mission wasn’t just to protect China from external threats but to lay the groundwork for influence operations that shaped the world.

CHAPTER 2

SPYMASTER: YU ENGUANG

YU ENGUANG’S STORY has never previously been told. Before his death in 2013, he rose into the highest ranks of China’s intelligence community. He was instrumental in creating the organisations, practices and culture that make influence operations by today’s Ministry of State Security so successful. The MSS continues to emulate the boldness Yu showed as heengaged directly with an international power player, turning Soros’s dream of an open society in China into a source of funds, legitimacy and cover for influence operations.

The China International Culture Exchange Center that Yu led was an MSS-run frontorganisation, custom-built for engaging with foreigners like Soros. Nearly forty years later,it’s still in active operational use.

To foreigners who met him, Yu seemed like a man deeply interested in and acquainted with the capitalist world, not some paranoid Stalinist. He was a witty and memorable character, skilled at interacting with targets and adept at English – something that stands out in all accounts. While posted to America undercover as a Xinhua journalist, he charmed a Washington Post reporter with his commentary on the Cantonese meal they were sharing.1 He’d been trained well – the ability to introduce Chinese cuisine to foreigners was specifically drilled into Chinese spies during their English- language courses.2

Yu made a mark on Soros representative Liang Heng too, who was persuaded to acceptMSS control over the China Fund: ‘The impression Yu gave me was quite good. He wasabout fifty, tall, with strong eyebrows, big eyes and a sophisticated manner and he talked pragmatically … he’d been

to many countries, seen and experienced much, and spoke fluent English.’3 Soros likewise bonded with him, despite some apprehension about his special background. Both of them had lived in London and Soros liked the British accent of Yu’s English.4

Yu was not just any MSS officer. At the time he was a vice minister of the agency and among the Communist Party’s top foreign intelligence officers. Few within the agency could rival the depth of his overseas experience. Most of all, his operations in hostile capitalist nations taught him that loyalty to the Party came before all else. Only a politically secure officer would feel comfortable ‘dropping cover’ by revealing his MSS affiliation to Liang and Soros. This is also reflected in the fact that he was trusted to represent the MSS abroad, where he built partnerships with foreign intelligence agencies such as in Afghanistan.5

But who was he, really? The first two decades of his spy career were

spent embedded in the state-owned Xinhua News Agency, giving him rare opportunities to travel the world. In the 1970s he worked in Xinhua’s London bureau for eight years.6 One Thai woman living in London who met him at a Chinese embassy function noted that ‘heoften worked at home late at night writing dispatches’.7 Clearly, he had more on his plate thanjournalism.

From London he was reassigned to the United States, which had only recently opened diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). During the Carter andReagan years he headed the newly established Xinhua bureau in Washington, DC, overseeing coverage of the White House.8 ‘While I tirelessly reported on the activities and speeches ofCarter, Mondale, Reagan and Bush and other key White House figures, I also observed many phenomena and gathered many materials,’ he reflected years later in a compilation of his US reportage, which doesn’t reveal his MSS affiliation. Hinting at his dual life as a spy and a journalist, he wrote that it was a job where most achievements were ‘fragile goods, and hard to attach to my name’.9 By 1985, while he was officially deputy director of the Xinhua department responsible for foreign correspondents, he was in fact probably leading an entire bureau of MSS officers.10

Dual identities

Yet ‘Yu Enguang’ may not have existed at all. MSS officers use pseudonyms throughout their careers, even as vice ministers. These aliases often read like puns on their true names, with characters dissected and jumbled into new ones, or surnames replaced with homophones.

Yu is no exception. Though one writer on Chinese espionage assumed they were different people, little-known MSS vice minister Yu Fang looks identical to Yu Enguang.11 In the only published photo of Yu Fang, taken after his retirement, he stands with the same slouch, wears the same belt and dons the same pair of shaded glasses as Yu Enguang. Both reportedlystudied at Renmin University and grew up in Liaoning province in China’s northeast.12 YuEnguang was just a pseudonym for Yu Fang.

Among his comrades in the MSS, Yu Fang was just as respected as ‘Yu Enguang’ was by the targets he cultivated. At some point in his career he headed the agency’s important centraladministrative office, and in the early nineties helped secure the passage of China’s first National Security Law, which expanded and codified MSS powers.13 The authors of several MSS publications, marked for internal distribution only, thank him for advising on and improving their drafts.14 He also oversaw MSS production and censorship of histories, TV dramas and movies about spies, which were designed to build public awareness and support for the MSS’s mission.15

Ironically for a man who helped bring Chinese intelligence history into

the public sphere, Yu’s true legacy is an official secret. Official references to hisachievements are brief and elliptical. The authoritative People’s Daily eulogised him in 2013, an honour only a handful of intelligence officers receive: ‘In his sixty years of life in the revolution, Comrade Yu Fang was loyal to the Party, scrupulously carried out his duties and selflessly offered himself to the Party’s endeavours, making important contributions to theParty’s state security endeavour.’ The article also noted that he’d been a member of theNational People’s Congress, China’s national legislature, but lists of delegates include only his pseudonym.16

The MSS seizure of the China Fund was an impressive display of the

agency’s confidence in engaging with one of America’s best-connected and wealthiest men. What it learnt could be applied to future operations as the agency grew more aggressive and internationally focused over the following decade. But it was far from a flawless effort: exposing Yu Enguang and CICEC as arms of the MSS leads to a string of covert operationsagainst the United States, continuing right to the present day.

Soros had at first accepted the management change at his China Fund as a necessary cost of operating in China. Liang Heng claims he told Soros the truth about Yu’s identity in 1988.17 The MSS and Ministry of Public Security ‘were co-equal and they couldn’t interfere in each other’s affairs’, Soros argued in 2019, but partnering with the MSS offered quite theopposite of protection in the end.18 He may have thought he could handle the situation, that his ties to Party leaders could override the conservative proclivities of their spies. After all, his political philanthropy was thriving in Hungary and the Soviet Union despite their security agencies having been formed in the same ideological mould as the MSS.

It’s easy to see why Yu Enguang – or Fang – succeeded in convincing Liang and Soros to accept an MSS takeover of the China Fund, even if it wasn’t an offer the billionaire could easily refuse. But barbs lay behind his charm. Internal MSS reports show what the agency really thought of its American ‘guest’. Its claims about the Soros China Fund, perhaps compiled by Yu, reflected the paranoia and confirmation bias behind the Party’s decision tounleash military force on the people of Beijing in the Tiananmen Square massacre, just a year after Yu Enguang took control of the China Fund.

The Tiananmen Papers, a leaked trove of internal Party reports related to the massacre, reveals much. Updates by the MSS on the student protests form a large chunk of the cache, including one from three days before the massacre that was sent up to the Politburo. In it, the MSS repeated the line that Soros’s China Fund was a CIA front, painting a picture of anenormous conspiracy by hostile foreign forces to control reformists within the Party’s ranks and use the student protests to spark subversion. ‘Our investigations have revealed that Liang Heng, the personal representative of the [China Fund] chairman George Soros, was a suspected US spy. Moreover, four American members of the foundation’s advisory committee had CIA connections,’ it claimed.19

According to the MSS’s narrative, Soros showed his ‘true colours’ by asking Yu to close the fund in May 1989 once he realised that supporters of reform were being purged. Writingto Deng Xiaoping three months after the massacre, Soros denied any CIA involvement in his activities in a letter that was republished in the Party’s ‘internal reports’ circular, sent out to allsenior officials. All the China Fund’s projects were open and accountable,

and effectively sanctioned by both the Chinese government and the MSS. Still hopeful, he made an offer to Deng:

If the Chinese Government indicates its desire to pursue a policy of economic reform and openness, and makes itclear that those associated with the China Fund will not suffer any adverse consequences for their association, Iwould like to begin again to provide support for the activities of the Fund. Nothing would please me more thanto be able to resume a friendly and productive association with your government.20

But the MSS and its leaders in the Party had already made up their minds. That the winds of power were blowing against political reform was obvious. The ministry’s 1 June report to the Politburo, which purported to cover the various forms and means of Western infiltration into China, was unforgiving:

Many facts demonstrate that the international monopoly capitalists and hostile, reactionary foreign forces havenot abandoned for a moment their intent to destroy us. It is now clear that murderous intent has always lurkedbehind their protestations of peace and friendship. When the opportunity arises they will remove the facade andreveal their true colors. They have only one goal: to annihilate socialism.21

Chen Yizi, the ESRI director who was booted out and replaced by Yu Enguang as the chair of Soros’s China Fund, drew a direct link between the charges of espionage laid against Sorosand the factional battles that erupted into the Tiananmen massacre. It was an early ambush laid by the conservatives, who ‘were clearly trying to topple reformist forces within the Party’, Chen believed. ‘After they toppled [reformist general secretary] Hu Yaobang, they again sharpened their swords and prepared to take down Zhao Ziyang’, Hu’s successor, whose staff were working with and supporting Soros.22

As Chen went into hiding and was smuggled out of China after the

massacre, one of his institute’s researchers, Cheng Xiaonong, was in Germany. While newsof the crackdown spread, Cheng received a call from a colleague in Beijing, cryptically warning him not to come back. He later learned security officers detained a dozen of the institute’s staff and others associated with Soros’s China Fund. ‘Their goal was to get them to say that Zhao Ziyang had been conspiring with foreign states,’ Cheng said.23

Cheng suspected the MSS had been planting informants in the ESRI well before the Tiananmen protests began in order to monitor reformists and the institute’s foreign contacts.In fact, the ESRI’s representative in Japan at the

time, officially China Economic Daily’s Tokyo correspondent, was probably an undercover MSS officer.24 According to Cheng, ‘After June 4, [conservative Party leaders] wanted to take out Zhao Ziyang, so they desperately needed an excuse for doing so.’ The combination of MSS surveillance of Soros’s activities and his links to Zhao created the perfect recipe for made-up charges. The Party’s spies settled on the line that Zhao’s aide was in frequent contact with the institute, which had in turn partnered with George Soros, who they alleged was aCIA spy. As Cheng puts it, ‘The conclusion is that Zhao Ziyang was a spy, a US CIA spy.’25 Treason, in other words.

Yet the MSS may not have wanted to pursue the question further. The truth that it had been secretly running Soros’s China Fund inconveniently implicated its own officers in America’s supposed ‘counterrevolutionary strategy’ to turn China into a liberal democracy.Soros knew this and could have exposed the MSS’s hand if it harmed the China Fund’sassociates.

Likewise, the political and social consequences of accusing a crestfallen Party leader of capital crimes may have proven as unpredictable as the Tiananmen protests, and to do so was not the MSS’s prerogative in any case. This was a matter of the highest levels of elite politics. In the end, it seems that none were punished for their involvement in the Soros China Fund.26

Ultimately, the MSS didn’t need to formally reach a verdict either. Party crimes were to be sorted out by the Party elders themselves and the MSS was only there to justify the ruling it made: that the Tiananmen massacre had been a necessary struggle against anti-Party extremists and foreign agitators, and that Zhao Ziyang must be purged and indefinitely placed under house arrest.

CHAPTER 3

NESTLING SPIES IN THE UNITED FRONT

IN 1990, GEORGE SOROS looked back on the failure of his China Fund. ‘China was not ready for it because there were no independent or dissident intelligentsia,’ he wrote. ‘The foundation could not become an institution of civil society … because no such society existed.’1 Whether partnered with the ESRI or CICEC, he could not extricate his venture from the Party and the MSS.

The full story behind CICEC shows just how far the MSS’s connections reach across Chinese society. It was the first in what is now a long line of covertly controlled vehicles for the MSS, showcasing the agency’s united front traditions as well as its unique emphasis on building social networks and executing influence operations. CICEC and its MSS officers usedthese advantages to embed themselves into key channels for engagement with China, and from there manipulate and infiltrate the outside world.

The assets

At its establishment in 1984, CICEC was nearly unrivalled for the representation it had across Chinese high society.2 At first glance, the newly created cultural organisation’s ties tointelligence were far from obvious.

Representing the Party leadership at CICEC’s founding was Xi Zhongxun, considered arelatively open-minded and reformist official. Xi’s leading role in the united front and intelligence communities was not widely understood

by foreign observers even though he had also attended the MSS’s founding the year prior.3

Famous Chinese with strong international contacts filled CICEC’s list of 139 members. They ranged from future Party leader Hu Jintao to calligraphers, poets, a Manchu prince, ballet dancers, scientists and the leader of the state-approved Protestant church.4 Many had been victims of the Cultural Revolution, but their return to prominence reflected how theChinese Communist Party wanted to present ‘New China’ to the world: open, reforming, culturally rich and increasingly cosmopolitan. Their international standing and roles as de facto cultural ambassadors were magnetic to foreigners interested in China.

Many, if not most, of these people had something in common beside their

CICEC membership. They were people the MSS could rely upon to help its officers make international contacts among the diverse social circles and professions they represented. With their influence and connections to the outside world, they were masks China’s spies could wear to monitor, influence or even recruit outsiders. These people were intelligence assets.

A close look shows that several of CICEC’s earliest members had backgrounds in intelligence work. Ying Ruocheng, the famous Chinese actor who became vice minister of culture in the late 1980s, was both an intelligence asset and a CICEC member. His wife, in fact an employee of the MSS, was officially the secretary of another CICEC member, theplaywright Cao Yu. Towards the end of his life, Ying’s work as an informant over more than thirty years, reporting on his interactions with foreign friends such as Arthur Miller, began totrouble him deeply and only became known with the posthumous publication of his memoirs in 2009.

Even approaching death he refused to tell the full story. Perhaps demonstrating his mixedfeelings about intelligence work, Ying’s invitation to CICEC’s 1985 council meeting recently appeared for sale online for ¥35 (A$7).5 Ying’s biographer had to piece together a more complete picture of his affiliation with intelligence agencies through interviews with his son.6

A more willing friend of the MSS was Peng Chong, the senior politician chosen as CICEC’s founding chairman. As a vice chairman of China’s congress, Peng was involved in supervising security agencies but was most notable in his career for having never stuck his neck out.7 Likewise, CICEC’s first secretary-general had for decades been an asset to China’s spies, helping orchestrate the defection of a high-ranking Kuomintang

general to Beijing.8 If these people were the MSS’s assets then who was really in charge?

Social investigations: The 12th Bureau

CICEC was not meant for routine intelligence work; it is the MSS’s custom-made organ formeeting, covertly influencing and recruiting elites from around the world. Its spies have handled the kinds of operations that

the MSS’s many provincial branches might not be trusted to carry out, from schmoozing with China scholars to penetrating US intelligence agencies.

Politically sensitive missions like engaging directly with George Soros or posing as liberals within the Party in order to gain the trust of foreigners are home turf for these officers.

To this day, CICEC’s secretariat is home to a cadre of serving MSS officers. Biographical information on them is often scant and vague, but every now and then it’s possible to find a clear link to the MSS. Initially, several MSS deputy bureau chiefs were mixed in among the group’s members, as well as many more junior officers.9 These deeply embedded officers often stayed with CICEC for more than a decade, allowing them to build deep relationships with the Chinese luminaries among its members, and with the many foreigners CICECengaged with. As MSS Vice Minister Yu Fang advised in a piece of calligraphy he dedicated to the organisation, they were ‘using culture to make friends’.10 But rather than being theobjective of this group, building China’s cultural influence was only a convenient and disarming way to place agents beside foreign targets, and give spies chances to travel abroad.

Another clue to CICEC’s behind-the-scenes MSS officers comes from its

membership lists, some of which have been doctored in what looks like an attempt to scrub references to spies.11 Lists published on CICEC’s website appear to be mostly complete. A second set of lists from a CICEC promotional video has erased fourteen names. Many of those censored names can be linked to MSS officers, including two vice ministersspecialising in foreign intelligence and the agency’s cyberespionage chief.12 What can be found on the other officers shows backgrounds in foreign languages, arts and culture that make them uniquely suited to carrying out intelligence work through CICEC.

Take Jiang Xue, a member of CICEC’s council until 2013 and one of those whosenames were redacted. He’s an accomplished poet and

calligrapher.13 In 2014, his lyrics ‘River of Love’ formed the theme song for a Chinese movie, where he’s credited as a former Ministry of Public Security employee, a commonlyused cover by MSS officers.14 He’s also lectured at two MSS academies: the University of International Relations and the secretive Jiangnan Social University, a mid-career traininginstitution with what looks like a shooting range on its campus.15 He’s an MSS officer.

CICEC’s links to spies converge in the Ministry’s Social Investigation Bureau, also known as the 12th Bureau. Mao Guohua, head of the bureau in the 1990s, concurrently served as a secretary-general of CICEC.16 CICEC member and undercover MSS Vice Minister Yu Fang was the MSS leader who supervised the 12th Bureau.

The bureau’s most senior officers can still be spotted at CICEC events and among its staff. In July 2020, Sun Qingye emerged as the deputy director of the PRC’s new nationalsecurity office in Hong Kong. He’s an MSS officer, just not under that name.17 As Sun Wenqing, he is a vice president of CICEC and a delegate to the Chinese People’s PoliticalConsultative Conference, and probably ran the 12th Bureau until he was sent to Hong Kong.18 Earlier in his career he studied in Japan before working undercover as ChinaYouth Daily’s Tokyo correspondent.19

No one seems to agree about this bureau’s true mission but every intelligence officer who’s studied it is intrigued and has their own theory. Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau – a counterintelligence agency at the coalface of MSS infiltration – described the bureau as responsible for ‘managing relations with social organisations’.20Experts on Chinese intelligence Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil believe it’s in charge of ‘MSS contributions to CCP’s united front work system’.21 A former US intelligence officer called it the ‘mini MSS’ because of the breadth of its activities, which included spying on US intelligence agencies, monitoring dissidents and political influence operations.22 Others have proposed that it might be the MSS headquarters’ own foreign operations bureau. Normally,local branches of the MSS in cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou carry out the bulk offoreign operations based on instructions from Beijing.23 Despite the bureau’s central role in MSS foreign operations, few Western spy catchers working on China would be familiar with it.24 It was only around the early 2000s that it began to attract greater, if still minimal,scrutiny.25

The bureau’s structure says much about how it operates: it has directly set up and managed more front organisations than any other unit of the MSS, many of which look similar to the various community associations run by the UFWD. Here, some helpful context comes from an internal MSS textbook used for training officers, which implies that the ministry controlsseveral social groups, underwriting their budget and inserting ‘personnel responsible for state security work’ among their ranks.26 The bureau alone has controlled or been associated with four publishing houses, a Japanese magazine, a well-known think tank, an arts troupe, an international travel agency, a university alumni association, a film production company, aCalifornia bookstore, Hong Kong’s Sing Tao Daily, the China Writers Association, a public relations professionals association, a medical centre, an international calligraphy competition, a record company and countless international conferences. That’s only those that can be identified through open-source investigations. Most of these fronts remain activetoday.27

United front traditions

From its very earliest days, CICEC’s activities exemplified the Leninist united front strategy of forming alliances of convenience with outside groups, only to discard or marginalise them when they are no longer needed.28 Its very first operation, an effort to scrounge for funds, shows how the MSS Social Investigation Bureau draws on the best intentions of unwitting foreigners to strengthen its covert activities.

The MSS of the 1980s only had a meagre budget, and China as whole was cash-strapped after the devastation of the Cultural Revolution. Foreign investment was just as important to the country’s economy as it was to its intelligence agencies, which by the 1990s were running some of China’s largest business empires.

China’s intelligence community found its opportunity to harvest foreign cash in a HongKong charity group. In 1981, while the MSS’s establishment had only just been proposed, the Jian Hua Foundation (literally the ‘Build China Foundation’) was set up by four evangelical Protestant businessmen. They wanted to show how Christians could contribute to China’s ‘four modernisations’. These four goals of modernising industry, agriculture, national defence and technology were Deng’s signature policy for reform and opening.29

Huang Zhen, the Party’s head of foreign cultural exchanges and the Propaganda Department’s number-two man, helped steer the Jian Hua Foundation’s philanthropy.30Huang allowed the foundation to become one of the first non-governmental organisations operating in China since the Cultural Revolution, but it had to work on the Party’s terms.

The foundation’s first commitment to the Party was that it would fund the construction of what became CICEC’s headquarters. The building, in Beijing’s inner east, symbolised China’s triumphant reopening to the world. Designed to look like a musical reed pipe with eighteen storeys, it was one of the tallest and largest buildings being planned for Beijing at the time.31 According to one of the foundation’s founders, interviewed by China scholar Miwa Hirono, ‘The idea for the [CICEC] started when Deng Xiaoping wanted to develop people’s diplomacy. [Deng suggested that the] relationship should start with friendship between people; not so much [between] officials at the conference table.’ The Party envisioned the CICEC building with state-of-the-art amenities, including a modern theatrethat could serve as a conference venue and a performance hall.32

The Jian Hua Foundation, thinking it was being given privileged access to China and its elite, was used to fund a brand-new intelligence front.

CICEC was the PRC’s first body of its kind during the reform and opening period. It was set up ‘under the attentiveness and care of the central leadership’, its members selected by the Central Political-Legal Affairs Commission and approved by Xi Zhongxun.33 This leading MSS front group even describes itself as carrying out overseas united front work, although this is just a pretence for intelligence work.34

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International, registered in Luxembourg but backed bythe Sheikh of Abu Dhabi and Saudi intelligence, also contributed to the project through loans and a gift of US$2 million.35 Separately, the bank’s branches in Shenzhen and Hong Kongwere being used by the Party’s investment companies and arms exporters to access international markets, and by senior officials to siphon off their own gains.36 China International Trust Investment Corporation or CITIC, a gargantuan state-owned corporation with MSS links, was a client of the bank until it collapsed in 1991 under the weight of corruption, reckless lending practices and US law-enforcement actions.37

It’s no coincidence that the MSS draws on the Party’s united front tradition. When theMSS was established in 1983, cops and spies made up

the bulk of its workforce, but less known is that two other organisations contributed personnel to the newly formed organisation.38 One was the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, a military organisation active in technology theft efforts. More intriguing are the officials transferred from the United Front Work Department (UFWD). The department, long overlooked, has seen a resurgence of attention from both the Party leadership and foreign observers in recent years. It focuses its work on strengthening the ‘united front’ of groups within and outside China working towards the Party’s goals. The basic principle is to target or manufacture representatives of important interest groups and use them as platforms for influence work and infiltration.39

More powerful than the UFWD alone, the grouping known as the united front system – covering the dozens of agencies and front groups that are tasked with such activities – is surging in prominence under Xi Jinping.40 Implementing the ideas he once advocated for as a lowly municipal Party secretary, Xi personally convened the first-ever central conference onunited front work in 2015 and re-established the high-level coordinating body for united front work his father, Xi Zhongxun, chaired in the 1980s.41 The UFWD itself has undergone its largest reforms and expansions in decades, subsuming three smaller agencies and receiving official blessing to manage China’s ethnic, religious and diaspora affairs.42

Xi Jinping is simply reading from an old playbook. Party leaders since Mao Zedong have referred to the united front as one of their three ‘magic weapons’.43 Together with armed struggle and efforts to strengthen Party organisation, the two other magic weapons, the CCPcredits the united front work with major contributions to its victory in 1949, China’smodernisation and subsequent economic development.44

United front work is the subtle and but no less effective cousin of armed struggle. It aims to expand the Party’s control beyond its membership, building a network of friendly contacts in China, and increasingly around the world, who can align their actions with Beijing’s wishes. It focuses on individuals in positions of influence or those who claim to represent key segments of society – ethnic community leaders, business magnates, religious figureheads and so on. This same strategy underlies the forced assimilation of Xinjiang (a policy area overseen by the united front system) and the extinguishing of freedoms in Hong Kong, where Beijing has successfully co-opted key elites.

Abroad, the Party replicates these methods of cultivating elites and community leaders. As recent cases from around the world have shown, the Party seeks to insert itself into segments of diaspora communities and then mobilise them as political influence. Co-optees can be used to suppress dissidents, make political donations, mentor political candidates and staffers, and otherwise apply pressure in support of Beijing’s interests. In Australia, businesspeople with strong ties to the UFWD have channelled millions of dollars into political parties, attempted to change foreign policy, and placed their associates in politicians’ offices and even in parliament.45 For a time, the secretive nature of some of the UFWD’s activities led the FBI tomistakenly label some UFWD officials, operating as diplomats in the United States as they built clandestine networks in Tibetan diaspora communities, as MSS officers.46

On its own, united front work is bad enough. It serves as a way for the

Party to push its influence beyond its own ranks, including abroad. But the biggest problem with united front work is not with those activities themselves but how they enhance the work of professional spies with grander ambitions than the UFWD.

United front networks are a golden opportunity for the Party’s spies because they represent groups of Party-aligned individuals who are relatively receptive to clandestine recruitment. The ways intelligence agencies ride atop these networks is the most concerning yet least understood aspect of CCP influence, but one that goes back to the earliest days ofthe Party. For example, in 1939, Party leader Zhou Enlai advocated ‘nestling intelligence within the united front’ and ‘using the united front to push forth intelligence.’47 The state of affairs is unchanged today: the united front system provides networks, cover and institutions that intelligence agencies use for their own purposes. The same methods of political influence and infiltration that led to the Party’s 1949 victory were later trialled in the US before being used by the MSS Social Investigation Bureau and People’s Liberation Army for their influence operations across the globe.

History provides another angle on the Social Investigation Bureau’s work. Its name harks back to the Social Affairs Department, the Party’s primary intelligence agency during the last decade of the Chinese Civil War.48 Like the MSS, which counts the Social AffairsDepartment as one of its predecessors, espionage, analysis, counterintelligence and protection

work were integrated under it.49 And like today’s Social Investigation Bureau, the SocialAffairs Department heavily used united front networks to meet and recruit agents.50

Key to understanding the Social Affairs Department’s legacy is its massive expansion of efforts to understand the Party’s foes, ‘friendly parties’, social groups and other societies. ‘Our understanding is still rough, patchy and cartoonish, and lacks a thorough understanding of the system.

The ways of subjectivism and bureaucratism still haven’t been entirely eradicated,’ the Party Central Committee complained in 1941.51 In order to remedy this, the whole Party was urged to contribute to ‘investigation and research’ under the coordination of the Central Social Department.52 The targets of this information-gathering exercise were varied and broad: ‘avillage, a district, a county, a city, a village, an army, a division, a factory, a store, a school, a problem.’ The key was understanding the classes of a society and the relationships within it, and on that basis recognising contradictions or cracks that could be exploited. As a young Mao Zedong wrote in 1925, ‘Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is therevolution’s foremost question.’53

Leading scholars, journalists, religious figures, bandit chiefs, overseas activists and even famous prostitutes were subjects of this effort. Dossiers reaching up to thousands of words were to be compiled on each person, recounting their lives, histories, ambitions, interests and weaknesses in order to determine the appropriate way to recruit, influence ormarginalise them.54 An official Chinese intelligence history describes how the Party carried out these ‘social investigations’ during the Chinese Civil War to identify targets for recruitment behind enemy lines who could help the invading communist army take and then occupy key municipalities.55

The MSS’s Social Investigation Bureau’s dozens of front organisations used to mediate and exploit China’s interactions with the outside world are the legacy of those Civil War tactics. These facades have given the MSS a front seat in China’s opening to the rest of the world. Foreigners hoping to visit China could be directed to MSS travel agents. International writers,self-aggrandising politicians and business leaders shopping around manuscripts of their memoirs, novels or poetry could have them translated and published by the MSS. They could mingle with peers in MSS-run associations and set up long-lasting friendships and exchanges.Wealthy and well-connected foreign philanthropists could find a conduit for their

generosity in one of several MSS-controlled charities. When Australia’s Edith Cowan University explored partnerships with Chinese universities, undercover Social Investigation Bureau officers were there to help build bridges.56 Front organisations such as CICEC have held international conferences on technologies such as microelectronics, space propulsion and semiconductors – tailor-made settings for economic espionage.57

The MSS’s commitment to running these groups like genuine cultural associations sometimes led to comical results. Richard Clayderman, the popular French pianist, found his largest audience in China with help from the MSS. Known to millions of Chinese fans as the ‘Prince of Romantic Piano’, Clayderman’s initial tours in China were organised by the Social Investigation Bureau’s arts company.58 Clayderman was certainly clueless to the MSS’s hand, but the agency probably found the relationship helpful for giving its front groups some status in France and providing officers excuses to travel there. The MSS front group also brought Spanish pop star Julio Iglesias to China, where he became the first Western entertainer to perform live on Chinese state television.59 Years earlier, the Guangdong International Culture Exchange Center, a branch of CICEC run by theGuangdong State Security Department, hosted Wham! frontman George Michael on the band’s 1985 tour of China. A photo of the banquet held for Wham! shows Michael sittingbeside the MSS’s Wang Shuren, a senior spy who worked in the Chinese embassy in Cambodia before building a specialisation in smuggling agents into Hong Kong.60

The thousands of employees and members of these front organisations

would also serve as a recruiting ground for both future officers and assets. Young, intelligent and linguistically gifted university students might have enjoyed MSS-run magazines about the foreign world and decided to work for them after graduating, not knowing who was paying the bills. Front groups with members from the business world make convenient channels for arranging covers or new identities for MSS officers as businesspeople. The MSS also forges symbiotic relationships with business leaders who receive political protection in exchange for enriching its officers and serving as high-level intermediaries in their operations.61 To give one example, in 2016 The Wall Street Journal revealed that a Chinese intelligence officer was suspected of masterminding a plot to have a Macanese billionaire bribe United Nations officials.62 In another case, a since-deleted Chinese state media article reported that a wealthy tai chi

master (also an active member of CICEC) was claiming to be affiliated with the MSS 12th Bureau and showed off photos of himself with Party leaders.63

The overseas activities of these fronts help MSS officers travel abroad and identifyrecruitment targets. For example, officers could be embedded inside a film crew going to France to interview actors, join a conference delegation, or act as escorts to a troupe of dancers going abroad. Once overseas, they might disappear, perhaps to meet an agent or collect stolen documents.

MSS politics

For all the Party’s emphasis on the rich traditions of the united front, the limitations placed on the early MSS are a defining part of the Social Investigation Bureau story. Counterintuitively, it’s these constraints that helped craft MSS influence operations into the powerful weapon they are today.

In 1985, Deng Xiaoping forced MSS officers out of China’s embassies, favouring his friends in military intelligence.64 With few exceptions, the MSS was prohibited from using Chinese diplomatic missions to manage clandestine agents abroad.65 Before then, intelligence gathering was such a feature of Chinese diplomatic life that one insider recalled how Deng’s direction sparked uproar from China’s embassy in India, but they had tocomply.66 Around the same time, the MSS also lost much of its access to plum journalisticposts in Xinhua and the People’s Daily, which forced it in turn to rely on more unofficial forms of cover and find other Chinese newspapers willing to let the MSS run its foreign correspondents.67

Without the freedom to work from diplomatic missions until perhaps the late 1990s, the MSS developed a unique methodology for its operations.

Officers posted overseas, often as journalists with newspapers such as the Guangming Daily, China Youth Daily, China Economic Daily and Shanghai’s Wenhui Bao, were famously cautious in Western countries during this early period. Rarely were they caught doing anything untoward for a journalist, which still gave them broad latitude to gather politicalintelligence as they met and ‘interviewed’ sources. Apart from not wanting to stick their necks out, they did so because the hard business of recruiting agents was often done within China – especially by the Social Investigation Bureau. The bureau was the best-placed unit inMSS headquarters to recruit

agents and influence outsiders because of its unrivalled ability to plug itself into existing united front networks and an array of front organisations through which it invited foreigners to China and dispatched spies abroad.

Why did the MSS face these unusual restrictions? The story goes back to the political struggles behind the MSS’s founding, and a scandal shortly after.

In 1985, Ling Yun, the first minister of state security, was fired after just two years in the job and denied the appellations normally awarded to someone of his status.68 His second in command responsible for foreign intelligence left soon after, reappearing as the secretary-general of China’s peak united front forum, the Chinese People’s Political ConsultativeConference.69 They’d taken the fall for one of China’s greatest intelligence blunders: thedefection of MSS officer Yu Qiangsheng earlier that year.

The CIA recruited Yu, the son of a high-ranking revolutionary, before the MSS was even established. Many spies had their cover blown as Yu shared his knowledge of Chinese espionage networks. In the process, the CIA uncovered two key overseas agents of the MSS, reflecting the ministry’s main predecessors: the Central Investigation Department and the Ministry of Public Security.70

French diplomat Bernard Boursicot, arrested in 1983, was the first to fall because of information shared by Yu.71 Starting in 1964, the Central Investigation Department, then the Party’s premier foreign intelligence organisation, hatched a sensational scheme to recruit him. At a diplomatic function, the naïve and young Boursicot was befriended by Shi Peipu, aPeking opera actor who specialised in female roles. Incredibly, Shi convinced Boursicot that he was actually a woman. Boursicot fell in love and was so credulous and sexually inexperienced that he believed he had fathered a son with Shi – actually an adopted Uyghur boy. By 1970 Shi introduced Boursicot to his handlers from the Central InvestigationDepartment, and he began providing them classified information. The case was as tantalising as it was tragic: Boursicot tried to kill himself after learning during his trial that Shi was in fact a man.

Then, as the US government prepared to smuggle Yu out of China, it acted against one of its own, arresting retired CIA analyst and translator Larry Wu-tai Chin, who was mostly handled by the Ministry of Public Security. Often simply characterised as China’s police force, the public security agency has a long history of clandestine foreign operations.72 Chin,

who’d secretly worked for the Party for forty years, was found suffocated in a plastic bag as he awaited his court sentencing in 1986.

With its creation, the MSS subsumed these two intelligence organisations, incorporatingthe entire Central Investigation Department and significant chunks of the Ministry of Public Security’s intelligence units.73 At face value, this looked like a reasonable renovation of China’s intelligence apparatus. By combining the law enforcement and counterintelligence powers of the Ministry of Public Security with the Central Investigation Department’s foreign expertise, the result would be a potent and comprehensive agency with responsibilities similar to the Soviet Union’s KGB. This is more or less the official story – that Deng Xiaoping and the Party’s ‘deep analysis’ of risks posed by China’s opening to the world resulted in a remodelling of the intelligence apparatus.74 And, as a symbol of reformist trends, the MSS reports to China’s government – the State Council – and not the Party itself.

In reality, animal spirits and elite politics defined the MSS’s creation

even more than rational explanations. Moulding the MSS was in part a process of reckoning with the unresolved legacy of the Cultural Revolution, which had ended with Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, and establishing Deng Xiaoping’s primacy.

Both the Central Investigation Department and Ministry of Public Security had been wrecked by the Cultural Revolution.75 Most of their leaders were locked up in Beijing’s notorious Qincheng Prison, where prisoners were beaten and administered experimentaldrugs.76 The remnants of both agencies were also enlisted to help investigate and purge fallenParty leaders.77 Years after the Cultural Revolution, workstreams still needed to be rebuilt and internal rifts continued to cripple morale.

The Central Investigation Department’s head, Luo Qingchang, was particularly divisive.78Wronged veterans of the department pointed the finger at him for their imprisonment duringthe Cultural Revolution.79 Party historian Gao Wenqian points out that it was unusual that Luo was never purged during the Cultural Revolution.80

Luo and Deng Xiaoping developed a deep loathing for each other. Luo’s attitude was common among the older generation of intelligence officers, who didn’t see Deng, a Red Army man, as one of their own.81 Deng, for his part, sought to rein in Luo’s powers. Two former officers of the Central Investigation Department revealed that Deng first ordered thedepartment to

pull its people out of Chinese embassies in 1978, but Luo told his officers to ignore the directive.82 Luo responded the next year by writing publicly about his close relationship with the late premier Zhou Enlai, framing himself as an inheritor of Zhou’s legacy when Deng was also viewed as Zhou’s successor.83

Deng’s ultimate solution was to disband the Central Investigation Department, forcing Luo into retirement. As early as 1981, Party officials began exploring the idea of a new intelligence agency to replace the embattled agency.84 Xi Zhongxun, the father of Xi Jinping, and two senior foreign affairs officials were successively sent in to assess the situation in the department. Meeting with its leadership in 1982, Xi Zhongxun stressed the importance of passing knowledge down to younger generations and sorting out issues left over from the Cultural Revolution. Some would have to gather the courage to self-criticise, he told them.85It was a sign of the end to come.

The result was the MSS, a compromise between Deng and Party elders who were themselves of the intelligence world. Combining the Ministry of Public Security’s law enforcement powers with the Central Investigation Department’s intelligence work amounted to a substantial expansion of its abilities when Deng could have simply abolished the Central Investigation Department and swept its remnants into his favoured military intelligence system. Likewise, Deng succeeded in pushing Luo into retirement and approved of the new agency’s chief, but Luo’s protégé stayed on as a deputy head of the MSS.86

The role played by Party leader Chen Yun may have proved decisive.

He’d been head of the Party’s first intelligence agency fifty years earlier, stood atop a different faction of Chinese politics to Deng and was among those consulted about the MSS’s creation.87 Chen was a creature of the civilian intelligence system. This was his bastion. These were his people. He had a history of throwing his weight behind the intelligence community.88

The compromise between these two wings of Chinese politics has given the appearance that the MSS was meant to be apolitical.89 On the contrary, its political significance meant that neither side could allow the other to gain too much influence over it. It’s no coincidence that it has since been involved in several elite corruption scandals, both as accomplice andinvestigator.90 The corruption case that Party rivals used to bring down

Beijing mayor Chen Xitong in 1995, then China’s largest financial scandal, centred on a company that was in fact a front for the MSS’s Beijing bureau.91 In 2012, an MSS vice minister personally flew to the southwestern city of Chengdu to apprehend a close associateof Xi Jinping’s main rival, who attempted to defect to the American consulate.92

Whichever side of Party politics MSS leaders may lean towards, loyalty to the Party has always been treated as the most important foundation for state security work. The message from the MSS’s crest is clear: the Party’s hammer and sickle sit above the five stars of the country’s flag. Its creation was negotiated and approved by Party leaders many months before it passed through the country’s powerless legislature.93 While officially subordinate to the State Council, the MSS has been run by the Party through its Central Political-Legal Affairs Commission, which provides leadership over security, law enforcement and justice agencies.94 The ministry’s training materials hardly mention loyalty to the people, and itsofficers are rigorously selected for their own political purity as well as the backgrounds of their family members. Many are the descendants of revolutionaries or intelligence officers such as Peng Zhen and Marshall Zhu De.95

As Vice Minister Yu Fang once said about the process of selecting intelligence officers, ‘We first look at their political qualities, meaning their beliefs and their belief in communism. What that means now is their loyalty to the Fatherland. This aspect is paramount – their ideological character must be good.’96 Having served undercover in the UK and America as ‘Yu Enguang’ for over a decade, he was well positioned to comment on the matter. Similarly, an internal manual for MSS officers repeatedly stresses three core traits: ‘absolute loyalty to the Party’, a willingness to become a ‘nameless hero’, and, like the lotus of Buddhism, the ability to ‘rise through mud unsoiled’.97 These are the Party’s spies, a vanguard within a vanguard. Politics, domestic or foreign, is their bread and butter.

CHAPTER 4

A BLOODBATH MARKS A NEW ERA

AFTER THE TIANANMEN massacre of 4 June, the MSS’s leadership reflected that ‘1989 had been an unusual year’. International capitalists, they claimed in an annual review, had been usingChina’s growing openness to catalyse a transition towards liberal democracy. However, ‘in the trial by blood and fire on the verge of spring and summer last year, state security personnel showed the elevated awareness and excellent quality of their absolute loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party and the state’.1 By the MSS’s own account, it had protected the Party by catching supposed Taiwanese spies and expelling American journalist John Pomfret, who was rewarded for his reports on the protests with the charge of stealing state secrets.2The messy Soros incident and the tide of defections in the massacre’s aftermath was left out of this official narrative.

The massacre marked a new era for China and the MSS. The Party establishment had laidout its position with the blood of protestors: it wasn’t going to accept ‘peaceful evolution’ ofChina into a liberal democracy.

Those in the Party leadership who’d sympathised with the protests or were too close to ousted leader Zhao Ziyang had their careers cut short. In the years since, the Party has closely studied the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which has only strengthened its conviction to never tread that path.3 Amid these political currents, the Social Investigation Bureau led MSS efforts to aggressively build networks abroad, placing its officers and assetsclose to the centre of foreign powers and intelligence agencies. From

humble beginnings, these MSS operations did much more than protect the Party from threats; they slowly but surely worked their way into the heart of American policymaking and the world’s understanding of China.

This low point in the Party’s morality and international standing was also a chance to start afresh and rebuild China’s relations with the rest of the world. The Party and the MSS in particular sought to use the massacre as the pretext for a feigned reinvention.

Blood had been shed, but the Party was regretful. It needed time, tolerance, understanding and support from the West to liberalise and integrate into the international rules-based order.Or so the line goes. In the eyes of George Soros, whose early effort to promote open society in China met its end in 1989, the massacre helped create an ‘independent intelligentsia’ in China and spelled the beginning of the end for the Party’s hardliners.4

The picture inside the Party was very different. Reformists were weaker than ever, and the security state went into overdrive. Six months after the massacre, outstanding intelligence officers were personally awarded by Qiao Shi, chief of the Party’s justice and security system, for their contributions over the six years of the infant ministry’s existence.5 Ratherthan prompting solemn reflection, the massacre meant loyal Party members in the MSS were praised for their conviction. The message was that the MSS should be steeled by 1989’s atrocities. It was a bloody baptism from which the agency would emerge more powerful,adventurous and confident.

Little is known about how officers of the MSS really reacted to the

military crackdown. China’s intelligence agencies are bastions of ideological conservatism eager to see the black hand of foreign enemies behind such domestic unrest. Although the Party’s public rhetoric has become modern and inclusive of capitalists, a confidential history of Chinese military political warfare published a decade after the massacre revealed that intelligence agencies were still guided by concepts, such as classstruggle, that had long been cut out of official language.6

To the doyens of the intelligence community, the year’s events deepened their fears about the West and thereby their belief in steeling the Party for future struggle. In 1990, Chen Yun,one of the Party’s highest leaders and a former spymaster, asked his fellow elders to study imperialism, warning that it was still a force to be reckoned with. Citing Chen’s advice, LuoQingchang, the last head of the MSS’s predecessor agency, declared to a

gathering of retired spies that ‘US relations with China can’t return to how they were tenyears ago. The United States is an imperialist country, and as long as we’re socialist it won’t be at ease and will put pressure on us.’7

On the other hand, some intelligence officers were deeply unsettled by the events of June 1989. The aftermath of the massacre saw several officers defect to the West. Intelligence officers had suffered horrendously in various internal purges since the 1930s, their ties to the enemy turned into evidence of ‘counterrevolutionary activities’. They had good reason to besceptical of the Party’s more extreme actions.8 Some of them had only been rehabilitated years earlier. The awards issued to MSS officers in December 1989 were an effort to reaffirm the agency’s integrity and reputation, both to its officer cadre and to the Party’s leadership, most of whom no longer had personal experience as underground revolutionaries and spies. Some of those awarded were long-retired spies whose achievements dated to the 1940s.9

The old guard: Mao Guohua

One of the MSS’s old guard, Mao Guohua, took charge of the Social Investigation Bureau around this time and helped set in place networks that were so powerfully used for influence operations in later years. A pencil- thin and bespectacled intelligence veteran, Mao was a leading force in MSS operations against the United States. He was born in 1933 in Xikou, thesame home town as Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek. The two were distantly related, andChiang’s first wife shared Mao Guohua’s surname.10

Mao’s national service began in December 1950. Just seventeen years old, he signed up to a ‘Resist America and Support Korea’ military academy when Chinese forces intervenedin the Korean War. Expecting to be sent into battle, he was instead chosen to join an elite group of students destined to serve on the covert front.11 The 495 students, handpicked fromhigh schools across the country, were enrolled in Beijing’s Foreign Languages School, which employed the same secretive and closed recruitment system as military research institutes at the time.12 There he was taught English by Isabel Crook, a Chinese-born Canadian communist whose husband once spied on George Orwell for Stalin’s NKVD.13

Over the following years, Mao built up what might be the most extensive list of coversused by a Chinese intelligence officer. He exemplified the

traditions of united front work and ‘social investigations’ that are central to the Party’sinfluence operations. On a 1980 trip to Australia, Mao appeared as a journalist. Later he donned the hats of a book publisher, cultural official, university alumni association representative and medical association official.14

After being sent to one of the country’s notorious labour reform camps during the Cultural Revolution – his ties to the Chiang family meant he was accused of being a rightist and traitor– he was brought back into the Party’s fold to help manage Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972.15 He was assigned as a minder for members of the nearly hundred-strong Americanpress corps covering Nixon’s visit.16 The need for fluent English speakers with experience handling foreigners – nearly all of whom would have run into trouble during the Cultural Revolution – outweighed questions about Mao’s politics.

The American journalists, with few exceptions, were clueless about China. The first impressions they formed with Mao’s help would shape American public sentiment and coverage. As one participant later said, ‘I knew nothing about China. Nobody had any idea what it looked like. It really was like going on the moon.’17 Mao Guohua was chosen toaccompany one of the only journalists with experience in China, Theodore White, Timemagazine’s China bureau chief during World War Two.18

In the end, it was a success. The press corps were frustrated by their minders, who accompanied them day and night and stuck like glue to the Party line. Nonetheless, China, which had been almost inaccessible to Americans since 1949, entranced them. Suddenly, a rich and expansive country had opened before their eyes in a way that defied any Cold Warcaricatures. China was still communist, but its animosity towards the Soviet Union and relationship with Vietnam could also be helpful to the United States.

For its part, the Chinese government managed to win subtle concessions from the United States in its negotiations with national security advisor Henry Kissinger. The joint communiqué they produced stated that ‘all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China’, a controversial and now increasingly inaccurate claim. No mention was made of the mutual defence treaty betweenthe US and the Republic of China in Taiwan.19

But to American television viewers, ‘China had suddenly come alive, and all the rest is commentary’, one reporter who covered the trip reflected.20 It was perhaps the most important US presidential trip in history. The unabashed optimism it embodied would come to define much of the next forty years of US–China relations.

Mao Guohua was one of dozens, if not hundreds, of minders employed for Nixon’s 1972visit to China. But by the late eighties he would lead the MSS’s Social Investigation Bureau and personally handle one of its most notorious US spies, Katrina Leung.

Triple cross: Katrina Leung

Katrina Leung was the FBI’s star source on China for eighteen years.

An active member of the Los Angeles Chinese community, she had an uncanny ability to gather information not just on activities in California but also within China. Her first serious mission sent her into a Chinese prison. In 1983, the FBI tasked her to visit Hanson Huang, an old friend who’d been convicted of espionage in China. Although he was a US citizen,diplomats were having trouble arranging consular access to him.21 He’d been a person of interest in an ongoing investigation into PRC espionage against the US nuclear weapons program but had somehow gotten on the bad side of the MSS. Now the FBI thought there was a chance he could be flipped – turned into an asset for US intelligence. Somehow, Leung pulled off the prison meeting, even if the information she gleaned from it was of littlevalue.22

J. J. Smith, the FBI counterintelligence officer who recruited Leung, played a dangerous game from the beginning. She’d come across the FBI’s radar well before Smith approached her and came from murky origins. As the US government report on her later concluded, ‘Leung’s family background is unclear.’ She arrived in the United States in 1970, agedaround sixteen, alongside a woman who claimed to be her mother but was probably her aunt.Her passport was Taiwanese but stated that she was born in China’s Guangdong province.23

Soon after she arrived in America, Leung attracted the FBI’s attention. As a college student she joined the pro-China Diaoyu Islands movement, which advocated for China’ssovereignty over what Japan calls the Senkaku Islands. China, which didn’t yet have anembassy in the United States, made contact with Leung and the student movement through a Chinese

official whom the FBI believed was an intelligence officer.24 During this period she also became active in the National Association of Chinese- Americans, a pro-Beijing advocacy group with branches across the country that included leading scientists among its members.25An entry on the association from the 1992 China United Front Dictionary described it asAmerica’s largest ‘Chinese political organisation’, active in promoting ethnic Chinese political candidates.26 Its inaugural president, theoretical physicist Yang Chen-Ning, was a Nobel laureate who was among the first American visitors to China during the Cultural Revolution, where he was chaperoned by intelligence officers.27 He would eventuallyrenounce his US citizenship and move to China.

Katrina Leung’s husband told journalist David Wise that her activism as a university student ‘was the beginning of her trouble’, bringing her into the orbit of China’s intelligence networks. Things got a lot more concerning after she moved to Los Angeles in 1980, where she worked for a trading company that was under active FBI investigation for economic espionage.28 Even her residence was suspect. The FBI described her apartment building as a ‘nest of spies’ because many of its inhabitants were connected to Chinese intelligence.29 It wasn’t long before Leung herself came under investigation, but the case languished under an FBI agent who was disinterested in counterintelligence work. ‘The FBI knew little aboutChina’s quest for technology,’ a later US government assessment stated.30

A year after the bureau’s investigation into Leung petered out, J. J. Smith had recruited heras a paid informant, codenamed Parlor Maid. It’s typical of intelligence agencies to try to recruit agents of foreign powers. The same Chinese intelligence links that brought her under scrutiny could also be advantageous if carefully managed, helping the US government gain greater insight into covert CCP operations. Smith had run background checks on her, and she spun a convincing tale about how she’d woken up to the reality of China under communist rule and distanced herself from the Diaoyu Islands activists, but her long-running links to the CCP and its united front work weren’t fully appreciated. She leant into Americanoverconfidence and hubris towards China to great effect. Born a communist, ‘she’s now arock-ribbed Republican’, Smith reportedly told his colleagues.31 The year after he recruited her, Smith, a married man, took her on as his mistress.

She would later initiate an affair with a second FBI counterintelligence officer.

Smith wanted to turn her into more than a low-level source of information on the LA Chinese community. She was asked to tout her connections to the FBI and build up her reputation as a Chinese community leader, then pay a visit to the MSS at its Xiyuan headquarters in Beijing.

She was now a double agent for the FBI, actively building a relationship with Chinese intelligence at America’s behest. As a star source of information on CCP politics and intelligence agencies, she was handsomely rewarded. In total, she raked in US$1.7 million for services and expenses from the bureau on top of millions from business activities made possible by her friendships with Chinese officials.32 Leung’s successes were Smith’s too. In 1989 he won the HUMINT (Human Intelligence) Collector of the Year Award from the CIA,perhaps for Leung’s reporting from within China on elite politics after the Tiananmen massacre.33

Before long, the close professional and romantic relationship between Smith and Leung crossed another line. Smith treated her ‘as though she was a member of his squad’, investigators later concluded. The treasured information Leung was feeding him placed Smith beyond reproach – his supervisor was later criticised for treating him deferentially – and he exploited this to check classified documents out from the office and into his briefcase as he went to visit Leung at her home.34

It wasn’t long before evidence pointing to Leung’s deception began piling up. In 1987, surveillance found that she’d asked a Chinese diplomat to call her from a payphone, implying she knew the consulate was bugged and didn’t want the FBI to listen in on the conversation. The bureau’s investigation into the matter was eagerly closed up after they realised Leung wasSmith’s asset.35 No one followed up on it.

In 1990, the FBI learnt that Leung told the Chinese consulate it had been bugged.36Somehow, she also disclosed a ‘highly classified FBI counterintelligence program’ that Smithhimself wasn’t privy to. Again, the bureau’s response to the incident went nowhere. Smith and Parlor Maid were beyond reproach. Too much had been invested in the pair for the hundreds of reports they’d produced to all be brought into doubt.37

Later that year, FBI agent William Cleveland, who’d begun an affair with Leung the year prior, bumped into a man Cleveland’s colleague called ‘the subject of the single most important investigation of [Cleveland’s] career’. Even more puzzling, this random encounter happened in the most improbable of places – China, with its billion inhabitants. Cleveland had

joined a State Department group to assess the security of its diplomatic facilities in China and was wandering around a hotel in northeastern China when he stumbled upon Gwo-Bao Min. A former US government nuclear weapons scientist suspected of passing secrets to China, Min shared a mutual friend with Leung: Hanson Huang, the man Leung had been sent to visit in a Beijing prison back in 1983.38

What should have been the final red flag came in 1991. The US National Security Agency (NSA), responsible for signals intelligence and eavesdropping, recorded a phone call between none other than Mao Guohua of the MSS Social Investigation Bureau and a woman who introduced herself as Luo. She then proceeded to describe active, secret FBI investigations. The intercept made its way to William Cleveland, who recognised the voice of the woman he’d been having an affair with. It was Katrina Leung. To the FBI she was Parlor Maid; to China, she was ‘Luo Zhongshan’, a double or even triple agent. This side of Leung’s relationship with the MSS was all news to the FBI.

Cleveland hurriedly phoned his colleague from the China trip: ‘They knew we were coming even before we left.’39 He thought his encounter with Gwo-Bao Min was connected to Leung and probably a ploy to put the FBI officers off kilter. He also passed on the badnews to J. J. Smith.

Visibly upset, Smith confronted her. She had never told him about the codename or the phone call, but somehow managed to calm Smith down. Incredibly, Leung remained a paid FBI asset for years afterwards, and Smith was promoted to head the Los Angeles China Squad. The pair’s relationship continued, and Leung kept scanning documents from Smith’sbriefcase when they met. The full implications of the intercepted phone call were buried. Smith assured his superiors the slip-up was under control. He told himself he’d regained her loyalty.40

What Smith didn’t understand, or perhaps didn’t want to understand, was that it looked like Leung had been working for China all along. From her very first mission – the trip into a Chinese prison – and later a visit to the MSS’s headquarters from which she brought backfootage of the compound, her ability to tread the narrow path of a double agent had been too good to be true. A more complete account of her betrayal would only surface, by pure chance, many years later.

Robert Swan Mueller III was sworn in as FBI director in August 2001.

The September 11 attacks came weeks later, kicking off a massive

expansion in counterterrorism work within intelligence communities around the world, expenditures that often came at the cost of counterintelligence capabilities. Around the same time, US contractors delivered a custom- fitted jet to Beijing for China’s president, Jiang Zemin. Almost immediately after it landed, the Boeing 767 was dismantled, stripped and forensically analysed on a military airfield. Somehow, the Chinese military’s signalsintelligence officers knew that American spies had riddled it with advanced satellite-activated listening devices.41 The ensuing FBI investigation into a possible leak brought Katrina Leung under surveillance.

Mueller went ‘ballistic’ when the investigation uncovered Leung’s

relationship with Smith and hinted that the bureau had been infiltrated by China, accordingto journalist David Wise.42 To make things worse, Leung was still being paid by the FBI as a source. The pair were arrested, but the judge dismissed the case against Leung due to prosecutorial misconduct arising from a technicality.43 Smith negotiated a plea bargain and avoided jail time.44 The two eventually married.

The bookseller: Xie Shanxiao

The story of Katrina Leung should have ended there. But in 2018 a retired Chinese public servant using the name ‘Morning Bird’s Song’ began posting anecdotes, poetry and personal photographs onto WeChat, China’s most popular social media platform. He’d worn many hats over the course of his fascinating life – student, metallurgist, book publisher, to name afew. He’d travelled the world, secretly met a future Taiwanese president, been among the first Chinese students sent to study in America after the Cultural Revolution and talked business with Murdoch’s media empire.45 And he’d met Katrina Leung in Los Angeles. He was Xie Shanxiao, a member of the MSS Social Investigation Bureau and one of Leung’s handlers.

The stream of WeChat posts reveals new details about the Parlor Maid disaster, and the MSS’s deep integration with united front networks and dedication to influence operations. Xie’s official title was general manager of China International Culture Publishing Company,an MSS front company with Social Investigation Bureau chief Mao Guohua as its executivechairman.46 Acting as a book publisher enabled Xie to befriend intellectuals in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and Los Angeles. It was a form of cover that allowed him to travel with ease into enemy territory. A testament to the MSS’s focus on influence operations, itsnumerous publishing houses

also served as vanity publishers to elites. In 1987, for example, the bureau was involved in publishing a poetry collection by Bangladesh’s military dictator.47

Unlike Mao Guohua, Xie set foot in the United States several times, and even studied metallurgy at Ohio State University before returning to China as a technical intelligenceanalyst.48 ‘The moment I walked through Beijing Airport’s security checkpoint, I realised I was about to tread upon a dark continent that hadn’t been touched by the sunshine of socialism … A solemn feeling came over me and my heart suddenly grew nervous andterrified,’ he wrote of his first trip to the United States.49

Xie’s earliest liaisons in the United States brought him into the realm of influence operations targeting scientists. In January 1980, a Chinese physicist living in California published the first edition of Science and Technology Review. The hefty Chinese-language magazine featured interviews with and articles by Nobel laureates, and congratulatory letters from both Chinese and American leaders. According to Xie, distinguished Chinese American scientists who, like Leung, had been active members of the Diaoyu Islands movement, filled the periodical’s editorial board.50 ‘I and many others … feel that we should try to help China acquire more modern scientific knowledge,’ Nobel laureate andScience and Technology Review co-founder Yang Chen-ning later said.51 The FBI believed Qian Ning, the magazine’s founder, had been sent to the United States by Chinese intelligence.52

Interviewed by journalist David Wise in 2009, Qian denied working for the MSS,maintaining she set up the magazine to ‘help China understand the market economy’ so as to promote reform even though conservatives were in power.53 But by 1984 she was in touch with Xie Shanxiao. Science and Technology Review was penniless and had ceased publication. If Qian were indeed a Chinese spy, her likely backer no longer existed. The Central Investigation Department had been dissolved into the MSS the year before, and some of the department’s overseas operatives were sometimes expected to scrounge for funds on their own. One complained that the agency ‘had never been willing to spend money’ on him and only gave him and his wife about US$200 when they were infiltrated into Hong Kong.54The details are unclear, but Xie, then working as an aviation technology intelligence analyst in China’s military-industrial complex, became the magazine’s China manager and restarted the publication, this time from Beijing.55

Qian’s ties to America’s scientific elite had officially been handed over to China. Many of the magazine’s affiliated academics eventually moved to China and were instrumental in setting up research ties between the countries.

Influence and espionage are inextricable in the Chinese Communist Party’s intelligence operations. Gwo-Bao Min, the US nuclear weapons scientist suspected of spying for China, moonlighted as Science and Technology Review’s advertising manager. Qian, the magazine’spublisher, once helped arrange for Min to visit China.56

Katrina Leung embodied this integration of influence and infiltration too.

Though the sexiness of Leung’s affair and betrayal of the FBI far eclipsed it, and the FBI’sfailure to appreciate it doomed its handling of Parlor Maid, the truth is that Leung was as much an agent of influence as a spy. She was a united front leader, what the Party calls an ‘overseas Chinese leader’ or qiaoling.57 In fact, Chinese-language media reported that, amonth after her arrest, Beijing’s peak united front group for diaspora leaders accidentallypublished its new list of advisors with Leung included.58

The Party viewed Leung and her friends from the Diaoyu Islands movement as a bulwark from which it could supplant Taiwan’s influence over American Chinese communities and build influence over US politics. Known as ‘Little Taipei’, Monterey Park is a city in Los Angeles County that’s been a focus of those activities. When Xie led a Chinese publishingindustry delegation to LA in 1988, representatives from a Chinese city were also in town to open a Chinese garden. Visiting the Monterey government office, they were shocked to see a stone memorial celebrating Monterey’s sister city agreement with Taipei. The two sides were at an impasse – neither Monterey Park nor the Chinese representatives were willing tocompromise on the matter of the memorial. So, in the dead of night, Xie and Peter Chow,who ran a Chinese bookstore with Katrina Leung, stole the stone tablet, loaded it into a van and dumped it in a vacant lot. After that, the ceremony went ahead.59

When Chow asked for Xie’s help a year later, he wasn’t let down. It was a month after the Tiananmen massacre. Chow and LA united front leader David Fon Lee were in Beijing to meet the president of China, Yang Shangkun, a former intelligence chief better known as a pivotal supporter of the bloody crackdown.60 After the reception, Xie sat down with them.

Chow and Leung’s Monterey Books and Stationers was nearly bankrupt.

They wanted the Chinese government to help. With President Yang’s backing, Xie’spublishing house invested in the store to become its majority owner, Lee its chairman, Xie its CEO and Katrina Leung one of several directors. Three staff members provided by the MSSpublishing corporation were sent to LA to run the newly reorganised business.61

President Yang was a patron of Parlor Maid too. Xie wrote of a book launch in Beijing where President Yang Shangkun ‘made a beeline to Leung, who had received him on his trip to the United States’.62 US government investigations found that Yang also arrangedfor US$100,000 to be wired to Leung because he ‘liked her’.63

The bookstore was a minor errand compared to the mission Leung received from the MSS in 1990. Early one spring morning, Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin held an audience with Leung and the Social Investigation Bureau’s Mao Guohua. The makeup of the group was almost as alarming as its topic: influencing US politics. Jiang wanted to know how next year’s presidential election would turn out and encouraged Leung to involve herself inpolitics. Leung wrongly predicted that George H. W. Bush would keep office. ‘We will give you the support you need,’ he said. That evening, Mao and Leung retreated to her hotel, where they discussed the details of influencing the Republican Party. Mao’s tasking wasbroad but the guidance clear: donate, mingle with politicians, and make friends for China.64 A decade after her arrest, Leung wrote, ‘I was generous with my donations, and used my generosity to get politicians to do things for me … in fact when those governors and mayors attended Chinese events it was because I’d “bought” their attendance.’65 Ultimately, this meant FBI funds, Leung’s wealth from doing business in China and Hong Kong, and a smallamount of cash from Beijing were being mixed together and plugged into politics at the MSS’s behest. Already, in 1990, the MSS was trying its hand at political influence operations in the United States. A decade later, it perfected this playbook.

A cesspool of corrupted cases

Leung’s political activities alone may not have had a significant effect on politicians and their parties, but Xie’s journals also point towards a more disturbing conclusion. Leung was one among a score of CCP-aligned Chinese ‘community leaders’ in the United States whowere approached by

the MSS in the eighties and nineties. On top of that, Xie reveals how the MSS began working its way into international media organisations.

As one former intelligence officer explained, there were at least fifteen or twenty other ‘Parlor Maids’ along the west coast – people who were both MSS assets and US intelligence sources. He described it as a ‘cesspool of corrupted cases’.66 For example, local restaurateur, travel agency owner and united front leader David Fon Lee was another FBI contact who was also in contact with Xie.67 He was one of the only community leaders to publicly back Leung through her trial, and Leung in turn eulogised him as ‘the person who had the greatest influence’ on her after her father and grandfather. Lee described her as like a niece to him.68

US intelligence agencies were clearly out of their depth in a culture and

language that the FBI in particular had little understanding of. The FBI failed to grasp thesignificance of the MSS’s entanglement with united front work and the challenge it posed to its intelligence collection efforts by undermining the reliability of their assets in the local community. They were not alone. Until as late as 2016, counterintelligence agencies aroundthe world paid scant attention to united front work, viewing it as trivial or incidental to their core work of catching people who tried to steal classified information. But the enmeshing of open influence peddling and clandestine operations – Chinese intelligence’s integration of ‘black’ and ‘white’ activities – is slowly seeing broader recognition.

In contrast, operating in diaspora communities has always been a core modus operandi of Chinese intelligence agencies that predates the PRC’s founding. They excel at it. Since theCCP’s inception, its united front efforts have sought to organise and rally sympathetic ethnic Chinese communities to its cause. In fact, all major Chinese revolutionary movements in modern history did the same. Expatriate Chinese communities helped provide the funding, refuge and radical ideas that catalysed the Chinese revolution of 1911, ending imperial rule over China, and the communist takeover after that.

It was also the inadequacies of Chinese intelligence agencies that pushed them towards recruiting people who spoke their language and came from their culture, if not from mainland China itself. A string of recent espionage cases in the United States and Europe show that the MSS is now more than willing and able to recruit foreigners, including foreign intelligenceofficials, but one intelligence veteran told me that his Chinese counterparts

‘always sucked at languages’.69 Russian aside, genuine foreign-language experts were relatively rare in China before the 1980s. Mao Guohua himself had atrocious English.70 Even today, the MSS continues to treat personal and familial political loyalty, not linguistic or analytical ability, as the most important criterion when recruiting officers who will engage with outsiders. In a recent and unusually brazen approach, Canadian scholar Charles Burtonwas ambushed in Shanghai by MSS Canada Desk officers who had a ‘sophisticated grasp of the minutiae of Canada-China relations’ but no fluency in the English language.71 University recruitment notices issued by the MSS often clarify that Party members, Communist Youth League members and student representative cadres are preferred.72 Those with significant overseas experience or family connections to the outside world are likely to be weeded out in the early stages of vetting.

It should therefore come as no surprise that one of the MSS’s first uses for its premier front group, CICEC, was to hold a gathering of diaspora Chinese in late 1984, including many from the US west coast. Celebrating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the PRC’s founding, CICEC’s event attracted over fifty foreign attendees who went on to become leading promoters of the Party abroad. ‘China is their original home, and revitalising China is theduty of all descendants of the Yellow Emperor,’ the People’s Daily wrote in coverage of the event.73 Many of their individuals have well-documented united front links, but the fact that they were also courted by the MSS shows how the two spheres intersect.

Peng Chong, the trusted Party elder who was CICEC’s original figurehead, addressed the group. The People’s Daily summarised his speech: ‘The compatriots and friends here todayare all experts, scholars and notable figures with social influence and academic prestige … who have played important roles and worked hard for friendship and cooperation between our country and other countries.’74

Some of those present may have innocently answered Peng’s call through their promotion of Chinese art and culture. Wan-go Weng, described by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in 2018 as ‘one of the most respected collectors and connoisseurs of Chinese painting in the world’, was among those who attended the event.75

Another guest, San Francisco Chinese newspaper publisher Huang Yunji, was at least a degree removed from espionage.76 One of his newspaper editors, Russell Lowe, went on to spend twenty years working in the

Californian office of Senator Dianne Feinstein before being exposed as an MSS asset in 2018, probably working for the Social Investigation Bureau.77 One other newspaper staff member later became a city councillor.78 Also at the CICEC reception was journalist Weng Shao-chiu, who ran united front groups such as the San Francisco Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China that advocated for Beijing’s overseas interests.79

Similarly, Xie Shanxiao’s contacts through the publishing business went

far beyond Katrina Leung. Liu Bing, CEO of another Chinese bookstore in Monterey, was one of International Culture Publishing Corporation’s overseas advisors.80 So was Sally Aw, then publisher of one of Hong Kong’s largest newspapers, Sing Tao Daily. In 1992, Aw agreedto establish a magazine with the MSS publishing company after running into financialtroubles, the first such joint venture publication in China. It was a massive win for the Party as it prepared for the 1997 Hong Kong handover. Aw had been ‘pro-Taiwan and anti-CCP’ at first, Xie writes, but was later appointed to the Party’s top united front forum, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.81Sing Tao, which has editions in Canada, Europe,Australia and the United States, described its political position in 1988 as ‘neutral but leaning towards supporting the government of the Republic of China’, but the 1990s saw it fall under greater self-censorship and a pro- CCP editorial line.82 Since then, the newspaper’s ownership has changed hands, bringing it closer to the CCP. Today the outlet is officially designated by the US government as a foreign agent involved in political influence efforts.83

At one stage, Xie claimed International Culture Publishing Corporation was negotiating a partnership with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation before it was called off when the mediagiant published two books that ‘hurt US–China friendly relations, attracting the fury of thecentral leadership’.84

CHAPTER 5

CHINAGATE: THE PLOT TO BUY THEWHITE HOUSE

IN THE YEARS before Katrina Leung’s arrest in 2003, China’s intelligence agencies prepared for a far more ambitious gambit: an attempt to buy influence in the White House.

California was a treasured staging ground for political influence operations and economic espionage. Its extensive united front networks, clusters of advanced technology and undeniable electoral heft make it prime territory for MSS officers. Today, the state holds the honour of having an MSS unit dedicated to influence and intelligence work in it.1

But Washington, DC, the nation’s capital, is where operations ultimately come to fruition. These efforts successfully converted MSS cunning into new friendships for the Party and an international environment permissive of China’s rise. By patiently working on national leaders, Congress, diplomats, think tanks and business leaders, the MSS convinced keydecision-makers that China would gradually liberalise while averting their gaze from the Party’s ambitions and authoritarianism. This was the Party’s effort to lull the rest of the worldinto complacency as it built up its strength and never forgot its revolutionary core.

A newly uncovered document reveals the framework behind these covert influence operations. Buried on page 1433 of the second volume of a collection of theses by mid-career officials studying at the Central Party School in 1997, it’s no surprise it never attracted outside attention until now. Almost casual in tone, the paper offers ‘A few thoughts on

strengthening work on the US Congress’ from the Ministry of State Security 2nd Bureau’sfreshly appointed chief, Gao Yichen.2 Emphasising using legal means to cultivate opinion leaders and build influence across American society, business and politics, Gao’s writings help unravel the MSS’s deliberate effort to influence and manipulate US perceptions ofChina.

When he laid out his thoughts on influence operations, Gao had just returned to Beijing after five years as ‘Gao Fengyi’, a journalist for the Guangming Daily in Washington, DC. Appointed head of what’s known as the MSS’s ‘open-line’ operations bureau, he now managed the agency’s network of spies posing as diplomats, journalists, and trade and tourism representatives. These individuals all have some degree of overt government affiliation and an ‘open line’ to Chinese diplomatic missions and officials.3 Political intelligence is a core part of their work. The distinction is an important one in MSS tradecraft, contrasting with ‘illegals’ operating under deep cover, for example as private businesspeople. Under his pseudonym, Gao was also a vice president of CICEC. After a few years in charge of the open-line bureau, he was promoted to vice minister of the MSS.4

Gao, like his fellow undercover journalist and MSS US expert Yu Fang,

was a tall native of China’s northeast. He claimed to be fluent in Russian and French in addition to English and had also worked undercover in Moscow.5 This career spy hardly held up his pretence of being a foreign correspondent. He enjoyed the mystique of the intelligence world and wore mirror-lens aviator sunglasses indoors. ‘He had this sleazy look about him,’said a US official who met him several times. ‘He should have had MSS tattooed on his forehead.’6 Despite this, the insights he gained into American politics have left their mark ontoday’s MSS influence operations.

It was an exciting time to live and work in the heart of American power. ‘When I arrived in Washington, my first impression was its atmosphere of peace and tranquillity that’s hard to come by in capital cities,’ Gao later wrote.7 Scandal and uncertainty lay below the city’s clean architecture and broad avenues. Gao knew DC was ‘erupting with incidents’ – andespionage. The Cold War had ended but left in its wake a whole new set of securitychallenges for Washington. Russia, the former Eastern Bloc, China and the Middle East were at the top of the pile.

The Chinagate scandal

Gao’s recent experience with bungled influence operations in DC undoubtedly inspired his paper on influencing Congress. He watched and might have participated in poorly coordinated and immature efforts to influence the 1996 presidential election, dubbed ‘Chinagate’ by the US media. The story of the incident, or rather incidents, is as politicised as it is convoluted because it involved a messy web of alleged Party agents making illegaldonations to Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The operations implicated multinational corporations, the owner of a small faxingbusiness, a restaurateur, a Buddhist temple, a Thai government lobbyist, and the head of Chinese military intelligence in attempts to cosy up to both sides of US politics. Little seemed to connect this unlikely cast but their often murky ties to the Chinese Communist Party.8 One after another, they popped up as donors to the Democratic National Committee,inside the White House, or at a function with Republican Speaker of the House NewtGingrich. It was an ‘intercontinental connect-the-dots puzzle in which there are plenty of dots but few firm connections’, reported The Washington Post.9

Johnny Chung was at the heart of the controversy. An Asia expert at the White House’s National Security Council described Chung best in an internal memo, calling him a ‘hustler’. Born in Taiwan, Chung rapidly transformed himself from a struggling businessman into a frequent visitor to the White House with enough spare cash to give generously to the Democratic Party. In 1994, his Automated Intelligence Systems – not aclandestine organisation but a ‘blastfax’ business that could push out thousands of faxes on command – made less than US$20,000.10 After making a meagre donation to the Democrats that year, he was invited to join, at his own cost, a Department of Commerce trip to China. Chung’s biggest kickbacks from the visit were the photos he snapped with US officials that could help promote his business ventures. But it was on this trip that he first entered theChinagate story.

After landing in Beijing, a senior US Commerce official introduced Chung to Charlie Trie, a fellow political donor and American citizen. Trie and Chinese property developer Ng Lap Seng tried to convince Chung to let them buy the Chinese marketing rights to his blastfax business, but Chung claimed he turned down the offer.11 After a stint as an international fugitive, Trie would later plead guilty to illegally laundering donations from Ng, who

secured ten meetings in the White House with Trie’s help.12 Like a score of other billionaires wrapped up in China’s influence operations, Ng landed a seat on the country’s peak unitedfront forum shortly after Chinagate.13

Ng was never prosecuted for his donations to the Clinton campaign, but two decades later a New York court convicted him of bribing two UN ambassadors as part of a scheme to gain support for a conference centre in Macau that would have expanded China’s presence in UN affairs.14 ‘He comes here principally to bribe people,’ a US attorney told the judge.15 But the law enforcement operation’s white whale, who might have unlocked secrets about the Party’s elite influence operations, got away. The billionaire Ng treated Qin Fei, an obscure Chinese businessman, with deference, and was seen carting around his bags. The FBI suspected Qin of being an intelligence operative, linking him to a smuggling operation byChinese military officers in New York.16

Johnny Chung had none of Ng’s wealth, yet his steady stream of donations meant he ‘hustled’ to cash in fifty visits to the White House and photo opportunities with Republican heavyweight Newt Gingrich, Senate leader Bob Dole and President Clinton as business deals in China.17 He eventually ran into a business partner unlike all others: Lieutenant Colonel Liu Chaoying, a fashionable Hong Kong–based arms broker, daughter of navy chief and Politburo Standing Committee member General Liu, and a pathway to Chinese military intelligence.18

With an introduction from Liu, Major General Ji Shengde of the Military Intelligence Department greeted Chung at a Hong Kong abalone restaurant three months before the 1996 election. Ji directed him to deepen his stake in US politics, and President Bill Clinton inparticular. ‘We hope to see him re- elected. I will give you 300,000 US dollars. You can give it to the president and the Democratic Party,’ General Ji told him over the meal.19 This was anelite influence operation, both in its perpetrators and targets. It was also reflective of the deep corruption that infused the Party’s military. Ji’s unusual (at least to Western intelligence agencies) personal involvement may have been motivated in part by a need to keep his black budgets under intimate supervision. Ultimately, Chung used most of the cash for his ownneeds, and Ji was later imprisoned in one of China’s most spectacular corruption scandals.

It was a mutually beneficial scam. Chung profited from hyping up his ability to gain political influence in the White House when all he had to

show for it were photo opportunities. General Ji might be able to claim to Party leaders that real ground had been gained through his operations.

Hints of the MSS

Chinese military intelligence’s role in Chung’s donations is undeniable, but the intelligencelinks of other key players in Chinagate were never specified. James Riady, the Chinese–Indonesian head of the Lippo Group property and banking conglomerate, would in 2002 plead guilty to his role in illegal donations.20 Journalist Bob Woodward revealed that the USgovernment’s classified investigations indicated Riady and his father ‘had a long-termrelationship with a Chinese intelligence agency’ revolving around their business interests.21US intelligence agencies also identified Ted Sioeng, another Indonesian with investments inChina whose businesses and family donated to both sides of politics, as an agent of influence for the Chinese government.22 Sioeng had joined Vice President Al Gore at a fundraiser held by a Buddhist temple in California, where Gore received eleven US$5000 cheques from nuns who had ostensibly taken vows of poverty.23

Traces of the MSS pockmarked the scandal, even though it was primarily a military intelligence operation. When Sioeng came under scrutiny, none other than Katrina Leungstepped up to defend him: ‘If there is one criticism I can make of him, it is that he got himself in the limelight for so long that he attracted rumours and speculation.’24 Both were active in Los Angeles, where Sioeng owned a pro-CCP Chinese newspaper.

Likewise, Thai billionaire Dhanin Chearavanont surfaces again and again at the edges of Chinagate, and of US politics for years thereafter, without ever attracting serious controversy. With help from a lobbyist who later pleaded guilty to delivering hundreds of thousands inillegal donations to set up such meetings, Chearavanont met Clinton for a ‘coffee meeting’.25 Two weeks earlier, Chearavanont had also wired US$100,000 to Charlie Trie.26China–US relations dominated the discussion for good reason: the entrepreneur was all over Asian markets for agricultural products, telecommunications services and motorbikes, but China was where his entanglements went deepest.

Chearavanont is in his eighties but is still the head of one of Asia’s richest clans, with afamily worth upwards of US$30 billion. They trace

their roots to Chaozhou, a region of southern China with rich mercantile traditions. The family business, CP Group, returned to China after the Cultural Revolution and still benefitsfrom the blessing of Shenzhen’s first- ever foreign investor certificate – numbered 0001. Chearavanont was soon elevated into the upper ranks of the united front and now receives the seat of honour at state banquets for united front figures.27

Like many other united front figures, Chearavanont also intersects with the MSS. The year of Clinton’s election, 1992, CP Group had partnered with CICEC’s audio-visual publishing business to set up a record company in China, Chia Tai Ice Music Production.28 Though a mediocre operation by CP Group’s standards, a joint venture with a covert subsidiary of the MSS Social Investigation Bureau should raise eyebrows given Chearavanont’s inroads into the highest levels of the United States government.

Chearavanont’s political generosity has been bipartisan. As he secured his coffee meeting with Clinton, he’d also developed a close friendship with the Bush family. CP Group hired former president George H. W. Bush to promote its business in Asia after he left the White House, taking him on a glitzy tour of China and Thailand. Neil Bush, the younger brother ofGeorge

W. and Jeb, who runs a US–China relations foundation under the family name, was a CP Group business partner. In 1996, CP Group signed up Brent Scrowcroft, formerly Bush Sr’s national security advisor, to run a new institution promoting US–China relations.29 The project fell through, but in 2016 it funded the US$10 million Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Washington’s Georgetown University. Congressman Mike Gallagher attacked the partnership because of the involvement of several former USgovernment officials. Dennis Wilder, who was a top CIA official under Obama, was selected to lead the program, alongside several other administration foreign policy experts from the Obama days. Though the initiative maintains its independence, Gallagher’s concern, almostidentical to those of Congress during the Chinagate scandal, was that the ‘CCP may be using proxies to weaponize the “revolving door” between the public and private sector’.30

Looking back, it seems incredible that monitoring and responding to the

Party’s influence operations and united front work didn’t become a focus of the world’s intelligence communities until a whole twenty years after Chinagate. At least three figures from Chinagate – Ng Lap Seng, Dhanin Chearavanont and Lieutenant Colonel Liu Chaoying – continued peddling

influence and resurfaced in similar controversies over the next two decades. Reflecting how the problem was overlooked, former CIA China analyst Chris Johnson dismissively referred to the threat of ‘so-called influence operations’ and ‘the idea that somehow China is trying to subvert the rules- based global order’ as ‘chasing ghosts’ in a 2018 interview. ‘I’m reallysurprised by how much Washington has become focused on this issue of influence operations and so on. You know, when I was working in the government, we didn’t care that much about the activities of the United Front Work Department, and I think there’s still a reason why we really shouldn’t care that much’, said Johnson, who worked in the intelligence community from the time of Chinagate until 2012.31

Years after General Ji Shengde broke campaign finance laws to funnel cash to the Clinton campaign, Johnson brushed off alarming indications of CCP-backed interference in Australia as a product of its large Chinese community and relaxed donations laws, which allowed foreigners to contribute to political parties until they were amended in 2018. ‘We don’t have these things in the United States,’ he claimed. ‘I do not see, for example, the Chinese diplomatic presence here or even some of their think tanks and so on doing anythinglike what they were doing [in Australia].’32

Lessons that were staring everyone in the face – that the Party’s intelligence agencies ride atop united front networks to carry out relationship-focused influence campaigns through a multitude of proxies – were not lost; they were simply never learnt.33 ‘Nobody took it particularly seriously,’ a former intelligence official reflected.34 Tantalising leads, nodes in an international web of intelligence-linked united front figures, sat in Langley safes seldom perused by even those with the privilege to access them. The Party’s ability to allegedly co-opt and mobilise some of the richest men in Asia for influence should have made the prospect of future operations under a wealthier, more savvy and more aggressive China,targeting many more countries, a top concern.

The US intelligence community saw Chinagate as laughable because of how unprofessional it had been. ‘People have been looking for a magic link that shows how the Chinese money affected policy,’ James Mulvenon, an experienced observer of China’s military and intelligence agencies, said at the time. ‘All I see are a bunch of coincidences standing around the same room trying to introduce themselves.’35 No real political influencehad been gained, and the Party showed it hardly understood how DC worked. ‘They

were so fricking ignorant about how things were done in Washington,’ said one former USintelligence official.36 The extent of known illegal donations

– perhaps a few million – was small enough that the Democrats were willing to cuttheir losses and return the money.

These operations backfired on China without achieving any immediate wins. The People’s Republic was left with a self-inflicted black eye and nothing to show for it. But the presidency stepped in to protect the US– China relationship, with the White House claiming it had no evidence showing the Chinese government had sought to influence elections (otherswho’d received the same briefings disagreed). The establishment strategy reigned dominant.‘We believe there’s no basis for any change in our policy toward China, which is one of engagement,’ the White House press secretary maintained.37

Beyond the P-factor

Digging deeper, one finds the failure wasn’t entirely fruitless. Chinagate provided a model that could be improved on and replicated in countries less willing and able to intervene incorruption and interference from the CCP.

The scandal foreshadowed a similar effort by business figures to buy their way into Australian politics that was only unwound in 2018. Notably, Australian media revealed in 2017 that political donor Helen Liu was a friend and business partner of Liu Chaoying, the blue-blood colonel who helped pass on military intelligence cash to Johnny Chung. During the 2000s, Helen Liu became a close friend and backer of then defence minister JoelFitzgibbon, even renting a property to him, and befriended several other senior politicians.38When Australian media first raised the alarm about Liu’s activities in 2009, Australia’s counterintelligence agency responded that it had ‘no information relating to Ms Helen Liu which would have given rise to any security concern regarding her activities or associations’, eschewing its long-standing practice of not commenting on operational matters. Australian defence officials then used the statement to reassure their US counterparts that there was nothing to worry about.39 The ignorance had come back full circle. Since then, the same patterns of CCP influence have once more surfaced in countries from the United Kingdomand Canada to El Salvador and the Czech Republic.40

In Chinagate, the Party had sought a quick and easy route to influencing

American politics. Key players from military intelligence carelessly

chipped in, presumably looking more to impress their leaders than achieve long-term results. They found eager participants in businessmen looking to raise their status in China and make a quick buck. Johnny Chung, the ‘hustler’, exposed China’s core mistake in an interview withthe Los Angeles Times. ‘The White House is like a subway: You have to put in coins to open the gates,’ he said.41

This reflected China’s misplaced emphasis on what’s known as the ‘P- factor’. In hisbook The China Fantasy, journalist James Mann explained how he learnt of the term. It was 1992, an election year. The incumbent President Bush Sr was on the verge of selling F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan. Throughout his presidential campaign, Bill Clinton criticised Bush’scloseness to China, accusing him of coddling dictators. Instead, Clinton pledged to make China’s continued access to favourable trade terms dependent on its human rights situation. Without an improvement in its treatment of religious groups, political dissidents and ethnic populations, Chinese trade would suffer. One analyst predicted a downward trend in the US–China relationship regardless of who controlled the White House.42 Reviewing these prospects, a Chinese diplomat complained to Mann, ‘What’s happened to the P-factor?’43

The P-factor was China’s discovery that ‘whenever it had difficulties

with the lower levels of the US government, it could rely on an American president or his highest aides to intervene with a decision in China’s favor’. The presidency will often ‘sweep aside the complexities’ (human rights, technology theft, unfair trade practices, political interference operations and so on) to settle on an outcome in line with their strategic priorities.44 When the strategic priority was to support China’s emergence as a responsibleworld player, to invest in its economic development, eventually watch it liberalise, and later to cooperate on counterterrorism and climate change, this consistently worked out in China’s favour.

MSS officer Gao Yichen acknowledged the power of this force in the

very opening of his paper, seeing the personal relationship between Chinese leader Jiang Zemin and Bill Clinton as ‘actively correcting’ the Clinton administration’s China policy and contributing to ‘rare upward momentum in recent years’. The P-factor was working its magic.45

Chinagate had reaffirmed the helpfulness of the presidency and the unwillingness of White House policymakers to digest evidence that challenged their strategy, but alsodrew Gao’s attention to serious

shortcomings in these influence operations. ‘We should see with clear eyes that voices unfriendly to China within the US Congress still continue,’ he warned, and had been undoing the ‘warm atmosphere’ achieved by President Jiang’s 1997 tour of America. Focusing on strong relations with the White House had been right, Gao believed, but the presidency was still contradicted by Congress on China. ‘Just as dialectical materialism tells us, seizing the core contradiction of a matter does not mean neglecting, and certainly not totally ignoring, the non-core contradiction,’ he wrote.46

The plan to influence the United States

The next time around, things had to be done differently. Gao advised, ‘We must recognisethat in strengthening work on US Congress we can’t hope to see results immediately. Rome wasn’t built in a day. We can’t fantasise about coming across a miracle one morning. Rather, we should sufficiently prepare ourselves for its long-term nature, difficulty and complexity.’47

Inside the MSS, the Chinagate catastrophe was driving home the need for a broader, more patient and more deliberate campaign. They had to do more than manipulate the presidency. China’s spies needed to shape and cultivate the entire DC Beltway foreign policy establishment. Plenty of scholars, bureaucrats and congresspeople were arguing for maintaining China’s access to trade privileges, glossing over human rights concerns andweakening America’s alliance with Taiwan, while arguing against any policy of competition with China. They just needed a push in the right direction.

At the same time, the Party’s influence operations needed to be better at dodging the attention of law enforcement and media. Gao pointed out the obvious: ‘American political and media circles getting worked up over the so-called “Chinese involvement in political donations” incident should give us many important revelations.’ In the future, ‘We must ensure that all activities are carried out within the allowed boundaries of the law, not leaving behind anything that can be used against us,’ he wrote. A remarkable statement for an intelligence officer to make, and a difficult one to believe.

Broad US laws prohibit some of the most basic tasks of foreign intelligence officers, although they are rarely used for prosecutions. In September 2018, an electrical engineer and army reservist was arrested in the United States. Ji Chaoqun’s charge: acting as anillegal agent of the

government of China.48 Apple iCloud files seized by the FBI allegedly show how he was recruited years prior by the Jiangsu State Security Department, one of the MSS’s provincialoutfits. While Ji’s case is ongoing, prosecutors haven’t accused him of theft or any attempt to gain classified information. Instead, criminal allegations focus on State Security directing Ji to purchase open-source background checks on US defence contractors.49 In other words, assigning even the most rudimentary of tasks to intelligence assets can place them on the wrong side of the law. And while Deng Xiaoping had ordered intelligence officers out of China’s embassies in 1985, DC’s importance made it an exception where some spies wereallowed to stay in place.50 The nature of their work meant they inevitably crossed criminal lines at some point.

Gao’s recommendation also contained a grain of truth, crucial to understanding why so many of the MSS’s influence operations have gone largely uninterrupted. The ministry’s greatest actions haven’t relied on clandestine activity, which can backfire dangerously. ‘If youlook at the way influence [operations] are run, it’s about working the relationship,’ one former intelligence official said. ‘There’s a lot less of formal payments.’ In other words, less of what might normally ping on counterintelligence radars as activity that needed to and could be stopped.51 The MSS even has a specific term, xin zhao bu xuan (literally ‘hearts shine without showing’), to refer to this kind of tacit recruitment, where people become de facto agentswithout their handlers ever forcing them to recognise this fact.52 Clandestinely gathered information including hacked databases, or analytical reports purchased from retired officials as ‘consulting services’, help steer and refine influence operations. Yet dozens of mainly legalchannels for building influence lay at the MSS’s disposal. The meat of these operations comes from the integration of overt and covert work so prized by China’s intelligence agencies. Covert proxies and co-optees such as prominent PRC academics or retired statesmen working with the MSS are key to their success. They might have benefited from espionage and fancytradecraft, but they didn’t depend on it.

Gao’s paper reflects this more sophisticated understanding of influence work, dancing along the boundaries of the law and drawing on China’s strengths as well as the best practices of other countries. In overly simplistic terms, influence operations could be described as seeking to cause a change in behaviours, beliefs or actions. But China’s activities oftenreaffirm,

expand and encourage views already held by sympathetic individuals. These efforts can take place through carefully curated trips to China, interactions with Chinese officials orrelationships with united front figures.

Having armed their targets with a greater confidence in their views about China, the Party then helps them gain influence within their political system. For politicians this can mean donations; research funding and privileged fieldwork opportunities for scholars; or business opportunities for entrepreneurs. Danish scholar Jonas Parello-Plesner wrote about howundercover officers of the Zhejiang State Security Department, an MSS branch known for its focus on Europe, attempted to recruit him through the career networking website LinkedInand then in person. Working with them would help avoid conflict between the United States and China, they promised, and ‘You could have access to any top Chinese official’.53 Yearsafter Parello-Plesner turned down the pitch, German authorities revealed that it had been just one node of an MSS campaign to reach out to over 10,000 targets through social media.54

The MSS’s ability to broker access to Party leaders and senior officials,

coveted by those foreign commentators who trade off even the briefest of meetings for credibility and consulting jobs, can be a particularly powerful tool. As China expert Peter Mattis observes, this is essentially what Katrina Leung did: work with the MSS to gain access to Party leaders and mediate the US intelligence community’s insights into elite politics.55Party leaders themselves are important actors in these operations by making their guests think the lies they’re being peddled are instead privileged insights into what the Party really thinks. Many, such as former president Hu Jintao and vice premier Liu He, China’s top trade negotiator with the US during the Trump years, have relationships with the MSS Social Investigation Bureau. Both were vice presidents of its CICEC front group. Another former CICEC member, Li Yuanchao, was touted as a progressive in the Party leadership. His promotion to vice presidency under Xi was misread by some observers as a signal of impending liberal reforms.56

Familiar with these tactics, Gao used his paper to highlight six

mechanisms for influencing Congress that would help China construct a ‘beneficialinternational environment’.57 Many are familiar or obvious, but this MSS document reveals new details about their scale and intent, and provides further proof of the role of Chinese intelligence agencies in these activities, paraphrased here:

1. Invite congresspeople to China, arranging for English-speaking and politicallyexperienced experts and scholars in international affairs to accompany them and ‘subtly influence’ them.

2. Expand engagement with congresspeople on the ground. While China already has diplomats tasked with engaging Congress, visiting delegations of scholars can be incredibly valuable for influencing congresspeople. ‘Reflecting the high status and prestige of scholars and experts in American society, we can send out delegations of well- known professors and scholars … specifically visiting America to engage with congresspeople.’ Scholars can seem ‘less official’, allowing them to build long-term relationships and ‘produce excellent results from their interactions with congresspeople’.

3. Lobby congresspeople through various channels such as reputable public relations firms, law firms, and organisations established by ‘patriotic overseas Chinese’ but funded and guided by the Chinese government. These entities, ‘in addition to directly lobbying Congress as our legally registered agents, can also provide us with internal information on Congress and provide advice on improving our congressional work’. The Chinese government should also set up a ‘Sino–US relations research centre’ that can focus on influencing the foreign policy community with congresspeople and their staffers as the focus. (Since 2005, the Chinese embassy has engaged one of DC’s leading lobbying firms, Squire Patton Boggs, paying it a US$55,000 monthly retainer in 2021.)58

4. Work on political and business elites and interest groups in congressional districts. Members of Congress ‘absolutely cannot do without the support of their district’s political and business elites’. According to Gao, these influence efforts can take the form of inviting local politicians to visit China, deepening business relationships with those areas to ‘advance work on members of Congress’, and establishing sister-city or sister-state relationships. ‘Those congresspeople who aren’t too friendly towardsChina should be a focus of these activities.’

5. ‘Borrow the strength of major American enterprises to carry out work on members ofCongress.’ The business sector’s aspirations for the

China market mean that ‘Without letting it be known, we can “use economics to advance politics”.’ Gao recommended deepening commercial ties to companies while also ‘prompting them to carry out work on congresspersons according to our plans’.

6. Finally, united front work on Chinese communities. ‘Even though Taiwanese authorities currently have greater control and influence over American Chinese communities than we … a gradual transformation is possible,’ and it will be possible for numerous Chinese communities to become ‘an important force we can draw on to carry out work on Congress’.

This influence campaign would rely on more than the MSS. The importance of overt and covert influence, not just clandestine operations, meant counterparts could be called into action. The full weight of China’s bureaucracy was being drawn into this fight. Gao believed influencing Congress required the active participation of China’s Ministry of ForeignAffairs, the Ministry of Commerce, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (now part of the United Front Work Department), the Propaganda Department and China’s National People’sCongress (as the US Congress’s counterpart). The Chinese government also needed to carry out extensive background research to understand Congress and its members. Over thefollowing years, the Chinese embassy’s congressional affairs team grew to become a highly effective and well-resourced section.59

Many of Gao’s recommendations are simple and predictable. They’re the kinds of things any major power would hope to carry out. Much of what he had in mind were mere extensions and elaborations of ongoing efforts to influence the United States, but China was starting from a low base. The Cultural Revolution was still recent history, Deng Xiaoping had only just passed away, and China still had a lot of time left to ‘hide its capabilities andbide its time’ – Deng’s strategic guidance to the Party.

It’s important to also recognise what Gao hinted at but left out: the covert side of China’s influence. His paper, buried though technically public, doesn’t mention the role of his own ministry. The visible slice of MSS networks in California up to the 2000s, of which Katrina Leung was only one node, shows how deeply united front work and covert MSS activitiesintertwine, to the point of being inextricable. In the years since, the CCP has well and trulysucceeded in displacing Taiwan’s presence in most

Chinese communities through united front work. The global Chinese- language media environment is dominated by Party-aligned outlets, driven again by united front work and the dominance of China’s WeChat social media app. With little to stop them until recently,MSS influence operations have ‘grown in scale and scope and sophistication over time’, said one former US intelligence officer who worked on China.60

Intelligence activity is the missing piece in our understanding of China’s rise. With the benefit of hindsight, the MSS’s systematic manipulation of the West’s understanding of China shows it was already preparing the ground for confrontation, years before the Party made undeniable its intention to challenge the United States and witness what General Secretary Xi Jinping predicts as the ‘eventual demise of capitalism and the ultimate victory of socialism’.61 At the time of the Clinton donations scandal, China had years to go before glimpsing its economic potential and finding confidence in aggressive displays of power under Xi Jinping. It needed to buy time so that it could challenge the rest of the world on its own terms, at its time of choosing. This was the MSS’s chance to shine and prove it hadoutgrown the public failures of its early years. Luckily, it had just the man for the job.

CHAPTER 6

PLAYING THE LONG GAME

LIN DI BECAME head of the MSS Social Investigation Bureau around the turn of the millennium. With Lin at the helm, the bureau’s experience with the outside world and elite networks saw it become the MSS’s ‘de-facto US operations bureau’, in the words of one former intelligence official.1 Through an array of front groups like CICEC, this bureau has been the hidden force behind many of the CCP’s most impressive operations in the United States. As we will see, it has excelled at influencing elites and manipulating key American interlocutors with China.

Lin represented the new breed, the first generation of officers to be raised and trained by the MSS itself. They were young, fluent in English, interested in America and dead loyal to the Party. Many, like Lin, came from ‘red’ families with long histories in the Party. One of Lin’s uncles was a senior Chinese diplomat, and another was a colonel in the military.2 His ancestor Lin Zexu became a national hero for his opposition to the opium trade in the mid-nineteenthcentury.

Most importantly, Lin was the son of a martyred spy. His father, best known by his alias Li Liang, worked for the Tianjin Public Security Bureau in the 1950s, where he was responsiblefor catching ‘imperialist’ spies.3 Li’s years of underground revolutionary work, fluency in English and experience working for Western news services propelled him into important

assignments.4 Despite his intellectual air and ‘high status in the old society’, Li’s former boss recalled him as humble, devoted to the Party and dedicated to work.5

The Tianjin bureau was mostly tasked with counterintelligence, but Li was chosen for two overseas missions. Only the most trusted and capable officers were given such tasks. At best, they risked exposure by foreign agencies; at worst, they might defect. Nothing is known about these missions, but other spies sent abroad by the same agencies handled double agents in the CIA and Taiwanese intelligence.6 Today’s Tianjin State Security Bureau focuses on Korea and Japan and is a proving ground for foreign intelligence officers, at least two ofwhom have gone on to become senior MSS leaders.7

Li’s second overseas assignment proved his last. The Cultural Revolution was in full swing by the time he returned to China in 1967.8 Even though his mission had been approved by the Ministry of Public Security’s headquarters, his overseas connections and bourgeois family background made him an ideal target for the Red Guards. The next year, he was locked up and accused of harbouring ‘secret ties to foreign countries’. Eleven months later he was dead,denounced as a ‘counterrevolutionary race traitor, western slave and foreign conspirator’.9Starvation was the most likely cause.10

Separated from his family, Lin Di spent the rest of the Cultural

Revolution toiling in labour communes where he was criticised and teased on account of hisfather. The family’s political troubles ruled out any chance of him entering university, at least while the Cultural Revolution was still underway, and Lin’s mother encouraged him to self-study. Coaching himself in English became a way to mourn his father. ‘The English booksleft behind by Dad became my inseparable friend,’ Lin recounted.11

Finally, in October 1977, the year after Mao’s death, the end of the Cultural Revolution and coup that ousted the Gang of Four meant ‘our dreams turned into reality’, Lin wrote. The Central Organisation Department, which oversaw rehabilitation of Cultural Revolution victims, and the Ministry of Public Security set up a team to investigate the case and recover Li’s ashes. He was quickly exonerated; the family’s appeals had been heard after ten painful years.12 Among the worshippers of Li’s legacy was Ling Yun, soon to become the first headof the MSS.13

Lin Di’s entry to the intelligence world probably predates the MSS’s 1983 founding. In1977, by then around twenty-three years old, he was

accepted into a teachers’ college.14 But by the end of that year, indications are that he wasworking in the Tianjin Public Security Bureau.15

By 1980, Lin was working undercover at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).16 The state-run institute advises Party leaders, collaborates with scholars around the world, hosts thousands of international visitors each year and also dispatches delegations overseas through its foreign affairs bureau where MSS officers like Lin worked.17 The academy’s close relationship with the MSS remains in place; many CASS scholars sit on the councils of intelligence front organisations. Its Institute of Taiwan Studies is the public face of the MSS’s Taiwan affairs bureau, staffed by the agency’s analysts.18

Lin’s undercover work meant putting his English skills to use, charming

foreign visitors and anyone he encountered overseas. If suitable, these individuals would also be targeted for recruitment, drawing on ideology, blackmail or venality. Such attempts haven’t always gone to plan. One Chinese delegation’s ‘interpreter’ was arrested by Russian authorities in 2010 after trying to purchase information on surface-to-air missile technologyfor the MSS.19 Good recruitment opportunities are rare and can be risky. Working in the open to shape foreigners’ perception of China, misleading them about the Party’s intentions and direction, building friendships with influential individuals or those who might rise intoprominence can be just as worthwhile as stealing missile technology. Why do you need missiles if you can convince your enemies to point their weapons elsewhere, or, even better,at your enemies?

Lin’s political reliability, demonstrated primarily through his family background, madehim one of the few MSS officers trusted to take frequent trips abroad and mingle closely with foreigners. By 1984, Lin had travelled to Australia as an interpreter to a CASS delegation.20He later entered the first class of master’s students at the Johns Hopkins University School ofAdvanced International Studies in Nanjing. The program put American and Chinese students side by side on a dedicated campus. American students would learn about China, and Chinese students about America by, for example, studying the autobiography of Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca. Both groups would study international relations, politics and history, preparing them to spearhead engagement between their two countries.21

Lin was one of many intelligence officers embedded in the unique program, preparingfor future operations against the United States.22 We

know this in part because the year after Lin graduated from the program, a PLA intelligenceofficer studying at the Hopkins–Nanjing Center fell in love with her American professor, who she’d been tasked to monitor, and eventually moved to the United States after the Tiananmen massacre to tell all in an autobiography.23 Again testifying to the unusual trust he had earned, Lin was allowed to lead a scholarly delegation to Japan just a month after the massacre.24 A few years later, he even managed what was then the largest-ever CASS delegation to Taipei.To the MSS, this would have been a journey into the heart of enemy territory.25 The next step would be operations in the United States.

Fellow travellers: The US–China Policy Foundation

Lin and his colleagues – the same network of Social Investigation Bureau officers that handled Katrina Leung – found their entrée to US politics in 1995. Lin now worked through CICEC, the Social Investigation Bureau’s leading front group, and began cultivating networks for influence operations.

While the FBI slept on evidence of Leung’s betrayal, Lin sealed a partnership with a group of American China experts. At that time, the US– China Policy Foundation (USCPF) had connections to the heart of US policymaking on China. When I visited the group in 2018, it had gerontified out of its former influence, occupying a cramped office in Washington, DC.Wang Chi, the group’s octogenarian president, seemed on the verge of being swallowed by his suit as he shared his thoughts on US–China relations and recalled his personal experience asan intermediary between the two powers. With National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s permission, he secretly travelled to China in 1972 to set up exchanges with libraries there.Later he served as China head at the Library of Congress, and a professor at GeorgetownUniversity.

Wang’s memoir details just about every interaction he’s had with Chinese leaders and senior cadres, including military intelligence officers like the future General Ji Shengde. Yet his dances with the MSS, which appeared time and time again in my research, were absent.

Back in 1995, Wang led the USCPF together with Chas Freeman, who had recently retired from the Pentagon as assistant secretary for international security affairs.26 Freeman accompanied President Nixon as the interpreter for his groundbreaking 1972 trip to China,the beginning of a

long career in diplomacy.27 Their foundation had a weekly TV program, held monthlyroundtables with China experts and government officials, and published a journal on China for policy wonks.

Leading China scholars and policymakers like David Lampton and Kenneth Lieberthal sat on the foundation’s board. Dianne Feinstein, Max Baucus (later ambassador to China under Obama) and Chuck Hagel (a future secretary of defence under Obama) – all influential senators who believed in closer relations with China – were honorary advisors.28 Feinstein, unaware until many years later that one of her staff had been recruited by the MSS, wrote that the USCPF could ‘play a key role in exposing U.S. policymakers to the people, perspectives and information necessary to make informed choices on important issues in U.S.-China relations’.29 Maurice Greenberg, then chief of the insurance company AIG, was the foundation’s honorary chairman.30 Greenberg was a leading donor to American foreign policy think tanks and once threatened to pull funding from the Heritage Foundation after one of its analysts wrote a paper calling for tougher policies on China.31

General Alexander Haig – a central figure in the opening of US–PRC relations, and secretary of state under President Reagan – was an honorary advisor to the US–China Policy Foundation. After leaving his government career behind, Haig turned to consulting for armsmanufacturers that wanted to expand their international clientele, carving out a niche with hisability to open doors in China. He also served as the advisor to a PRC guide on American business and industry produced by the MSS Social Investigation Bureau. One of Katrina Leung’s handlers’ names appears alongside his in the credits.32 ‘He doesn’t register as a foreign lobbyist, but he’s effectively a voice for a foreign government,’ a former Hill staffercomplained after watching Haig’s persistent efforts to shut down bills that were tough on China.33

A few months after the foundation’s inception in 1995, and before it had become a rallying point for advocates of softer policies towards China, Wang Chi flew to Beijing to meet with Party leaders. Lin Di and MSS Vice Minister Yu Fang, undercover as members of CICEC, were there to accompany him.34 The next year he returned again with Freeman and otherUSCPF board members, where they were welcomed by CICEC at the Great Hall of the People.35 Wang was later honoured as one of eight foreign advisors to CICEC, together with former Clinton White House official

Ernest J. Wilson III, Jillian Sackler of the Sackler pharmaceuticals family, a former Malaysian politician and others.36

CICEC was Wang’s gateway to China, and the US–China Policy Foundation was the MSS’s ticket to Washington, DC. While most of CICEC’s US interlocutors were sincere and interested in navigating the challenges of US–China relations, the MSS could only have viewed the relationship as a golden opportunity for influence operations. The twogroups quickly became important partners in what was thought to be a mutually beneficial arrangement.

The result looked very much like what Gao Yichen, who was promoted to MSS vice minister shortly after returning from DC, recommended in his paper on influencing the US Congress. CICEC worked with the US foundation to bring delegations of congressional staffers and other policymakers to Beijing for study tours. In return, the MSS sent its officersand assets to the United States to study the country, meet with agents, network with elitesand spread the Party’s influence.

MSS officers must have marvelled at the doors that opened to them, with no apparent resistance from American authorities. With the US–China Policy Foundation’s help, ViceMinister Yu Fang now returned to DC as an honoured guest at a National Press Club event, though still using his alias, Yu Enguang.37 Through his open role as a member of the NationalPeople’s Congress Foreign Affairs Committee, Yu became a staple in the opening ofparliamentary exchanges with the United States, taking part in the Chinese congress’s first delegation to America.38

Lin, presenting himself as the secretary-general of CICEC, was afforded significant privileges and access. At a National Press Club talk in 2001, the USCPF’s Chas Freeman introduced his friend to DC’s elite. ‘It is a great pleasure to welcome Mr Lin Di … who has been very helpful to the United States [China] Policy Foundation on numerous occasions when we have arranged educational travel for congressional staff and others to China … Ithink Mr Lin is actually known to many of you,’ Freeman said. Surely none of them realised they were looking straight at one of the most important officers in the MSS’s history, and a chief architect of its efforts to undermine and influence the United States.

After Freeman’s introduction, Lin expressed his gratitude towards those who’d helped him build bridges with America. ‘I am pleased to report to you that in recent years my organisation has worked with foreign

counterparts such as US–China Policy Foundation [and] accomplished many fruitful achievements in this regard,’ he said.39

Without a hint of irony in his voice, the undeclared intelligence officer advised his audience, ‘To conduct the effective dialogue, both sides should keep the dialogue channel open and try to build up mutual confidence through consultations on an equal footing … Each side should respect and trust the other side and the Cold War mentality should be completely abandoned.’ The kinds of ‘cultural exchanges’ carried out by CICEC, heproclaimed, were key. ‘To promote the development of China–US relations, China needs to know the US better and vice versa. What is the best angle to learn a foreign country? I think it is her culture.’

Lin was clearly playing to America’s ill-informed hopes about his country. ‘China,’ he proclaimed, ‘is deepening her reform to build a more open, prosperous, democratic and modernised nation.’ These were no off- the-cuff comments by a pro-democracy rebel within the Party. Lin was nervously reading from a script that must have passed through severallayers of bureaucracy in China. It was a script for influence operations that the MSS would deepen and elaborate on to tremendous effect over the following years.

The event was a succinct demonstration of the core narrative CCP influence operations try to promote to this day, as well as the stark imbalances that too often come to define engagement with China. On the one hand was a civil society group that wanted to better understand China, on the other was an intelligence front run by experts in influence operations and agent handling. Rather than educating US policymakers and scholars on the Party’s true intentions, Lin and many other MSS officers acted like mirrors reflecting the West’s misplaced confidence that China would democratise, liberalise and become a‘responsible stakeholder’ on the world stage.

Implicitly, Lin was also dissuading his audience from waking up to those lies. The flipside of Lin’s advocacy of lofty causes like world peace, friendship, culture and cooperation was his admonishment of those who might impede the Party’s progress. While internally the Party leadership, and the MSS especially, views the United States as its greatest threat, Linwarned that ‘the Cold War mentality of demonising the other side as a threatening enemy could easily incite suspicions, panic, resentment, hostility and, finally, confrontation’.Questioning PRC sovereignty over

Taiwan, a country with a separate history, culture and identity to CCP- controlled China, wasanother line that Lin said should never be crossed.40

In particular, Lin attacked the belief in facts that the Party itself has begun to prove through its aggression, rampant interference efforts, disturbing human rights abuses and violation of international agreements. ‘Now in the US there is a kind of opinion that is shared by some senior government officials and social celebrities. That is China cannot be a partner of the US. China will be competing with the US on the international stage. Some people even go further to identify China as a potential enemy and a threat to the security of the United States and the world. I’m afraid that we cannot agree with this at all.’41

Through years of engagement with the United States, Lin built up an

unrivalled list of contacts and acquaintances as he climbed the hierarchy of the MSS, becoming the Social Investigation Bureau’s chief around the time of his National Press Club talk.42 Accompanying renowned Chinese economist Fan Gang (a member of several MSS front groups), Lin spoke at a 1997 Harvard University conference alongside Jeffrey Sachs, the eminent American economist and UN advisor whose growing support for the Chinese government has recently pushed him towards denying the existence of genocide in Xinjiang and into an advisory role at a Chinese military intelligence–linked think tank accused of bribery at the UN.43 Under Lin, CICEC worked with the Sackler pharmaceuticals family’s foundation to hold calligraphy competitions around the world.44

Congress and local governments were top priorities for Lin and his bureau. The US–China Policy Foundation placed at least three delegations of congressional staffers in CICEC’shands for tours of China, with approval from the US State Department.45 CICEC’s cultural exchanges with the state of Kentucky led to its powerless figureheads, Peng Chong and Cheng Siyuan, being honoured as Kentucky Colonels, joining the ranks of estimable ambassadors ofthe Kentucky Commonwealth alongside Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Sanders.46

Donning an array of masks, Lin and his MSS colleagues also embedded their intelligencework into the Party’s united front courtship of sympathetic diaspora leaders. In 2001, Lin appeared at the annual meeting of the Committee of 100, a highly influential Chinese community body of which Wang Chi remains a member.47 Through another front group called the Chinese Association for the Promotion of Cultural Exchange and

Cooperation, Lin held annual welcoming parties for the most faithful united front members from around the world: those handpicked as delegates to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. The group’s Chinese- language name hints at its role as a counterpart to CICEC more focused on Taiwanese and Chinese diaspora targets.48 Unlike CICEC, its mission is not ‘international’ exchange. Its China is not that of Zhongguo – the common name for the People’s Republic of China that means literally ‘Middle Kingdom’ – but Zhonghua, an ambiguous and expansive concept encompassing Chinese culture, heritage and ethnicity. Officially, the group reports to China’s National Radio and Television Administration, but its addresses over the years lead first to the offices of an official MSSmagazine at number 21 in central Beijing’s Daxing Hutong, and then to CICEC’s building inthe city’s east.49

The Chinese Association for the Promotion of Cultural Exchange and

Cooperation continues to plug itself into united front networks, and for reasons unknown it has gained a focus on Central and Eastern Europe. The association’s current president is Huang Ping, head of the Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau Research Center at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.50 Until recently, Huang headed CASS’s European StudiesInstitute and ran a think tank network under the banner of Beijing’s ‘17+1 Initiative’, a push to deepen China’s influence in Central and Eastern Europe, which worked with the MSS to host and engage with European scholars.51 Huang’s successor as head of the think tank network is also affiliated with the MSS, having recently served as deputy head of the MSSbureau known as the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations.52 The think tank network, proposed by Premier Li Keqiang, includes Hungarian, Polish, Hungarian, Serbian, Czech, Slovenian and Romanian scholars on its academic committee.53 In 2021 the MSS group began exploring deeper cooperation with Huaqiao University, a leading Chineseuniversity administered by the United Front Work Department that specialises in educatingand researching Chinese diaspora communities.54

Friends in high places

The MSS plays a long game of cultivating relationships with China-friendly voices in order to understand and influence politics, and perhaps one day see its contacts rise into the upper echelons of government, academia and

business. The fact that many of these targets may not have realised their Chinese friendslike Lin Di were intelligence officers has hardly lessened the effectiveness of these operations.

This game nearly paid off when the US–China Policy Foundation’s Chas Freeman was picked as the chair of Obama’s National Intelligence Council. Dennis Blair, head of the US intelligence community and a former member of the US–China Policy Foundation’s board, handpicked Freeman for the ultra-sensitive role in 2009.55 Freeman, in China when news first broke of the decision, quickly severed his various board roles and affiliations.56 ‘I understood [Blair] was “asking me to give up my freedom of speech, my leisure, the greater part of my income, subject myself to the mental colonoscopy of a polygraph, and resume a daily commute to a job with long working hours and a daily ration of political abuse,”’ Freeman wrote, nonetheless eager to take up a job that would have been the pinnacle of his long career.57 As chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Freeman would have served as the bridge between intelligence and policy, preparing top-level analysis of the most important security issues facing America and occasionally joining Blair on trips to the White House to deliver the president’s daily intelligence briefing.58

News of Freeman’s imminent appointment sparked an explosion in the media. Freeman’s numerous interactions with undeclared Chinese intelligence officers like Lin Di, which extended to unknowingly helping them build networks in America’s capital, didn’t surface in the ensuing vivisection of the retired diplomat’s beliefs and allegiances. Neither did the‘contrarian’ realism of national interest of values that may have eased Freeman’s entry into the MSS’s orbit and provided the basis for Nixon’s Sino-American rapprochement escape scrutiny. Freeman’s thoughts on the Tiananmen massacre, shared to a private email group, were leaked to the press within days. In Freeman’s view, which he points out is shared bymany in China, ‘the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than … to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquility to Beijing’.59Freeman’s jarring realism is as strong as ever: in a 2020 interview he took a similar positionon China’s crackdowns in Hong Kong, and argued the United States should avoid conflictwith China by winding down its military support for Taiwan, which he called a ‘rump statecreated by the Chinese Civil War’. Freeman

studied in Taiwan in the 1970s and appreciates it as ‘the most admirable society that has ever existed on Chinese soil’. But the bottom line is that ‘it is on Chinese soil’.60 Never mind the views of those who inhabit it, over two-thirds of whom identify exclusively as Taiwanese.61

Dozens of commentators weighed in, many attacking Freeman’s closeness to Saudi Arabia, where he’d served as ambassador, and critical take on America’s relationship with Israel.62 Many others stood up for Freeman – for his intelligence, experience and freethinking attitude most of all. ‘You can’t cow him and you can’t find someone with a morerelentlessly questioning worldview,’ one said.63 In the end, Freeman withdrew from his stillborn nomination, finding the Israel lobby responsible. ‘I have never sought to be paid or accepted payment from any foreign government, including Saudi Arabia or China,’ Freeman wrote in his withdrawal statement. ‘I am my own man, no one else’s.’64

Officers like Lin Di, with their extensive connections within and without China, air of inside knowledge and cover as promoters of cultural diplomacy, were well equipped to shape the opinions of those they met. But the big whales like Chas Freeman – members of Congress, retired ambassadors, business leaders and so on – are generally deeply loyal to the United States and often have a strong sense of independence. The MSS would be foolish to try a recruitment pitch on them, promising, for example, cash payments in exchange for information. In the high-stakes game of elite influence operations, a light touch is often the best approach. But that doesn’t mean deals can’t be sounded out.

CHAPTER 7

ZHENG BIJIAN AND CHINAREFORM FORUM

FAR FROM THE smog and concrete of Beijing, Hainan’s Bo’ao Forum for Asia is the Party’s platform of choice to present itself to foreign notables in painstakingly airbrushedtechnicolour. Each year, hundreds of world leaders gather at the beachside venue to talk foreign policy. They’re surrounded by marble and red carpets, immaculately groomed topiaries and pedantically drilled staff, and probably a few thousand bugs and hidden cameras.

Outside, palm trees sway in the Pacific breeze, and beyond them stretch the island’s famous sand beaches.

In November 2003, Zheng Bijian stepped up to the podium at Bo’ao to deliver a speech that could not have been a greater triumph. His articulation of the idea that China can peacefully become a great power sparked excited discussion among China watchers and international relations scholars around the world. It quickly caught on as his ‘theory of China’s peaceful rise’, which is explored more in the next chapter. Zheng argued that China’sgrowth towards superpower status, feared by some, would in fact ‘safeguard world peace’ and ‘boldly draw on the fruits of all human civilization’.1

Yet of all the false hopes China’s spies covertly peddled, none landed

quite like ‘peaceful rise’. For all of Bo’ao’s breeziness and pats on the back, the ‘peaceful rise’ slogan was a cynically crafted riposte against growing apprehension towards China’smounting power. The theory and its untold

origin story lay bare how the Chinese Communist Party fooled the world about its ambitions.

The rise of Zheng Bijian

For decades, the Party theoretician had deftly navigated the vagaries of internal politics. Yet despite all Zheng’s achievements and experience, and perhaps because of his years workingwith purged leader Hu Yaobang, he’d never actually been the top leader of a central agency. The Party’s leaders shuffled him between important roles, but always as second in command.

Likewise, he’d long been interested in international affairs but had never been at the heart of foreign policy. It must have been frustrating. He still had his old connections and now had help from China Reform Forum, the think tank he chaired, but his wits were doing the heavy lifting.

The story of Zheng’s adventures goes back to the county of Fushun, a region of China’s southwestern Sichuan province where he was born in 1932. Not long after the communistvictory of 1949, Zheng found himself in Beijing, joining the Party as a student in Beijing Renmin University’s Marxism–Leninism program, entering the Party’s PropagandaDepartment a few years later.

In the ideologically charged aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, Party leaders manoeuvred to interpret Mao’s legacy and, in turn, their place in China’s future. Zheng’s skill in rhetoric and apparently passable track record during the Cultural Revolution, when he spent time in a rural work commune, landed him a senior role in the Central Committee office editing Mao’s collected works, which functioned as a sort of speechwriting andadvisory body to the leadership. Perhaps as much by chance as cunning, he soon foundhimself on the winning side of Deng Xiaoping’s quest to control the Party.

In 1980 he was handpicked to help compose the ‘Resolution on certain questions in the history of our Party since the founding of the People’s Republic of China’, an attempt tosynthesise Mao’s disastrous mistakes with the reality that his legacy and reputation were wedded to that of the Party.2 Damning criticism of Mao would undermine the Party’slegitimacy, and any unorthodox re-examination of the past (known as ‘historical nihilism’ intoday’s Party-speak) could spark turmoil.

The text’s uninspired title hides how the lengthy drafting process of nearly two yearsbecame a mechanism for rationalising the defenestration

of Chairman Hua Guofeng, who had seized power after Mao’s death. The whole affair wasclosely controlled by Deng Xiaoping, whose strawman of Hua remains the conventionalappraisal of him to this day.3

By the time the Party’s Central Committee approved the ‘Historical resolution’ in June 1981, Hua had been removed from positions of power, his faction already disintegrated. Deng replaced him with Hu Yaobang, an old comrade-in-arms who had followed Deng for much of his career.4 The ‘Historical resolution’ served to legitimise the takeover – to outdate Hua’s leadership. Who better to serve as Hu’s secretary and aide than Zheng Bijian, whose diligence through the drafting process proved his willingness to serve the cynical machinations of elite infighting and helped land Hu in the leadership?

Thus, Zheng was elevated from ideological hitman to a Party leader’s

aide. He was good at it. One Party journalist was stunned by Zheng’s familiarity with classic Marxist–Leninist literature. Once General Secretary Hu struggled to recall a Marx quote relevant to the topic at hand while delivering a speech to a gathering of Party officials. Zheng immediately scribbled down the line and passed it over to him.5

Zheng faced the most precarious moment of his career after Deng Xiaoping decisively toppled Hu Yaobang in 1987, wary of Hu’s growing insistence on genuine reformist policies. Zheng’s colleagues and associates were being purged left right and centre. Those whosecontroversial opinions were tolerated under Hu now faced a reckoning. Zheng had to sell himself to the conservatives: he must have convinced Party leaders that his loyalty to the Party trumped all else, and that his usefulness as a ‘hired pen’ was still relevant.

In 1988 he was appointed director of the CASS Institute of Marxism– Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought, and in 1992 became the senior deputy director of the Central PropagandaDepartment and a member of the Party’s Central Committee. Five years later, the Central Committee appointed him senior vice president of its Central Party School, the peak training academy for China’s political elite.

By 2003, Zheng was officially retired and out of the Party bureaucracy, and his place in the new era of Chinese politics and foreign policy was by no means certain. His long-time superior at the Central Party School, Hu Jintao, was now the Party’s leader – on paper. Even Hu’s status was in dispute: his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, maintained immenseinfluence and

personally held onto the reins of the Chinese military for two more years. Yet, if Zheng were looking for a legacy, his ‘peaceful rise’ speech at the Bo’ao Forum that November could not have been a greater triumph.

Here was a Party insider with the ear of the nation’s leaders proposing an experiment at aglobal scale that seemed to contradict the logic of history. It was tantamount to refuting a physical law. Was this the spirit of Hu Yaobang and the Party’s undercurrent of liberalism andreform speaking?

As Zheng argued in an earlier speech at Washington, DC’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, China would not be like Germany in World War One or Japan in World War Two, which he thought were mistaken for attempting ‘to overhaul the world political landscape by way of aggressive wars’.6 Nor would China be like the Soviet Union,competing against the United States in an arms race and through its global sphere ofinfluence. According to Zheng, ‘China will have a totally different path of development from the path of rise of all major powers in the world since modern history.’

It could not be like them. ‘China’s only choice is to strive to rise and,

more importantly, to strive for a peaceful rise,’ Zheng said. The alternative path – that of confrontation and conflict with the United States – was ‘doomed to failure’.7 It sounded like the best of all possible worlds and a commitment to end great power competition.

China watchers, policymakers and intelligence analysts took note, some with scepticism, but many with optimism and hopefulness, describing Zheng’s idea in adulatory tones.8 Zheng was connected to chiefs of the Party; he had developed a reputation as a ‘confidant’ or trusted advisor to China’s leadership. His height, tone and experience make him a strikinglystatesmanlike figure. Though much taller than the average Chinese man, he has an uncanny resemblance to Yoda. One person who met him was impressed by his ‘gentleness’ andprofessionalism.9 Another noted his deep intellect and theoretical interests.10 Henry Kissinger praised Zheng and called his peaceful rise narrative a ‘quasi-official policy statement’.11 Herewas a roadmap to a peaceful and stable twenty-first century.

But the concept of peaceful rise was always a hollow one. The very

vehicle Zheng hung his hat on and which enabled his promotion of the narrative, China Reform Forum, was simply an MSS-controlled front group that had selected him as its latest figurehead. He was not in control.

Outwardly, Zheng is closest to the Party’s propaganda system, the

ideological apparatus that dictates history and seeks to frame the present and future, but it is to the MSS that he owes his international fame.

For his part, Su Shaozhi – an academic purged in 1987 who knew Zheng

– thought of him as a modern-day Feng Dao, a medieval politician commonly regarded as ‘anextreme case of a treacherous minister’ for having served five different regimes.12 Similarly, China journalist Jonathan Mirsky wrote after attending a speech by Zheng, ‘If Zheng Bijian is the face of reformist “liberalism,” I tremble for China.’13 These warnings went unheeded in every way that mattered.

The operation of the decade: The MSS and China Reform Forum

China Reform Forum – to many scholars and policymakers the think tank

brings to mind dreams of change and liberalism in China. To the handful of Western intelligence officers who were aware of its true nature, the name draws a mixture ofadmiration and frustration. Chinagate (see chapter 5) and other early MSS entanglements in the politics of Washington, DC were the full dress rehearsal for this global operation. Led by Zheng Bijian, the think tank touted unmatched access to China’s leadership, superior pedigreethrough its affiliation with the Party’s highest training academy, and a track record of policy influence. Its Beijing office was decorated with photos of visits by retired Americanpolicymakers and politicians – president George

H. W. Bush, national security advisors Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, Bill Clinton’ssecretary of defence William J. Perry and so on.14 It was cocaine for China watchers from Washington to Tokyo and Paris, manufactured in Beijing by the MSS.

Most of MSS’s influence operations are difficult to track. Their secrecy and sheer volume create formidable barriers to working out what’s really going on. A suspected MSS SocialInvestigation Bureau officer appears in Hong Kong, using it as a base to cultivate connections in the islands of Mauritius and Macau. His name might pop up in the Panama Papers, chained to a company with no public presence. The many aliases he undoubtedly uses are unknown. From there the scent dies out. One is left with pieces of a web, the sense of a network but not its mechanisms, its aims and its consequences. It’s the kind of frustrating experience one has time and time again while digging into the MSS.

China Reform Forum is the exception to that rule for the same reason it’s been stunningly successful. Its achievements haven’t relied on spies operating in the shadows, high-tech gadgetry or daring thefts of classified documents. The brilliance of this scheme is its recognition that an open influence operation is sometimes the best influence operation. Despite the operation’s breadth, few in the US intelligence community were familiar with it, and some of those who were simply viewed it as an MSS-connected think tank but not a major cause for concern.15

Somewhere in its Beijing headquarters, the MSS must have recognised how only some of its spies were running into law enforcement blockades. Counterintelligence agencies like the FBI have traditionally busied themselves with protecting state secrets, protected technology and government employees. They worry much less about think tanks andforeign policy conferences. Even though it took many years for the MSS’s understanding of foreign political systems to mature, it quickly recognised the importance of theseorganisations on the verge of officialdom.

At the time, countering influence operations wasn’t a focus for the FBI, and few understood just how much emphasis the CCP placed on such activities.16 US prosecutions of Chinese espionage have been overwhelmingly focused on economic espionage, yet it is only one of many areas in which the MSS is active. Few other countries have ever taken China’s spies to court. The more court cases and public exposures of China’s economic espionage operations, the more it makes people think these often clumsy plots really do represent thebulk of MSS activity.

Cautiously orchestrated operations that span several years are intrinsically much harder to bring to light.

It’s simply more exciting and fruitful to track a foreign intelligence officer who’s usingskilled tradecraft and breaking well-tested laws than one who chats to foreign policy scholars without obviously recruiting any of them. A career-minded counterspy would have to be stupid to dedicate their efforts to chasing influence operations that almost never lead toprosecutions. When an engineer working for the Chinese government steals the results of aUS defence contractor’s jet engine research program, the cost can often be literally accounted for in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The effect of a long-term influence operation is only obvious once it’s already too late. Frustrated Western intelligence officers who wanted topush back against China’s influence operations gained little buy-in from

their leadership, especially because their criminal aspects were harder to point to.17

There are other reasons to pay no mind to elite influence operations. By targeting and manipulating prominent political figures, the MSS forces uncomfortable political choices upon spy catchers who’d rather stay out of the media and parliamentary inquiries. According to one former US intelligence officer, executives in intelligence agencies ‘hate dealing withpolitical cases’ because of the sensitivities they involve, and a fear of upsetting political parties.18 The kinds of people targeted by the MSS usually don’t react well to anyone telling them they’ve allowed themselves to be manipulated by a foreign power. And when these operations move with ease from country to country, within and beyond China’s borders, theyalso exploit the unclear and contested bureaucratic lines between a country’scounterintelligence and foreign intelligence agencies, which often aren’t in perfect sync.

Humble beginnings

Quietly founded on 1 March 1994, China Reform Forum initially focused on exchanging ideas with international experts on economic policy.19 It was affiliated with the China Economic System Reform Society, a group of economists and policymakers navigating the balance between capitalism and socialism with Chinese characteristics.20 Wang Guiwu, a retired government economist, was selected as China Reform Forum’s first chairman. Wang could tout his connection to China’s premier and chief economic policymaker Zhu Rongji, an old classmate of his, but he had little international name recognition and hadn’t been particularly senior in his government career.21

Those behind the scenes of China Reform Forum are much more interesting. The first time the group appeared in national newspapers, in a January 1996 article about a Spring Festival celebration it held for international economists, ‘Lin Rong’ was described as its secretary- general.22 About a decade later, he reappeared as deputy secretary-general of the MSS’s CICEC front group.23 According to a profile of him from a 2001 conference inBangalore held by New York’s Asia Society, ‘Professor Lin’ was a graduate of Beijing’sRenmin University and France’s National

School of Administration, but there’s almost no other information available about him.24

The address China Reform Forum uses in government registration records also provides another MSS link: 35 Baofang Hutong in Beijing’s inner east (now numbered 69) is the same location once used by two magazines and two front groups controlled by the MSS Social Investigation Bureau.25 Lin Di, the MSS Social Investigation Bureau chief who had cultivated DC elites through the agency’s CICEC front group, was a vice president of China Reform Forum.26

From the beginning, this think tank was a staging ground for influence operations.

In China Reform Forum, the MSS was drawing on what by now had become one of its traditions going back to at least the ‘Soros incident’ of the 1980s. It wisely recognised that foreigners who invested in China’s project of reform and opening, both in principle and with their wallets, would become China’s greatest advocates. Their good intentions could betaken advantage of to manipulate foreign politics and perceptions of China.

To this end, a cohort of internationally recognised Chinese intellectuals and economists, including Fan Gang, Justin Yifu Lin and Hu Angang, joined the forum in its early days. Another member was Ding Xueliang, a scholar at the Australian National University who had been sponsored by the MSS-infiltrated Soros China Fund in the 1980s. Peng Puzhang, a Japan- based businessman who once worked alongside MSS officers in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Foreign Affairs Bureau, was also listed as a member.27 Their presence would ensure foreign policymakers, investment bankers, economists and scholars could be drawn to this front.

Their names undoubtedly helped the MSS build partnerships in Japan and

attract guests from Europe, Australia, Singapore, Canada and the United Kingdom to its economic conferences.28

Despite its modest beginnings, the seeds of future growth were there. Economic reform proved a wise theme for the operation. American and European think tanks, like the influential RAND Corporation and the French Institute of International Relations, soon began holding regular conferences and exchanges with China Reform Forum. Within China, the forum’s members may have benefited from the political shield MSS contacts offered them as they explored their respective fields and policy ideas. Any of their articles or ideasthat proved politically fraught in China

could perhaps be excused as attempts to influence foreign audiences in coordination with the MSS.

An expanded mission: Political influence operations

A few years after China Reform Forum’s birth, something changed. The Party’s leaders might have grown more demanding of the ministry, which was being outshone by its counterparts in military intelligence.29 At the same time, Party leaders Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji were attempting to tackle the fabulous levels of corruption in the People’s Liberation Army, and the MSS may have sensed an opportunity to show what it was capable of. Regardless of the true cause, the MSS stepped up its political influence game at the turn ofthe century, selecting China Reform Forum from among its fleet of fronts.

The MSS’s mission for the forum had evolved and grown. Wang Guiwu

and other boffins of his Economic System Reform Society were no longer suited to the task. China Reform Forum would continue leveraging hopes for reform and opening to observersof the Chinese economy, but this was now a secondary mission.

Its newfound value was in advanced political influence operations targeting the thinkers and institutions that shape foreign policy around the world. Better suited to this objective, the Central Party School became the group’s new benefactor. Central Party School executive vice president Zheng Bijian was chosen as China Reform Forum’s new chairman in February 2000.30 As the top academy for senior cadres, the school both indoctrinates and acts as abrains trust for the Party, with extensive ties to its leaders.31 A stark upgrade from China Reform Forum’s previous affiliation, the Central Party School partnership may have reflected the Party leadership’s growing trust and confidence in the MSS.

It was no big deal if some association for economists was exposed as working with the MSS, but the Central Party School is a far more sensitive matter. A senior Politburo member or leader-in-waiting is usually selected as the institution’s figurehead while deputies actually run the school. Hu Jintao, two years out from becoming Party leader and China’s president,was chancellor of the school when it became China Reform Forum’s patron. In 2007, none other than Xi Jinping was placed in charge of it as he was being positioned to lead China. Now that Xi Jinping has risen to general secretary, his close friend Chen Xi heads the CentralParty School.

China Reform Forum’s connection to the Central Party School makes it a child of the Party’s nerve centre. Most other Chinese think tanks are controlled by lesser agencies, like the China Institute for International Studies, which reports to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.In contrast, ‘China Reform Forum was always a kind of oddity’, one American China scholarwho was familiar with the group told me.32 It had none of the age or established reputation of other official think tanks, but its star shone brightly. In large part it owed this to the Central Party School, which reaches across the upper ranks of the Party, training officials from allagencies, and was unique in having the general secretary-in-waiting as its chancellor. Most of all, Zheng’s presence was magnetic. When China Reform Forum set up its website a month after Zheng became chair, the network server was so overloaded with visitors that it had to be rebuilt with greater capacity.33

To many observers, China Reform Forum offered the chance to foretell

China’s future and tap into the thoughts of its leaders. It was a crystal ball into the closed hallways of the Zhongnanhai leadership compound. It might even be used to influence China’s direction and encourage reformist forces within the Party.

China Reform Forum broke the mould of stodgy Party bureaucrats in Mao suits who seized any opportunity to lecture their guests on the West’s problems (although its staff sometimes did that). Its researchers didn’t always follow the Party line. They could seem urbane, liberal and willing to share what they’d heard from the Party’s inner sanctum. One of them evenvoiced support for ‘inevitable’ democratic reform in China and expressed sympathy for Zhao Ziyang, the Party’s reformist general secretary who was dismissed and placed under house arrest after the Tiananmen massacre.34

Waves of foreign officials and scholars conversed with the group throughout the 2000s. Embassies turned to it for insight that would help them write classified cables and inform policymakers back home about China’s direction. Foreign think tanks and academics leapt atthe chance to engage and partner with this wormhole to Zhongnanhai. Some saw it as achance to influence the Party and urge it towards democracy and reform.

Few stopped to wonder why so many of the think tank’s staff were ghosts with little verifiable past to speak of. Those that did have a public history often came from public-facing parts of the MSS – its China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) think tank or other front

groups run by the Social Investigation Bureau. Even experienced intelligence officialsseemed oblivious at first to the ambition of China’s influence operations. Unwittingly yetrecklessly, China Reform Forum’s foreign interlocutors helped propagate MSS lies into capitals the world over.

Spymasters

The arrival in 1998 of a new chief of the MSS, Xu Yongyue, came just in time for him to help orchestrate China Reform Forum’s success. Zheng’s acquaintance with Xu proved to be one of the most consequential relationships he formed as a political secretary. Through the 1980s, Xu worked on the opposite peak of Chinese politics to Zheng, as secretary toconservative Party elder Chen Yun.35 In China Reform Forum, they came together.

Xu surprised observers with his promotion to lead the MSS, an agency he’d never workedin. His appearance and manner certainly lent itself to this reading of him as an unassuming ‘dark horse’ candidate. China analysts in Taiwan’s counterintelligence agency described the prevailing view at the time, writing that ‘Xu Yongyue with his flat-top haircut looks just like acountry bumpkin’. But their information indicated that ‘in reality, he is a highly talented writer, smart and meticulous in his work’.36

Chen Yun, the old spymaster, drilled Marxist philosophy into Xu and probably imparted a deep appreciation of Party history and intelligence work upon him. But the reality of managing an agency of covert and clandestine operations was daunting. For five years before entering the MSS, Xu had been a Party leader in Hebei province where he oversaw the local security and law enforcement system. It was some experience, but not enough to know the ins and outs of a world that prides itself on secrecy and conspiracy.

What he lacked in experience, Xu made up for by being whip smart.

Shortly before moving into the MSS, he gave an ‘electrifying’ speech on using sophisticated governance mechanisms to improve social order and reduce crime that was circulated nationally through the People’s Daily.37 Under his leadership, the MSS underwent organisational reforms and attempted to audit and divest its business fronts as they exploded in number and corruption.38 Xu’s fifteen years as Chen Yun’s secretary also gave him broad connections among elites that few would have been able to compete

with. These would have proven valuable for his own security but also for state security.

China’s spies take social status and connections seriously when recruiting domestic informants and agents. Of course, coercion could be used instead, but a willing agent is usually far more useful and reliable. The higher the status of the recruiter, the greater the chance the asset would continue to cooperate. For the MSS to have recruited Zheng Bijian, a ministerial official, as the willing face of its most ambitious influence operations, XuYongyue must have been intimately involved in calling on his old colleague.

Even as intelligence officers now surrounded him, whatever Zheng Bijian knew of theiractivities was strictly on a need-to-know basis. The MSS often picks retired officials withinternational repute to head its front groups. They’re trusted but never enough to really run the organisations or the operations that exploit their reputation. Yet the MSS found in Zheng an unusually deep and effective partnership.

Imbued with rhetorical talent, Zheng was undoubtedly one of the best picks China could have made if it wanted to manipulate foreigners. He was certainly better suited to the job than his predecessor at China Reform Forum and had already begun playing a larger role in the group before his appointment.39 The flexible character to which he owed his career alsomade him perfect for dancing between the Party line and the West’s dreams and expectations of China, finding convenient but misleading ways to reconcile the two. His cynical familiarity with the Party, its ideology and factions subtly yet always in flux, at times erupting into purges, had prepared him well for this.

One experienced former intelligence officer who met Zheng quipped that the secret to hislong career in Beijing’s centre of power lay in his alignment with the ‘wind faction’.40 It’s impossible to pin him down as a member of any particular faction in the Party. Rather, he goes where the winds of power blow, landing him important roles under six Party leaders inthree decades. For someone with his close ties to the purged Hu Yaobang, there was surely no other way to survive. Far from merely clinging on for life in the Party system, he thrived amid a succession of power struggles.

CHAPTER 8

THE CONCOCTION OF CHINA’SPEACEFUL RISE

ZHENG BIJIAN’S ARTICULATION of the ‘peaceful rise’ concept marked the beginning of a phenomenally successful influence operation orchestrated by the MSS through China Reform Forum. The United States’ dogmatic confidence in China’s political liberalisation, coupled with the MSS’s influence peddling, doomed Washington to failure in recognising and reactingto China’s political course. Yet this stunning success emerged from a particularly tumultuous period of US–China relations around the turn of the century.

A major diplomatic incident took place a few months after George W. Bush’s inauguration. On 1 April 2001, Lieutenant Commander Wang Wei took off from his base inHainan to patrol the South China Sea. Piloting his streamlined Soviet jet, Wang soon intercepted an American EP-3 surveillance plane, an awkward porpoise of an aircraft covered in appendages to pick up electronic signals.

The Chinese airman had a taste for risk and presumably an unhealthy affinity with Top Gun. In previous encounters he had veered within three metres of US aircraft. He’d salute the American crew members, flip the bird at them and even hold up a sheet of paper with his email address on it in case they ever wanted to contact him.1

This time, Wang played it a little too close. He misjudged his momentum and slammed into one of the EP-3’s propellers. The foolish manoeuvre sliced his plane in two. He was forced to parachute out, plummeting

towards the ocean never to be seen again as the EP-3’s crew of twenty-four were tossed around inside their fuselage.

The US pilot managed to regain control of his damaged craft and an emergency landing in the sea seemed like the simplest option, but it was risky and the plane was dangerously overweight. They flew instead towards the closest strip of land – Chinese territory. Crew members frantically tried to destroy the literal piles of sensitive equipment and classified information surrounding them – laptops, papers, cassette tapes, and specialised keys forsending and receiving encrypted information. Yet they were untrained for the task, making their emergency landing in Hainan still bearing reams of secrets for Chinese intelligence analysts to dissect.2

The American crew were greeted by unsmiling Chinese soldiers who had

more of an air of prison wardens than rescuers. As they arrived, the PLA sent out hundreds of search-and-rescue missions but failed to uncover Wang’s remains. The pilot was promptlymythologised by Party authorities, while the twenty-four Americans were eventually released after days of interrogation.

It was an unsightly collision between the two countries mere months into Bush’s first term as president. It was also the new administration’s first major foreign policy crisis. The relationship, still unformed, was on the line, and both sides acted tough. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered an end to all military contacts with China, and it would take years for the US’s relationship with the PLA to again approach normality.3

Beijing’s foreign policy and security officials must have felt nostalgic for the Clinton White House of the decade before. There had been deep tension over human rights, but the previous administration showed itself willing to make compromises in the name of strengthening other aspects of engagement with China. It dutifully mediated Congress’s desire to contain and punish the Party for its suppression of political and religious freedom. What China called the ‘little Bush’ administration initially made a point of being tough on China and criticisingClinton for not being that. Ahead of the 2000 presidential election, Bush cast China as a‘strategic competitor’, as opposed to Clinton’s conception of China as a ‘strategic partner’. His incoming national security advisor Condoleezza Rice argued the US government should seek to open up China’s economy to promote ‘internal transition’. The Bush administration believed economic liberalisation would probably lead to ‘sustained and organized pressures for political

liberalisation’ within China, so the US needed to ‘strengthen the hands’ of reformists in the Party.4 One can only imagine how such language went down in Beijing.

Then came the September 11 terrorist attacks. A disaster for America looked like a breath of fresh air for China. The CCP jumped at the opportunity to win friends in the new security-focused administration, and Jiang Zemin personally called President Bush to express his sympathy that day. True to its ‘united front’ tradition of building alliances ofconvenience in pursuit of a greater strategic goal, China announced its support for the US-led war on terror. Far from merely not disrupting the US’s agenda, Beijing supported anti-terror resolutions at the United Nations and may have helped get Pakistan on side with the war in Afghanistan.5 Around the same time, the MSS set up its own counterterrorism bureau, which became a locus of cooperation with otherwise hostile intelligence agencies.6

America responded in turn, designating the East Turkestan independence movement, an Al-Qaeda–aligned Uyghur group, a terrorist organisation. It was a fine pretence for China to justify its repression of traditionally Muslim ethnic minorities such as the Uyghurs, a step down the path that saw a million people held in Xinjiang’s re-education and concentrationcamps under Xi Jinping.

Except there’s scant evidence that the group, which mainly operated in Afghanistan and Syria, ever carried out attacks against China. One expert, George Washington University’s Sean Roberts, convincingly called into question the very existence of Uyghur terrorist groups with the capacity to launch strikes in China.7 Nonetheless, bounty hunters kidnapped nearlytwo dozen Uyghurs in Pakistan and sold them for US$5000 apiece to the US government, which locked them up in its Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Most were later cleared of terrorism charges and released after years of solitary confinement.8

In the meantime, America’s attention had pivoted away from North Asia and would remain that way for a decade. Finding a convenient issue of mutual concern, the War on Terror helped stabilise the US–China relationship as Chinese strategists and intelligence analysts pondered what the post-9/11 world meant for their country. Chinese security officials, though anxiously watching the US military’s awesome force in Afghanistan and Iraq, must have breathed a sigh of relief. CIA Director George Tenet initially briefed the newly inaugurated President Bush that terrorism, arms

proliferation and China were the top three threats facing the country, but China had noweffectively moved off that list entirely.9 It was still a foreign policy priority, but dealing withit as a threat seemed off the table.

Cooperation, whether on terrorism or North Korea, was the name of the game.

Cognitive bias was at play. Seemingly surrounded by the brilliance and horror of terrorism, people grew desensitised to the CCP’s growing power, unabated human rights abuses and authoritarianism. It became easier to focus on China’s economic growth and the pockets of liberalisation in Chinese society. As China scholar David Lampton wrote, ‘American priorities and threat perceptions changed – the sense of challenge from China declined as dangers from other quarters mounted.’10 This shift took place equally among the public as it did within the administration: a Pew survey found 13 per cent fewer Americans were concerned about ‘keeping close watch on China as a global power’ than before the September 11 attacks. Those who believed China should be a priority of America’s foreignpolicy found themselves deep in the minority, 12 percentage points behind those worried about North Korean militarism.11

Arms and influence

Zheng Bijian and his MSS colleagues surely sensed the opportunity at hand. This was a crisis and turning point for US foreign policy and the freshly anointed Bush administration’sunderstanding of the outside world. Not only that, Rice had indicated the US government was in search of Chinese reformists it could back, and the MSS excelled at presenting its officers and proxies as reformist. Years, if not decades, of time for China to continue ‘hiding itsstrength and biding its time’ were within reach if the Party played its cards right. ChinaReform Forum had, of course, been probing US politics for years, aided by numerous intelligence officers stationed in DC and New York as diplomats and journalists. In the early days of the Bush administration the forum invited politically connected American China scholars to Beijing, quizzing them on Washington intrigue: who was up for promotion, who might be favourably disposed to China, and so on.

Slowly but surely, the MSS was working its way closer to the White House.

Amid the Mid-Autumn Festival of 2002, China Reform Forum flew an old contact out toBeijing. The meeting doesn’t appear on the MSS front’s otherwise detailed records of over fifty visits and events from that year

alone. This was sensitive: the only account of the meeting just describes him as a ‘godfather’ to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. It was the latest of dozens of trips the man, now in his seventies, had made to China over the decades. This mentor to Rice was also an ‘old friend’ of Marshall Nie Rongzhen, one of the Party’s greatest military leaders and thecommander of its nuclear weapons program.12

‘Their goal was to understand the situation from him, and also encourage him to educate Bush’s team on China,’ a state-owned magazine later revealed about China Reform Forum’s operation. Understandably, there’s nothing else that’s been revealed about these closed-door chats. The old man left with a box of mooncakes – the rich pastry snack of the Mid- Autumn Festival – and a scroll of Chinese calligraphy to deliver to Rice.

From what little has been disclosed about the exchange, it’s clear that the ‘old man’ was John W. Lewis, the late Stanford University expert on Chinese nuclear weapons and a strong advocate of engagement with China. Though Rice was a Soviet specialist, Lewis was head of the Stanford centre where she worked after completing her doctorate. ‘I had wonderfulmentors,’ one of whom was Lewis, Rice said of her time at the university.13 Her time at Stanford, where she rose to become the university’s youngest- ever provost, was an essential step in her journey towards the world’s most powerful jobs.

Lewis’s strange dances with the Party’s military and security agencies

went back to the 1990s, preparing the ground for the MSS’s work a decade later. One of his closest collaborators, Hua Di, was a former Chinese military engineer who helped him write detailed and influential histories of China’s ballistic missile program, based on ‘extensive interviews’ with Chinese insiders.14 Hua was in fact ‘one of three people authorized at thehighest levels in China to give me material on the history of the strategic weapons program,’ Lewis claimed. The Chinese military’s leaders wanted the West to better understand itscapabilities and strategy, the thinking went. This would reduce the risk of any overreaction to China’s relatively small strategic missile program.15 In 1993, Lewis and Hua also brokered acontroversial deal that gave the PLA access to advanced broadband equipment from the United States.

The dance between capitals

When Hua was unexpectedly arrested in China in 1998, accused of leaking state secrets, the turn of events gave the MSS an odd connection to Lewis. After all, it was the MSS to whom Hua turned for guarantees that he would be safe in China. As both an intelligence and a law enforcement agency, tasked with punishing those who leak state secrets, it could have set Huafree. Lewis travelled to China six times the year of Hua’s arrest, desperately seeking to resolve the situation. At some point he would have added the MSS to his list of Chinese official contacts.16

Rightly or wrongly, the MSS thought it could translate its relationship with Lewis into a connection with the White House and Lewis’s former protégé, Rice. Since the Hainan jet incident, their Rolodex for the new White House had been slim. Chinese military intelligence in particular had lost much of its access to the new administration. This was a job for the MSS.

Despite her strong comments on China, ‘Condoleezza Rice was still one of the few options we had to work on’, explained Li Junru, then a deputy director of China Reform Forum.17The scene was set for Zheng to lead the MSS’s political influence professionals intoWashington.

With an invitation from two venerable DC think tanks, they busily worked their contacts to line up meetings with key decision-makers.This task was made easier by the fact that Zheng was recognised as a leader of Communist Party chief Hu Jintao’s new task force on US-China relations.Tellingly, expert theoreticians and narrative crafters like externalpropaganda official Zhao Qizheng – not diplomats – formed the group’s core.18 This was an influence operation, not a policymaking committee.

For both sides, it was a chance to gauge the waters. In December 2002, the US StateDepartment’s head of policy planning, Richard Haass, gave a speech just three days beforeZheng’s team departed for the United States.

Haass attempted to lay out a ‘post-Cold War’ agenda for the relationship that would make up for what he called the previous decade’s directionless ‘fits and starts’. The speech was a defining document of what now feels like the distant history of US–China relations. This new era would be defined by ‘tangible actions to build a more cooperative US–China relationship’. Mere ‘engagement’, Haass argued, was not enough – America’s new Chinese mission was to build concrete cooperation on key areas.

And there seemed few bonds as powerful as a common enemy. Just as animositytowards the Soviet Union brought China and the United States

together in the 1970s, Haass believed security threats could once again unite them. Haass presented counterterrorism cooperation after September 11 as a model for the two nations’ future, raising how they had worked together to label the East Turkestan Islamic movementas a terrorist group.

Yet the Bush administration also believed China could and should be integrated into its international ‘system of shared interests and values’. A core but shaky pillar underlying this premonition was the belief that ‘prosperity will lead inexorably to demands by Chinese citizens for greater inclusion in their political system’. Haass called for China to move towards political liberalisation and openness, but the coming years showed that the US waswilling to leave that up to the Party’s discretion. Haass, for his part, was emphatically opposed to competition with China.19

China’s magi

Zheng and his MSS collaborators arrived that December as the first high- level delegates to study Haass’s proposal on the ground. Was this a ploy to distract and undermine China, or could the Party embrace the benefits of US partnership while dallying on the question of human rights and political change? For the MSS, this was an opportunity to analyse the situation in America as it honed and revised its influence operations, seeking to avertattention from signs of the Party’s growing misdeeds and ambition.

They couldn’t have gathered a better focus group to investigate and test their lines on as they crafted what became the ‘theory of China’s peaceful rise’. The delegation visited senior congresspeople and officials from the departments of state and commerce. Half a dozen retired officials who continued to shape foreign policy discussions, including Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, weren’t forgotten either.20

Condoleezza Rice and Bush’s chief of staff were key parts of the agenda.

The China Reform Forum team sat down with Bush’s young national security advisor,effectively Bush’s top foreign policy advisor alongside the secretary of state. According to the Chinese side’s rather condescending account, Zheng and Rice got off to a cold start. ‘Your qualifications aren’t enough to be the US national security advisor,’ Zheng said. ‘You don’tunderstand China because you’ve never been to China.’ Rice had in fact visited China before, but Zheng pressed the point. He quizzed her on the essence of the Chinese Communist Party and laughed when she claimed it

was the ‘three represents’, Jiang Zemin’s recently introduced policy emphasising theimportance of the business sector.

Zheng left Rice with three gifts. First was volume three of the Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, which covers most of the 1980s (‘to tell her that our internal and external policies aren’t tricks, that they’re open’). Second were the memoirs of Pu Yi, China’s last emperor who was detained and re- educated as a gardener by the CCP (to show China’s history of anti- imperialism, class struggle and humanism). Finally, he gave Rice, an accomplished pianist, a copy of the Yellow River Piano Concerto, hoping that the score would somehow showcase China’s ‘vibrant culture and deep history’.21 Musically, the piece has much of Western romanticism – Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and the like – and remarkably little traditional Chinese influence. Without realising it, this final gift encapsulated an aspect of their influence agenda: show the West that behind our pretence of being uniquely Chinese, China under the Communist Party is also imbued with European tradition as it moves towards modernisation into a liberal democracy.

Zheng’s account of the trip, probably a censored version of his report to the Party leadership, was published in a volume edited by MSS officers including Social Investigation Bureau chief Lin Di.22 In it, Zheng described how his American counterparts often expressed concerns that China was on an inexorable path to conflict with the United States, that it ‘will inevitably become a potential threat to the United States’. He rejoined that China would forgea peaceful and groundbreaking path to development, relying on socialism with Chinese characteristics. Spicing up the novelty of his approach, Zheng said that his Americaninterlocutors remarked they’d never considered the idea before and told him it was ‘very deep’. America’s foreign policy giants – ‘Kissinger, Brzezinski and Scowcroft’ – were allswayed by and in agreement with Zheng’s proposal, he claimed. All he requested to take the idea further was approval to focus research efforts on ‘peaceful rise’ and access to platforms where he could promote it to international audiences, which is where the Bo’ao Forum for Asia fits in.23

Versions of the ‘peaceful rise’ idea had been percolating around

academic circles for years, but it was this 2002 tour of the United States that convinced Zhengto advocate and articulate it. The next year’s Bo’ao speech took Zheng and his theory to the world. After decades working as a

hired pen, he now had a concept to claim as his own – even if he had no power over how the MSS exploited it.

This MSS influence operation was innocently absorbed into the heart of American foreign policy. Speaking in 2005 to the National Committee on US-China Relations, an influential non-governmental group, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick laid out a new framework for the Bush administration’s China policy. He opened his speech by praising none other than Zheng Bijian, with whom he’d ‘spent many hours in Beijing and Washington discussing China’s course of development and Sino-American relations’. The month before, Zheng had reiterated his ‘peaceful rise’ theory in an essay for America’s Foreign Affairs magazine, and Zoellick presented the new Bush policy as a response to it.24

Zoellick could not agree more that China’s peaceful rise had so far been immensely successful. He had just wrapped up four years as the Bush administration’s top trade official, overseeing China’s entry to the World Trade Organization in 2001. ‘The dragon emerged andjoined the world’ as a result of American policies, he quipped, and China was now ‘a player at the world table’, having entered key international organisations and agreements.

Now that China had taken a seat beside other major powers, Zoellick picked up Zheng’s theory and announced that ‘We now need to encourage China to become a responsible stakeholder in the international system’. To achieve this transformation, America would have to reject those voices that ‘perceive China solely through the lens of fear’ and work towards the ‘opportunity’ that China promised.

Zoellick did not gloss over sources of tension in the relationship. He specifically raisedChina’s military expansion, protectionist tendencies and ‘tolerance’ of intellectual property theft. Yet further incorporating China into the world order seemed like a remedy to these problems, as if the US only needed to show China the light. Even as these sources of tension only grew over the following decade, they were consistently glossed over in favour of cooperation on international issues like climate change and countering terrorism. It was easier than admitting that decades of China policy had gone wrong.

The early Bush administration’s confident language around changing China fromwithin was even more explicit in Zoellick’s speech.

Cooperating with an emerging China, he said, was a step towards ‘the

democratic China of tomorrow’. He acknowledged that the concept of ‘peaceful rise’ wouldcontinue to be debated in Beijing and Washington, but this only strengthened the MSS’s handas it positioned its assets and officers as members of a phantom reformist faction. Zoellick appeared to view Zheng Bijian and his undercover MSS associates as exemplifying the forcesthat would push China towards liberalism, if only they could be further empowered.

The MSS con had worked in a remarkably short period of time. The chief architect of the United States’ China policy had name-dropped their top front group, China Reform Forum, and unwittingly endorsed their influence operation.25

Turning weakness into strength

Surprising for how much geopolitical stake was placed on it, the vague and loosely formulated concept of ‘China’s peaceful rise’ rested upon several seemingly contradictory narratives. From the outside these might seem like weaknesses but they only enhanced its effectiveness as a propaganda narrative and influence operation, guaranteeing its circulation to this very day.

More than anyone else, it was Chinese scholars who took aim at Zheng’s theory. Two professors from Beijing’s Renmin University summarised the main critiques, which centred on how the ‘Taiwan issue’ and America’s attitude towards China undermine the idea thatChina can rise peacefully.

For one, China’s Taiwan policy officially reserves the right to use armed force to conquer Taiwan, though dressed up in defensive language. This ‘sacred right’ cannot be limited by the peaceful rise concept. Second, goes the critique, America will try to constrain China’sdevelopment, peaceful or not. Both countries had their share of folks who believed some sort of confrontation was inevitable.26

Though the Renmin University scholars attempted to refute those critiques, Zheng endedup incorporating them into future formulations of his theory.27 Convening a roundtable at the Bo’ao Forum the year after introducing the concept there, he listed Taiwan among the primary challenges to China’s peaceful rise. Peaceful rise, ‘by definition, requires the peaceful reunification of Taiwan and mainland China’, Zheng maintained. But ‘shouldforeign forces dare to intervene to support “Taiwan independence,” the use of force will by no means be ruled out’.

Zheng’s retort essentially turned the very contradictions highlighted by his critics into histheory’s greatest strength. By emphasising the contingent nature of China’s peaceful rise, Zheng was placing the burden of resolving those tensions onto other nations, and America inparticular.28 It was a wily conceptual volte-face that would have made Hu Qiaomu, the Partypropaganda chief who once supervised Zheng, proud.

As John L. Thornton, former co-president of Goldman Sachs and board chairman of the influential Brookings Institution think tank pointed out, Zheng’s campaign ‘demands thatthe rest of the world help China create an international environment where this sort of rise can take place’.29 China requires access to ‘capital, technology and resources in world markets’, Zheng argued, so established powers must support China’s integration into the world economy. China needs stronger ‘cultural support’ around the world for its rise, which also depends on world peace.30

The peaceful rise theory ‘always had a kind of half threat’, an American China scholar who heard Zheng speak recalled. ‘It was like, “China will rise peacefully, unless …”’31

The theory’s challenges and contradictions create room for ill-informed observers tointerpret it differently and map it onto their own aspirations for China. This flexibility allowed ‘peaceful rise’ to catch on as a kind of unfalsifiable cultural meme that could be conveniently adjusted and elaborated on. It took on a life of its own, far outlasting its official endorsement.

The Chinese government’s behaviour, no matter how militaristic, aggressive, abusive or disrespectful of national sovereignty, can never disprove the theory of China’s peacefulrise. Instead it becomes proof that China was so bullied and mistreated, its internal affairs so wantonly interfered in, that it had no choice but to diverge from its historical path. China is no longer an independent agent but a reflection of other world powers’ thoughts and desires.

Zheng’s theory was clearly not a promise. True to the tradition of China’s propagandists, he was not so much committing to a direction for the future as he was applying a framework to the past. Although he called peaceful rise a ‘new path’, it was one he argued China had already been on for a quarter of a century. This was Zheng’s analysis of Chinese foreign policy since 1978. One can see in the theory echoes of his deep experience with rewritingofficial history. As China scholar Robert Suettinger cautioned,

‘the concept of peaceful rise was initially intended as something of a propaganda campaign’ and ‘should not necessarily be taken to have decisive significance forChina’s foreign policy’.32

Rather than a policy position, Zheng’s theory represents China’s offer to the West: ensurethat we aren’t provoked into challenging you. For now, we are still growing, but our achievements will soon match and surpass yours. Abandon Taiwan, forget universal human rights, cede your sovereignty, give us control of strategic industries and technologies and you might be allowed a place in the coming century – if we’re feeling nice.

Phantom factions

Debate within the Party over Zheng’s framework played into the effectiveness of thispropaganda narrative. This looked to outsider observers like a struggle pitting the Party’s conservative hawks against supposed liberal reformists exemplified by China Reform Forum. China Reform Forum members who were really MSS influence operatives were instead seen as brave voices for change within the Party, glimmers of hope for a westernised China.

Early on, the Party’s highest leaders publicly endorsed ‘peaceful rise’. Hu Jintao and his premier, Wen Jiabao, both used the phrase in speeches the month after the Bo’ao Forum in 2003. At a Politburo meeting, Hu again endorsed the term. Numerous influential Chinese journals and newspapers discussed or affirmed the idea.33

Yet Hu surprised all when he left out the phrase from his speech at the 2004 Bo’ao Forum. From there, Zheng’s concept dropped out from the Party leadership’s common parlance. ‘Peaceful development’, which superficially carries fewer connotations of China displacing the United States, has instead become the preferred terminology, while ‘peacefulrise’ is still used with less prominence.34

The rise and fall of ‘peaceful rise’ may have been the public signs of a high-level political contest. Jiang Zemin still closely guarded foreign policy as his dominion, and this new theory looked like Hu’s attempt to place his own signature on China’s external affairs. As one story goes, Jiang was curious about Zheng’s theory, and Zheng was able to brief the Politburo on it in 2004. But their consensus was that ‘while debate should continue on the appropriateness of the idea, party and state leaders need not themselves speak on the subject’.35

Regardless, Zheng maintains that ‘peaceful rise’ and ‘peaceful development’ are the same thing.36 Frankly, neither label has any practical bearing on China’s actions. Like the political manoeuvring that led to the MSS’s creation, the heart of the debate is best understood as one of legitimacy, personality and symbolism. Jiang and Hu’s battle over foreign policy, if therewas such a clash, looks more like a proxy war over political turf, not substantive differences in grand strategy. It was a struggle the MSS’s influence operations could profit from regardlessof the outcome.

The peaceful rise meme lives on outside of China, with help from the Party’s foreigninfluence organs. Many foreign China watchers misread the debate over Zheng’s proposal as akin to the foreign policy debates familiar to democratic nations, where politicians, academics, media and other stakeholders chip in to formulate policies with concrete consequences.

Following this logic, there’s one faction of China’s leadership that’s a better fit for US interests pitted against a hawkish group that’s more inclined to intimidate China’s neighbours and Washington.37 Condoleezza Rice merely reflected mainstream views when she wrote that the administration needed to capitalise on the demands that economic growth would bring for political reform in China and ‘strengthen the hands’ of reformists in the Party.38

Zheng’s advocacy for peaceful rise and ties to President Hu Jintao placed him and China Reform Forum in the friendlier camp.This image was no doubt buttressed by Zheng’s time spent beside Hu Yaobang, a genuine reformist interested in liberalisation. The fact that he’d happily worked across the political spectrum through his career may have escaped people’sattention. These looked like the group to back. They were the insiders you talked to in order to understand what a more liberal and peaceful China would look like, to learn how you could help achieve that dream. They were meant to be the good guys.

It was a monumental case of disastrous and misguided mirror imaging.

Zheng’s influence within China is hard to assess. The symbiotic relationship between Zheng and the MSS makes any attempt to separate disinformation from fact on this matter fraught. His signature theory is essentially a propaganda framework and not a policy position.

Yet his global influence is undeniable. No less than Henry Kissinger, the giant of American foreign policy who was central to opening US–China relations, praised Zheng in his bestselling 2011 book On China. Kissinger, one of Zheng’s frequent interlocutors, elevated thepeaceful rise narrative to

a statement of Chinese government intentions. The fact that Zheng’s proposal dropped out ofofficial usage as quickly as it appeared, and for that matter was never about policy anyway,gets left out.39

Kissinger’s misunderstanding is instead a demonstration of how phenomenal ‘peaceful rise’ was as an influence operation. Using their skills of deception and manipulation, MSS officers worked hard to promote the assumptions about China that Zheng articulated, assuring their contacts that ‘peaceful rise’ still had relevance.40 They combined the theory of China’s peaceful rise with intelligence tradecraft to create a new songbook for political warfare.

The ‘peaceful rise’ narrative cemented China Reform Forum’s attractive power. Even if it was only fleetingly heard from the mouths of Party leaders, that seemed to prove that China Reform Forum could shape the Party and not just reflect conservative orthodoxy. It wascertainly more than other Chinese think tanks could offer. In the eyes of foreign observers,Zheng was no longer just a former deputy leader of the Central Party School. He was a ‘a confidant of Mr Hu’, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, and a ‘consummate Chinese Communist Party insider’.41 US diplomats concurred, describing him as ‘one of Beijing’s top foreign policy advisors’.42

China Reform Forum could also dangle connections to other powerbrokers in the Party’s inner sanctum. According to Bonnie Glaser, an experienced observer of Chinese foreign policy, academics in Beijing who wanted to be heard by the Party leadership would lean on Zheng Bijian to pass their reports up the chain. Scholars in Shanghai would turn to formermayor Wang Daohan, who was Jiang Zemin’s mentor and the senior advisor to China Reform Forum until his death in 2005.43 The group also promised a channel to Zeng Qinghong, then China’s vice president and perhaps its third most powerful man. Zeng’s secretary was another advisor to the MSS front and sometimes participated in its meetings with foreigners, such as adinner with former European Commission president Romano Prodi or a trip to Korea’s Jeju Peace Forum.44

Yet MSS officers aren’t in the business of helping foreigners influence

the Party and understand its inner workings. Some if not most of those who’ve been awarded access to Party leaders are asked to do something in exchange. For example, China ReformForum and the MSS’s Lin Di helped American peace activist Jeremy J. Stone land meetings with Chinese

officials as he tried to independently resolve tensions between China and Taiwan by negotiating a unification of the two nations. Lin once even offered Stone an audience with President Jiang Zemin, but there was a catch. He had to firmly take the Chinesegovernment’s side on the Taiwan issue. Stone turned down the offer, but we know little of what deals the MSS might have proposed to its dozens of other close contacts.45

CHAPTER 9

WIKILEAKS REVEALS THE MSS

THE MSS’S ELITE influence operations are a special homegrown brew. The ability to build and maintain relationships comes first. Actually recruiting an American, European, Japanese or Australian elite is only one end goal. Behind closed doors, MSS officers try to build leverage over their targets, offer favours and cultivate trust that can be exploited later on. We know something about these normally impenetrable exchanges from WikiLeaks.

More so than any other Chinese think tank, the MSS’s China Reform Forum could lure in foreign friends from the highest levels of politics and government. While its promises of ‘peaceful rise’ proved to be a lie, it really did offer access to intermediaries of China’s rulingtriumvirate, if not a private audience with the men themselves on rare occasions. Aspectacular new landscape unfolded before the MSS once it learnt to wield these powers. It could now orchestrate more closed-door discussions and deals with world-class foreign scholars and policymakers than ever before. These private meetings opened up new possibilities for influence operations, the kind China’s spies once only dreamt of.

Like how Chinese foreign intelligence officers of the sixties were taught to charm their guests over a Chinese meal, the intimacy offered by confidential gatherings provided a perfect setting for influence and ingratiation. China Reform Forum’s staff were often willing and able to give away more of the Party’s inner workings to their guests. Foreigners eager to learn about China, some less prepared than others, were convinced they were being brought into a circle of trust by Party insiders. ‘There were a lot of people who had interactions with the Chinese that didn’t know

much about the research organisations and may not have cared very much’ about whether they were meeting undercover intelligence officers, one American China scholar said.1 Some knewthe group included spies among its ranks but found the relationship useful and thought they were meeting reformists from within the MSS.

At first glance, there was nothing new or remarkable about this ploy. In the first years of its rule, the Soviet Union ran a masterful counterintelligence operation that used a fake monarchist organisation to lure foreign spies, snagging the intelligence services of Britain, France, Poland, Finland and the Baltic states.2 The same idea was used at the outset of the 1968 Prague Spring when the KGB dispatched fifteen illegal agents to Czechoslovakia to pose as sympathetic Westerners and thereby uncover local counterrevolutionaries.3

What sets China Reform Forum apart from these schemes is how it used similar methods not to catch spies but in an active attempt to guide foreign elites through the intricacies ofwhat Henry Kissinger called ‘a beautiful and mysterious land’, to implant powerful lies and narratives into global discourse.4 Official statements that contradicted what they’d said behind closed doors could be swatted away with leisure, dismissed as evidence that a conservative and hawkish faction within the Party was still competing for power, that the West needed to help empower liberals in the leadership, or that China’s masters were not yet ready to declare publicly the visions they could share in private with a lucky few. They couldnever be wrong.

Best of all, these operations needn’t run the risk of capture or exposure. There’s nothing illegal about chatting up and charming people, no matter how cynical your intentions. There was no reason for China Reform Forum’s MSS officers to try to recruit people on their trips to the United States – a dangerous move – because they could simply make their pitch onfriendly ground when a target visited China. Most of the time, these officers preferred to play a long game where a recruitment pitch was only one end game. ‘Make friends and watch what happens’ could have been their motto.

The China experts and policymakers who flocked to China Reform Forum were none the wiser about its schemes. Regardless, law enforcement agencies weren’t interested in shining a light on these activities, which seemed at the time inconsequential and hard to prosecute. And there were formidable legal and political reasons not to. Proposals to aggressively

intervene in MSS operations on US soil have often been knocked back by policymakers fearful of retribution from China.5

WikiLeaked

The WikiLeaks revelations of 2010 shone a light on these operations. The activist organisation rocked the world when it published 251,287 confidential US diplomatic cables stolen by Chelsea Manning, then a US Army intelligence analyst in Iraq. Those documentsoffered a rare glimpse into internal discussions, disputes and deals, many secret.

The US embassy in Beijing, only one of the diplomatic missions affected by the breach, had been sending back cable after cable to the State Department, National Security Council and CIA. In their search for well- placed sources to read the tea leaves of Chinese politics, American diplomats, like those of any country, spent decades building up friends ingovernment agencies, think tanks, universities, media and business. These contacts are like currency for diplomats, helping them impress seniors back home with information and insights.

Hundreds of Chinese contacts were named in leaked cables from the US embassy in Beijing. Chinese government officials, popular academics, journalists and activists were allincluded. Worst of all, many were marked as ‘strictly protected’ sources whose identities should be closely guarded. The consequences looked dire for some.

Party-loving Chinese nationalists were furious. While Chinese media were hesitant to report on the revelations, such as one cable alleging the Chinese government had hacked Google, excited netizens jumped China’s online ‘great firewall’ to access the WikiLeakswebsite.6 It didn’t take long for lists of so-called ‘traitors’ and ‘US informants’ to spread on Chinese forums.7

But WikiLeaks also exposed much of the US government’s ignorance. Cables show how US diplomats walked themselves into traps: undercover MSS officers were successfully posing as friendly contacts and sources.

Through diplomatic cables, MSS officers were being given a channel to speak directly to policymakers in the heart of American power and manipulate their understanding of China. In the eyes of their government readers, the stamp of confidentiality US diplomats placed on these cables must have added to the credibility of their compromised sources. It was sosmart an operation that it seems inevitable in hindsight.

This shows why China’s authorities didn’t act against the US embassy’s sources: manywere in fact MSS assets or undercover officers. To date, it’s unclear whether anyone was seriously punished for being named as a diplomatic contact. Far from being harmful in the eyes of China’s security services, these exchanges were a golden opportunity to run operations against the United States.8

The MSS had bigger problems to worry about, for that matter. Its counterspies were on the cusp of brutally shutting down one of the greatest threats in the agency’s history. First, in 2012, Reuters reported that an aide to MSS Vice Minister Lu Zhongwei had been arrested on suspicion of working for the CIA.9 Lu, a Japan expert who was once head of the MSS’sCICIR think tank, was stood down. His aide’s fate is unknown. As investigative journalist Zach Dorfman later revealed, this had merely been the tail end of a bloody MSS campaignthat wiped out the CIA’s sources in China. More than thirty were executed, including many of the MSS’s own.10 These ultra-sensitive clandestine contacts were precisely the kinds of sources who normally don’t appear in WikiLeaks files. The CIA has its own, more secure systems for sending messages back to headquarters.

Meanwhile, at least twelve undercover Chinese intelligence officers – only those I have been able to confidently identify – were contacts of the embassy. None were recognised as MSS officers by the diplomats writing about them or the ambassador as he signed off on cables citing them. To government readers back in Washington, these spies were quoted asscholars and think tank experts with unusual insight into Chinese politics. In contrast, numerous scholars from the MSS’s 11th Bureau, outwardly known as the CICIR think tank, were quoted by US diplomats, while their affiliation with the agency was usually noted.11

The MSS selected some of its most savvy officers for the treacherous

duty of engaging with US diplomats. They were chosen in part because they met several basic requirements. First, they all had to be loyal and trusted Party members, especially as they might be targets of recruitment by US spies. Having demonstrated that, they also seem to have been chosen for their expertise in both American and Chinese foreign policy. Finally, they had to be experienced at crafting lies that would stick in American minds.

Three people who tick all those boxes stand out in the forty-one leaked cables that mention China Reform Forum: Ding Kuisong, Xue Fukang and Cao Huayin. All were senior members of the front group. All were

undercover senior officers of the MSS, roughly at the level of deputy bureau chiefs.

Ding Kuisong

Ding Kuisong, then a vice chairman of China Reform Forum, is a regular on the academic conference circuit. He’s well known to most experienced scholars of Chinese foreign policy. He holds genuine academic credentials and was almost always seen alongside Zheng Bijian. The two formed a complementary pair. Zheng dedicated his career to cultivating theoreticalexpertise, probing and elaborating on the official line. Ding enhanced Zheng’s big-picturethinking, bringing with him the practical knowledge of both a security scholar and a spy.12

Ding was charming too. ‘I sort of liked him,’ said one former US intelligence official. ‘His English was good and he had a sort of urbane air about him.’13 Ding picked up a British accent during his time as a visiting fellow at Cambridge University and an affiliate of the London-based Institute for International Strategic Studies, one of the world’s largest thinktanks.14

With a well-furnished record of publications, Ding is a graduate of the MSS’s Universityof International Relations and spent some fifteen years at the CICIR. Some downplay CICIR’s ties to the intelligence agency, but it’s officially a bureau of the MSS. Its 400 or so analysts produce intelligence briefs for the ministry and China’s leaders. Its role in intelligence gathering is seldom recognised even though many of its scholars, including one who concurrently headed the agency’s Counterterrorism Bureau, rotate in and out of operational roles. Ding is one example.15

Ding is best known for his time heading Southeast Asian and then American studies at CICIR, but he also worked in a part that’s left out of official organisational charts. In name and mission, CICIR’s Center for World Personage Studies seems to have spawned from thesame tradition of intensive profiling and analysis of influential figures as the MSS SocialInvestigation Bureau.16 Very little is known about it except that it produces biographical information on thousands of international ‘thought leaders’.

What we do know suggests a close connection between its research and actual intelligenceoperations. Many of those it’s profiled have been courted by MSS fronts like China Reform Forum. One of its biographical compilations was even written in partnership with a magazine controlled by

the MSS Social Investigation Bureau.17 Of course, Ding’s official biography on the ChinaReform Forum website doesn’t mention his time spent as the centre’s deputy director.18

Ding must have come to the Social Investigation Bureau in 2000 with high recommendations. His last job at the CICIR was as assistant to its director, Lu Zhongwei, who had just been secretly chosen to run the ministry’s Japan-focused Tianjin bureau under the pseudonym Zhong Wei and would return to Beijing as a vice minister.19 This experienceand Ding’s high rank within China Reform Forum suggest that he was now a deputy chief of the Social Investigation Bureau.20

The promotion certainly showed in Ding’s behaviour. ‘There was this real sort of air of arrogance and self-importance, that he had taken on a very important position,’ recalled one American scholar who met him. ‘Ding Kuisong always struck me as an intelligence-like person.’21 His charm was coupled with a reserved bearing, the caution of one involved in theintelligence community. He stood out among China Reform Forum’s staff. The American scholar believed his connections to foreign scholars were unmatched ‘because he had come from CICIR and met with so many people’.

As if Ding’s status as an MSS officer could not be any more obvious,

while working at China Reform Forum he also surfaced as the vice president of another Social Investigation Bureau front, the China Universities Alumni Association, which he led on a trip to Taiwan.22 Around 2011, Ding graduated from China Reform Forum to leadCICEC, the MSS front group that had taken the lead on operations such as the takeover of Soros’s China Fund.23

Ding was one of China Reform Forum’s most effective agents, successfully ingratiating himself with foreign diplomats and scholars. US diplomats consulting their best sources in preparation for the 2009 meeting of the Party’s Central Committee seemed to view Ding as the best of the best. He was an individual with ‘access to internal Party discussions’ who was able to ‘discuss current Party priorities’, a September 2009 cable reads. Ding accurately predicted the date of the plenum and advised the US government to pay attention to a forthcoming speech by Xi Jinping, then China’s heir apparent, for signals ahead of the meeting. Little did they know, Ding Kuisong was providing what spies call chicken feed –genuine

but inconsequential information designed to shore up his credibility as a source and an insider.24

Another cable from that year gives one example of the lies Ding’s chicken feed helped support. This time, the American foreign service officers wanted to understand the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, which was just around the corner. Perhaps the most tantalising question – a loaded one – they had in their heads was: when would the Party revisit that darkest moment in its recent past? Ding skilfully played to their hopes, describing purged Party leader Zhao Ziyang as ‘a good man’ who made ‘tremendous contributions’ to reform and opening. Writing back to the State Department, National Security Council and the CIA, these diplomats took Ding’s statement as a demonstration that ‘support remains within the Party for ousted General Secretary Zhao’.25 If it were true then, there’s been suspiciously little sign of that since.

Ding seemed to suggest it was just a matter of time before the Party reckoned with the bloodshed it inflicted in 1989 and the broader political consequences that year had for reformists in the Party. The Party had now settled on the path of reform, a vague commitment that, Ding claimed, meant economic liberalisation and even democratic reform were ‘the only way forward’.

Exploiting the perception that China Reform Forum was tied to a more liberal faction of the Party, Ding warned his American colleagues of the threat Chinese hardliners posed. He ‘expressed some worry that a “minority” within China, such as the “New Left,” might attempt to “reverse course”’, the cable stated.26 A category that probably captures those wholabelled Ding a traitor for being a ‘protected’ US government source, ‘new leftists’ stand for nationalism, Maoism and socialism in opposition to neoliberalism and the West.27 Those ideas seem to define China more and more under Xi Jinping.

Xue Fukang

Xue Fukang, also a vice chairman of China Reform Forum, was consulted by US diplomats to help write the same cable. More experienced and perhaps more cautious than Ding, Xue nonetheless read from the same script.The Party ‘would eventually deal with the Tiananmen problem, but doing so would take time’, he insisted. What Xue called the ‘Pandora’s box’ ofTiananmen could only be reopened once China was more stable,

something Zheng’s theory suggests the United States was responsible for ensuring.28

Another cable shows Xue testing out a similar line, this time on Taiwan. It was October 2008 and the United States had just announced a tranche of arms sales to the island. China responded with its usual diplomatic protests and suspended military-to-military contacts with America, a freeze that would only end the following February.29 Speaking to US diplomats, Xue played down China’s reactions as mere face-saving measures made necessary by the population’s nationalistic sentiments. China had been reasonable in its response, he claimed, and now the United States needed to prove it didn’t view China as its enemy, a tax of sorts on its trade with Taiwan. Washington could demonstrate goodwill by lifting restrictions onexports of sensitive technologies (the kind the MSS and PLA try to steal) to China, he suggested. Again, the veteran intelligence officer was trying to place the onus on the United States for guaranteeing China would rise peacefully while absolving the Party for its feverish countermeasures.

That year, Xue was probably already moving into retirement from the intelligence community he’d joined as an English major at the University of International Relations in 1964. Like most of China’s spies, his time during the Cultural Revolution is a black hole. He resurfaced in 1980 as the first Washington, DC correspondent for the Guangming Daily, still the MSS newspaper of choice today. As students were gunned down on Tiananmen Square, Xue arrived in Canberra, again posing as a journalist. After six years in Australia, he returned to DC in 1997 for his final overseas posting. During this period, one former foreign intelligence official knew of him as the de facto ‘MSS representative’ in America.30 The fact that he was a known yet undeclared intelligence officer to the CIA didn’t stop him fromsecuring an interview with President Clinton.31 Nor did it stop him from posing as a scholar affiliated with the Central Party School in his later dealings with US diplomats.

Cao Huayin

Perhaps the youngest of the three MSS officers, China Reform Forum Deputy Secretary-General Cao Huayin was also one of the US embassy’s closest contacts, appearing in fourteen cables between 2006 and 2009. He was an accomplished translator and had been an English interpreter for the MSS’s CICEC front group.32 The Chinese edition of The Wizardsof

Langley, Jeffrey T. Richelson’s account of the CIA’s scientific and technology program, was one of several publications he had translated.33 US diplomats thought him ‘well connected’, and he was willing to entertain discussions on any matter of topics, including the Party’s internal affairs.34 In one cable, he contradicted the official line on China’s ‘open’ NationalPeople’s Congress, pointing out how various debates had in fact been carried out behind closed doors.35

Diplomats often consulted him on North Korea and Taiwan. China Reform Forum had some engagement with North Korea, even delivering flowers to its Beijing embassy for the tenth anniversary of Kim Il-sung’s death, and Cao was open to sharing his thoughts on the touchy issue of China–DPRK relations. A few years earlier, Cao travelled to the UnitedStates for a stint at Stanford University, where he researched North Korea’s nuclear arsenal as a visiting scholar.36 Another MSS scholar-spy operating under China Reform Forum’s cover, Li Peisong, was a visiting fellow at Harvard University in 2006.37

China appreciated the issue’s sensitivity, sending in assets trusted by the security services to communicate its thoughts on North Korea to Washington. Not one but two suspected MSS officers are quoted in one of the cables, as well as an academic closely associated with China Reform Forum.38 Unusually, both US embassy cables that feature Cao’s comments on North Korean nuclear tests were classified ‘secret’, as opposed to just ‘confidential’. On Taiwan,Cao urged the United States to help China rein in what he called their ‘common enemy’ – Taiwan’s President Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party.39

The professionals

While Ding, Xue and Cao led the operation at the working level and built up extensive contacts around the world, several of the MSS’s top leaders appear around the edges too.China’s agent handlers have a long history of trying to match or outdo the seniority and social status of their targets. If you’re recruiting a chaired university professor, you’d best have a bureau chief make the approach, or a division chief for an assistant professor and so on.40

So, the MSS elite influence operations – like the PLA’s – can draw out remarkably seniorofficers who might normally be expected to stay behind

their desks. These operations are so sensitive that the MSS’s headquarters appears to take the lead itself, when other operations are usually passed down to provincial bureaus in Shanghai, Guangdong and so on. If you’re being trusted to broker access between foreigners and the Party centre, you’d better get it right.

This meant that the growing ambition of MSS foreign intelligence efforts in the 2000s saw MSS chiefs appear in its front organisations, using a range of aliases. In Western intelligence agencies, such high-level officers almost never dirty their own hands with operational activities. It’s risky, unnecessary and inappropriate – the higher up you rise, the more of amanager you become. But in China, even retired MSS vice ministers hang onto their fake identities so that they can help the ministry when needed and maintain their foreign contacts.

So when a new class of MSS leaders rose to power around the turn of the century, they eagerly took part in the operations of China Reform Forum and other fronts. This generation entered the intelligence community after the Cultural Revolution, meaning they cut their teeth on operations in the early years of Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reform and opening’ era. They were a breed moulded by the contradictions of Party-endorsed globalism and capitalism yet seemed to have little more affinity for Western ideas than their hardline, conservative predecessors. Corruption and double agents were rampant, but China’s growing ties to and cooperation with Western nations also gave the agency unimaginable opportunities for foreign intelligence operations.

Geng Huichang was the first of the new leadership. In the early 1990s, Geng took charge of the MSS’s China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) think tank, giving him extensive access to foreign scholars. He specialised in America, Japan and research related to industrial espionage, yet he disappeared shortly after. In May 1995 he was secretlynamed a vice minister of the MSS, aged only about forty-four. The last of the agency’s generation of Cold War legends began to enter retirement. In 2007, Geng assumed the agency’s top job: he was now the minister of state security.41

Geng’s rise and that of China Reform Forum exemplified a monumental

evolution in the MSS’s focus. A foreign intelligence expert was in charge for the first time, not a political hack or an internal security specialist. His predecessors were occupied withcatching suspected spies and building up

the MSS’s capabilities, but now it was time to show the Party what the agency could do.

Geng was closely associated with the parts of the MSS involved in influence operations. After disappearing into the MSS’s leadership, he resurfaced in several front groups. Photos of a 1999 meeting of the Social Investigation Bureau’s CICEC front group show Vice Minister Geng, with his recognisable pudgy face and big round glasses, in attendance.42 The ChinaInternational Public Relations Association, which officially reports to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but is secretly run by MSS officers who use it to interact with multinational corporations, gave Geng another hat as one of its vice presidents.43

Geng wasn’t publicly associated with China Reform Forum, but his emphasis on foreign operations undoubtedly empowered it. His hand may have been represented by the manyMSS officers who surfaced in its ranks. Around the time Geng moved into the MSS’s top job, Tao Yijiang and Sun Zhihai became vice presidents of China Reform Forum.44 Sun is still listed as its executive vice chairman.45 Both were leaders of the MSS’s influence operations.

It’s hard to find much more about Tao and Sun than cyclical references to other fronts. CICEC’s records say Sun is an advisor to the Chinese Association for the Promotion of Cultural Exchange and Cooperation, which is just another Social Investigation Bureau cover organisation.46 Sun is also a vice president of the China International Public RelationsAssociation, which describes him as a deputy head of the Chinese government’s Asia Africa Development Research Institute.47 Interesting, but these affiliations reveal little beyond the fact that he’s connected to foreign intelligence operations.

This is by design: ‘Tao Yijiang’ and ‘Sun Zhihai’ are pseudonyms. Two doppelgangers with similar names to these intelligence officers, Tao Dawei and Sun Yonghai, were delegates to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the highest meeting place of the Party’s united front. Tao Dawei’s profile just about gives the game away, describing him as a vice president of CICEC even though only Tao Yijiang is named on CICEC’s website.48 Sun Yonghai’s profile is more striking: he’s listed as a vice minister of the MSS.49 Some reportsclaim Sun used to head the MSS’s 5th Bureau, which is responsible for analysing intelligence and coordinating operations with local branches of the agency.50

Much can be pieced together from the name ‘Tao Dawei’. Now retired, he had a long career in the MSS. In the 1990s, he was second in command of the 10th Bureau, whichhandles the Party’s ‘overseas security’ work.

That means it ensures security for Chinese diplomatic missions and state- owned enterprises but also actively infiltrates overseas Chinese student groups and dissident organisations.51Before returning to the MSS’s headquarters in 2005 as head of the Social Investigation Bureau, he worked in the agency’s provincial branches in Shaanxi and Henan.52

Finally, China Reform Forum also named one of Geng Huichang’s old colleagues as a vicepresident.53 Lu Zhongwei followed Geng as head of the CICIR and then pulled a similar disappearing act. After some years as the pseudonymous ‘Zhong Wei’, director of theimportant Tianjin State Security Bureau, Lu was brought back to Beijing by Geng as one of his deputies.54 China Reform Forum only describes him as a member of a China–Japan friendship association.55 If anything, it takes guts and confidence to name so many spymasters on the membership lists of front organisations.

CHAPTER 1O

THE REVOLVING DOOR:SCHOLARS AND THE MSS

AS GLOBAL THINK tanks innocently posed for photos with China Reform Forum staff andflocked to its events, one American scholar of China policy met firsthand with its underbelly. For the sake of his security, let’s call him Barry. It was around 2006, the heyday of China’s ‘peaceful rise’, and just about every major American foreign policy organisation had a relationship with China Reform Forum. Barry, a graduate student, knew its staff well from the sidelines of conferences and dialogues. He was in a better position to handle the situation than most, having lived in China and learnt the language fluently. But his youth and experience in DC marked him out as a target. ‘They probably saw the likelihood that I would join government at some point,’ Barry said, recalling they once explicitly encouraged him totake that path.1

One year, China Reform Forum invited him out to Beijing for a conference that never took place. Instead, after some meetings, they treated the young scholar to a boozy karaoke session. From there they dragged him along to a ‘fashion show’ of scantily clad Uyghur women. ‘We can go upstairs with them if you want,’ one of the Reform Forum staff membersleant in and suggested. Barry politely turned down the offer, but the MSS officers had a backup plan. They took him to an upmarket spa where the group relaxed in an elaborate indoor water grotto. The boss of the MSS officers even dropped in to say hi and wish them a nice stay. ‘After a while we showered off and went upstairs and we got massages,’ Barry recounted.

Then, halfway through, ‘the girl asked me if I was alright with a rub and tug, which I declined’. He was, no doubt, being watched and filmed by hidden cameras in the massage suite. ‘All the other guys were in other rooms … who the hell knows what they’re doing in there.’ He guessed the MSS officers were trying to compromise him while also getting in on the fun themselves.

When Barry visited Beijing a few years later, the undercover MSS officers were ‘genuinely excited’ at the prospect of taking him out for another massage. Sexual entrapment might have failed, but there are many other ways to get at a man. This time he visited a pub in Beijing with one of the China Reform Forum staff. Barry was only acquainted with the man, so he was shocked to hear him suddenly lament that he was in love with a colleague even though he had a wife and child. ‘He doesn’t love his wife and he wants to be through with it, but he can’t … and he really wants to run away with this woman,’ the story went. It was a bizarre confession, and all Barry could do was try to console the man over pints of Guinness. ‘You’re the only one I can tell because you don’t know anybody,’ the MSS officer moaned. But sympathywasn’t what the MSS was after, of course.

The spy had spun his yarn, pretending to drop his guard in the hope that his guest might do the same. ‘It did seem to me that he was trying to get me to open up to him,’ Barry recalled. ‘He even asked me, “Oh, did anything like this ever happen to you?”’

Then there was the money. One of the China Reform Forum officers met with Barry to hand over a cash reimbursement for some travel costs. The money came in a sealed envelope, tapping Barry’s knee as the officer tried to pass it to him under the table. ‘He did it in a way that was totally sketchy.’ Barry assumed someone was watching, ready to snap aphoto of a suspicious transfer of cash between him and the MSS. It was kindness dressed up as debt he might have to repay one day, but it didn’t even contain the full amount he was owed. To this day, China’s premier intelligence agency owes Barry money.

The MSS Social Investigation Bureau’s approaches to Barry were downright polite compared to how lesser wings of the ministry treated him. In his assessment, China Reform Forum never asked him to do anything that would ‘bring the situation to a head’. They wore their cover as think tank scholars like skin, patiently building a relationship with him andasking for insight into American politics and policy without ever stepping

beyond the bounds of what a Chinese scholar might say or do. Never did they ‘drop cover’,revealing they were intelligence officers in an attempt to recruit him. Barry guessed they were ‘largely in a collection mode and a kind of co-option mode’. They wanted him to know that China was going to be ‘this great democratic paradise’, and they wanted to use him like a focus group to help adjust talking points and influence operations to American tastebuds.

China Reform Forum’s MSS officers come from the agency’s headquarters, where staff are usually the cream of the crop. Many are transfers from other agencies, like the police or military, or top-tier graduates of specialised MSS training institutions like the University ofInternational Relations and other elite universities in Beijing. Capable graduates with local connections and somewhat lower grades might find jobs in Shanghai, Guangdong, Zhejiangand Tianjin. Woe to those who end up in the landlocked Henan State Security Department, under-resourced, undertrained and overlooked.

While Henan province’s intelligence officers may have had the same mission as their comrades in Beijing, they had more rustic ways of going about it. One officer, posing as a scholar at the local Academy of Social Sciences, tried to blatantly honeypot Barry, bribe him and recruit him without so much as trying to strike up a rapport. The spy even explained how he would give Barry access to an email account where Barry could discreetly send in reportsas email drafts. Chinese intelligence officers could then log into the same account and read his messages. ‘How stupid do you think the Americans are?’ Barry asked him. A second local agency – the ‘pain in the ass’ Shanghai State Security Bureau – also harassed him alongsimilar lines. Was this the muscle called in to prop up China’s strained pretence of ‘peaceful rise’? Other foreign scholars and policymakers, perhaps because of their seniority, weretreated more delicately as targets for influence.

Weak points and revolving doors

Other US think tanks envied the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s unusual connections in Beijing. One of the largest American think tanks, Carnegie runs a joint centre in Beijing with Tsinghua University, an elite institution that’s also Xi Jinping’s alma mater.But Carnegie’s presence in China goes back even earlier to a partnership with China Reform Forum.

Cables released by WikiLeaks, mostly from between 2006 and 2010, reveal only one aspect from the twilight phase of China Reform Forum’s influence operations. Although the MSS still uses the front group to go after easier targets than the United States, the cables arefrom the front’s last days as a highly active and effective intelligence front. And MSS officers were busily exploiting the group’s warm and fuzzy reformist aura to do far more than interact with American diplomats.

America’s think tanks have long been of interest to Chinese intelligence agencies. Numerous spies from both the MSS and People’s Liberation Army have held posts as visiting scholars in DC think tanks with varying degrees of transparency and awareness about their backgrounds.2 Even before the MSS was created, Chinese intelligence analysts were compiling open-source studies of influential think tanks in the Reagan era.3

Closer to the present, MSS Vice Minister Yu Fang travelled to America in the 1990s to carry out fieldwork on the Washington think tank community using his pseudonym, Yu Enguang. Surveying both the Democratic Party–aligned Brookings Institution and the Republican-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the experienced operative queried them ontheir funding, staff and policy influence. ‘These think tanks could be called storage houses or training institutions for government officials,’ he concluded, counting up the many former senior officials among their ranks. ‘Their status and influence mustn’t be downplayed. If we’re to understand American politics, we can’t be indifferent to think tanks.’4

Yu understood that think tanks are open, revolving doors of people and ideas, connecting governments to civil society and academia. They pay little heed to security – after all, they generally don’t deal with classified information. Physical security might be practised by some institutions, but warding off influence operations and misinformation is largely up to the discretion of individual analysts. They are exactly the kind of weak points intelligence agencies hope to exploit in democracies. Cultivating and recruiting scholars who might end up in positions of power is orders of magnitude less risky than trying to target servinggovernment officials.

Another advantage for the MSS is that some scholars and consultants can be more valuable intelligence assets than government officials. Most government officials work in narrow lanes and wouldn’t normally interact with politicians or colleagues working on unrelated topics on a whim. Their spy handlers need to painstakingly prepare secure channels, as well as

backup options, for meeting them, often through third countries. For an academic, on the other hand, jumping between research topics and meeting bureaucrats and politicians forcoffee is just part of the job. Regular trips to China for fieldwork don’t raise any eyebrows, even if a few leisurely chats with intelligence officers pop up in one’s itinerary. Writing confidential reports for various clients is also a common part of think tank work andconsultancy.

So the MSS had long known that think tanks were an ideal operating ground for influence operations, and now with China Reform Forum it had the team it needed to breach and enter.Its entanglement with the scholars of not just America but the world goes deeper than any other covert MSS operation of its kind. While MSS US specialists dominated the front group,many of its staff had studied in France and spoke the language. For example, the forum held numerous conferences with the prestigious French Institute of International Relations, giving MSS officers excuses to probe European scholars and policymakers.5 In 2016, one of China Reform Forum’s staff members reappeared in the Chinese embassy in Paris as a ‘press attaché’.6

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Fittingly, it was at a conference on China’s ‘peaceful rise’ that the Carnegie Endowment announced the opening of its new branch in Beijing. Already in 2004 Carnegie boasted the largest China program of any DC think tank, one that would more than double in size by the decade’s end.7 The two-day conference that September drew together leading voices on American China policy like former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and J.Stapleton Roy, a former ambassador to China.8 It was, in the words of one speaker, ‘the best conference on China I’ve had in my professional career’.9

The Carnegie Endowment had much to be excited about. After several years of collaboration with China Reform Forum, it could now reveal it had inked a deal to deepen that partnership and set up Carnegie’s first Beijing office within the premises of China Reform Forum. It was the first American think tank with a permanent presence in Beijing. Carnegie’s Chinese partner, which program director Minxin Pei stressed was ‘an independent NGO’, would also kindly appoint a local coordinator to help run seminars and meetings in Beijing. Perhaps as a gesture of goodwill,

several members of China Reform Forum, like Ministry of Foreign Affairs think tank chief Ruan Zongze, travelled to DC for the conference.

This was, in Pei’s words, an unrivalled chance to ‘reach the Chinese policycommunity’ and engage in honest discussion with the Party.

Carnegie thought it was expanding its influence within China, blind to the fact that it was taking part in an MSS influence operation.

Once again, dreams of shaping China were turned on their head, transformed into opportunities for the Party’s own foreign influence operations.10 The blunders of Soros’sChina Fund, and Wang Chi and Chas Freeman’s US–China Policy Foundation, were doomedto be repeated.

China Reform Forum’s access to Party insiders and reformist guise proved irresistible.

Carnegie’s China experts were not fools who would happily repeat Party lines. Minxin Pei, now a professor at Claremont McKenna College, is an experienced and perceptive observer of Chinese politics. Writing in 2005, he argued the Bush administration needed to toughen up on China and push the country to implement policy changes that would ‘assuage Americananxieties about the nature of the Chinese regime and its aspirations for power’. Pei had noillusions about China’s authoritarian ruling Party, which he assessed was ‘entrenched in power and shows no willingness to embrace democratic reforms’.11

But entering a partnership with a front for the MSS Social Investigations

Bureau risks far more than ideological compromise. Nestled in Massachusetts Avenue in central Washington, DC, the Carnegie Endowment’s headquarters speaks to its engagement with policy and politicians in America. Even without relying on classified information, theinsights scholars gain from living and breathing Beltway culture can help the MSS track US politics and guide its intelligence operations. The kinds of exchanges and discussions that are a routine part of any policy analyst’s work become fraught when your interlocutor is a covert political influence officer. It’s not a game that genuine think tanks – the kind that aren’t runby the MSS – can safely play.

The Carnegie Endowment wasn’t just sending its own China scholars into the MSS’s arms but bringing other organisations and policymakers along for the ride, opening them up to the kind of targeting Barry experienced. China Reform Forum already wielded Zheng Bijian’s magnetic power and the Central Party School as tools for drawing in

foreigners, and the Carnegie Endowment was essentially adding to its armoury, lending its name and reputation to the MSS. For example, the Carnegie Endowment introduced the MacArthur Foundation to China Reform Forum when the philanthropic organisation, one of America’s largest, was scoping out prospects for a presence in Beijing.12 In one meeting, Carnegie gathered scholars from India who shared their analysis of Indian foreign policy with undercover MSS officers.13

One meeting organised by the Carnegie Endowment and China Reform Forum, on Taiwan,saw MSS officers affiliated with a total of three different fronts attend.14 This relationship extended into the United States too, such as when Carnegie hosted China Reform Forum’s vice president for a speech in Washington, DC.15 After Obama’s election in 2009, the same MSS officers organised a conference with Carnegie’s China program, then headed by former National Security Council staffer and US Taiwan representative Douglas Paal, to learn the latest on American political developments.16

A few years after the Carnegie Endowment’s bargain with the MSS, its

China program was in full swing. Carnegie Endowment bosses in DC and New York rewarded it with an additional US$3 million grant to expand its engagement with China. The US needed more research to help ‘redefine the nature of its relationships with major and emerging powers’, the Carnegie Corporation’s president explained.17 China Reform Forum’s peddling of insider access continued to deepen the global think tank community’scompromise.

The Carnegie Endowment was far from the only American think tank that unwittingly wrapped itself up in the MSS’s influence operations. Two China representatives for the AsiaSociety, an influential institution based in New York, were named as members of China Reform Forum’s council.18 Washington, DC’s Center for Strategic and International Studieswas often a host for visiting China Reform Forum delegations, as was the BrookingsInstitution, which published an English edition of Zheng Bijian’s collected works.

Scholars, think tanks and diplomats from India, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Canada, Taiwan, Germany and the United Kingdom were frequently drawn to the MSS group. The Australian embassy invited Ding Kuisong, one of the most senior MSS officers running China Reform Forum, to give a presentation to Australian defence officials. Later, the embassy took a

visiting Australian intelligence analyst to meet China Reform Forum scholars.19

Analysts at geopolitical intelligence firm Stratfor considered a China Reform Forum staffer as one of their best sources, while noting with puzzlement that he sometimes ‘drops totally off the radar’.20

The RAND Corporation

It was China Reform Forum’s partnership with RAND that should have raised the most eyebrows.

If you’ve ever windsurfed, then you’ve literally stood upon the RAND Corporation’s work– the sport was invented by one of its engineers. That’s just one example of how RAND’s achievements speckle twentieth-century history. Its analysts have left their mark on the fullspectrum of government policy, from nuclear weapons strategy, counterterrorism efforts andhealthcare to the earliest computers and government-sponsored LSD testing.21

Nearly all its work is published and unclassified, but its critics still see it as some mix between the ‘deep state’ and the Cold War military-industrial complex. Pravda, the Soviet Union propaganda outlet, branded it an ‘academy of science and death’. In 1971, RAND unwillingly galvanised the anti–Vietnam War movement when RAND analyst Daniel Ellsbergleaked a top-secret study of US involvement in the country to the press. Soon dubbed the Pentagon Papers, the report revealed how successive presidents had deceived the publicabout the plans and motivations behind the conflict.

For these reasons, the MSS quickly homed in on RAND as a priority for influence and espionage operations. It surely helped that RAND is headquartered in California, the state with the most mature MSS networks. And, like any decent think tank, RAND had a healthy interest in China, employing some of America’s leading experts on the country.

Through China Reform Forum, RAND also had some of the strongest and longest-running ties to the MSS of any American institution. For over a decade starting in the mid-nineties, the groups partnered to hold high-level conferences, gathering the US investor community with undeclared MSS officers and the Chinese scholars and officials they chaperoned. Funded in part by the US Department of Defense, the meetings gave the MSS a chance to focus attention on China’s economic rise and build elite contacts in the United States withRAND’s help. A 2003 conference even gained

support from Capital Group, one of the world’s largest investment fund managers, which sent senior executives to participate.22 Alongside respected Chinese academics likeinternational relations scholar Wang Jisi, a vice president of the MSS front group, Chinese intelligence officers posing as think tank scholars sat opposite RAND analysts, Americangovernment officials and investors at these meetings. The MSS seemed happy to share its bounty: an otherwise low-profile general from China’s military intelligence agency sat in on one of the meetings.23

Esteemed RAND economist Charles Wolf Jr was one of China Reform Forum’s best contacts, an old friend and a frequent collaborator. ‘The Chinese had clearly sought out someone of pretty high prestige at RAND,’ which led them to Wolf, said former RAND analyst James Mulvenon.24 Despite years of engagement with China, Wolf was oblivious to the think tank’s true nature and introduced it as ‘the think tank of China’s Central Party School’. Wolf simply didn’t want to know, and neither did RAND’s leadership. ‘China is too important to be left to the sinologists’ was a common saying in those circles.

In fact, Wolf ‘deliberately cockblocked all of the China people at RAND

from attending the meetings’ with China Reform Forum, as Mulvenon put it. The decision was so unusual that even the Chinese questioned why RAND’s well-known China specialists didn’t show their faces when they visited the organisation’s offices in Santa Monica. RAND’s culture was heavily biased towards economic analysis, Mulvenon explained. The thinking was that econometric tools could be used to unravel tough problems of strategy, nuclear weapons and defence, and ‘you didn’t need area specialists’. With the China experts out of the room, China Reform Forum’s staff and scholars had more room topush deceptive narratives and peddle disinformation.25

But when Mulvenon, a junior researcher at RAND in the early 2000s, got his hands on a list of the Chinese visitors, it became clear they had other reasons for coming to America. In the RAND meetings, talkative Chinese economists like Hu Angang and Huang Fanzhang, who were senior members of China Reform Forum, sat alongside undercover intelligence officerswho hardly uttered a word. MSS bureau chief and US specialist Lin Di was one of them, but to RAND he was known as a vice president of the Chinese think tank. Mulvenon alerted the FBI to Lin’s presence, sending its counterintelligence agents into overdrive. It turned out that while Lin Di

went through the motions of attending RAND sessions by day, he was bouncing across Los Angeles to meet assets by night. His contacts were numerous enough that some evenings he was having second or even third dinners around town. Katrina Leung, the FBI source who was conclusively outed a few years later as an MSS spy, was one of Lin’s agents (see chapter4).

Mulvenon tried to warn RAND executive Michael D. Rich, later the institution’s CEO, about China Reform Forum. ‘I was able to tell him definitively that they were, if not anofficial part of the MSS, a platform for MSS officers to conduct intelligence operationsabroad,’ Mulvenon says.

He maintains Rich brushed off the concerns, emphasising both Charles Wolf’s experience and pre-eminence, and the importance of RAND’s relationship with the Chinese think tank.

Undaunted, Wolf continued to deepen RAND’s exchanges with China Reform Forum. He proposed the two organisations team up to connect former US government officials, each leaders in the areas of diplomacy, intelligence and economics, with their Chinese counterparts. Rich also backed the idea. After all, as Wolf argued, China Reform Forum, now headed by Central Party School leader Li Junru, offered unparalleled ‘opportunities for top-level networking in China’.26

Over several meetings with the think tank’s MSS officers in 2011, Wolf drafted plans for task forces that would bring together influential Chinese and American thinkers to work oncommon goals. Robert Gates, the recently retired secretary of defence and a former CIA director, as well as former World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, were two of the names Wolf floated. China Reform Forum couldn’t quite match the monumental status of Wolf’s nominees, instead offering the names of respected academics it had long worked with, as well as MSS officers like former Guangming Daily US correspondent Xue Fukang. China Reform Forum also nominated two more MSS officers to coordinate activities on their side. Wolfhoped the fruits of these exchanges would influence US–China relations, including through joint reports submitted to both governments and opinion articles in leading outlets such asThe New York Times.

Mindful of China’s developing economy but oblivious to the MSS’s resourcing, Wolfproposed that RAND would scrape together the funds for 80 per cent of the project’s bill, amounting to over a million dollars. In essence, he was offering to help out with an MSS elite influence operation

and pay for the privilege. The money would be used to bring the task force members to each other’s country, carry out research, and hold more conferences that the MSS could use as cover for meeting assets.

It would have been one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of MSS influence operations had it gone ahead. In the end, two things may have come together to foil to Wolf’s plans, neither of them a US government intervention. First, a billionaire Wolf turned to for funding was initially supportive of the project, but his staff had the foresight to ask a friend with intelligence experience for advice on China Reform Forum. The former intelligence official came back with damning findings. ‘At best the initiative is a talk shop with relatively little impact,’ they wrote. ‘At worst, funders of the project would be paying Chinese intelligence to influence US policymakers discreetly and to give Chinese intelligence access to former senior officials’ who maintain US government advisory roles and might take up office in future administrations. ‘The MSS is not a pathway to influence’ within China, they cautioned.27 Second, it was around this time, 2011 or 2012, that the MSS dismantled the CIA’s networks in China. In the process, several MSS officers were executed, and the ministry may have lost confidence in China Reform Forum’s cover.28

Chinese scholars lend a hand

Zhu Feng had travelled to America many times. This trip in 2018 seemed no different to the others as he rushed to board his flight home at Los Angeles airport. An international relations professor at Nanjing University, Zhu is no stranger to government circles but was surprised when two FBI agents stopped him at the boarding gate. They took his passport, crossed outhis American visa and told him he’d ‘receive a notification’ once he was back in China. His visa had been cancelled.29

Zhu revealed to the New York Times’s Jane Perlez that the FBI had also met him when he arrived in America. They quizzed him about ties to the Chinese military and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They asked him to hand over what he knew about his colleagues’ connections to Chinese intelligence agencies, but he said he didn’t know anything. No cooperation, no visa, seemed to be the message. Zhu is well known to American scholars and journalists, many of whom were shocked by what they considered to be an inexplicable and unwarranted intervention.30

The professor admitted to the New York Times that he’d worked with a group overseen by the China Association for International Friendly Contact, which the newspaper described as an organisation of the ‘ruling Communist Party that seeks to promote Chinese interests abroad’, but that’s less than half the truth.31

The association is a well-documented front group for the Liaison Bureau of the Chinese military’s Political Work Department. The agency’s obscurity – it doesn’t even have an English-language Wikipedia page – makes it easy to miss its importance. Simply put, it’s a military counterpart to MSS political influence units like the Social Investigation Bureau,specialising in using political warfare to win wars without fighting. The professor is still listed as a council member of its front group and a researcher at its think tank, alongside numerous undercover military officers.32 In 2017, Zhu worked with Xin Qi, secretly a majorgeneral in the political warfare unit, to organise a conference in China that placed Xinalongside American China experts and security thinkers like Dennis Blair, the former director of national intelligence who had also been targeted by the MSS’s CICEC influence front.33

The FBI probably had an interest in Zhu’s MSS ties too. Zhu produces an

academic journal in partnership with a Chinese government think tank, the Development Research Center’s Asia-Africa Development Research Institute. Ranked among China’s top research institutions, the Development Research Center is one of the go-to stops when foreign scholars visit Beijing, but few know that several of its institutes are covertly run and staffed by the MSS.34 Their exact operational role remains mysterious, but intelligence officers andsecret agent handlers returning from overseas often reappear as researchers there.

Not long after Zhu left the United States for perhaps the last time, Wu Baiyi, head of American studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, had his visa cancelled in a similar encounter with the FBI. Likewise, Wu’s biography reveals his involvement in both covert Chinese military and MSS organisations. He’s been a long-time member of ChinaReform Forum and also maintains an affiliation with another part of the DevelopmentResearch Center that’s run by the MSS, the Institute of World Development Studies.35

China Reform Forum is nothing without these reputable names. While the MSS directlyemploys many scholars as intelligence analysts at CICIR,

it’s is widely recognised as part of the MSS; US embassy cables dutifully note the fact whenever they quote CICIR researchers. This limits its effectiveness for influence and espionage (although it still participates in those activities). MSS operations therefore rely on genuine and internationally recognised academics to open doors, make introductions andgather intelligence. At the very least, MSS officers have accompanied these scholars on international trips with the purpose of meeting agents after each day’s meetings.

What’s remarkable about the involvement of these Chinese thinkers is that many of them are widely considered to be leading reformists and moderates. They’re often well liked by their peers in Australia, the United States, Japan and so on. Like China Reform Forum as awhole, the West has often looked to them as the kinds of people who, it was hoped, would gain more influence inside the Party and push it towards reason, liberalism and tolerance. For decades, they’ve been widely consulted by foreign diplomats in China.

Cases like Zhu Feng’s raise the unnerving possibility that many Chinese scholars owe their survival, or even their success, to relationships with intelligence agencies. As China expert Peter Mattis says, ‘The MSS is not so foolish as to not see value in someone like Zhu’ as a tool in their operations.36 Well-regarded academics with foreign connections are allowed a spectre of autonomy to the extent it benefits the MSS. It’s a symbiosis that gives the scholars relative freedom and security, and spies influence and cover. Zhu even hinted at this Faustian bargain in his interview with The New York Times: ‘When a national security official comes to my office, I have no way to kick them out,’ he explained.37 The MSS playbook appears to recommend fostering friends with helpful opinions rather than changing the minds of dissenters, but China Reform Forum and the MSS’s cynical role in Zheng Bijian’s ‘peaceful rise’ theory should lead us to pause before taking Chinese foreign policy debates at facevalue.

Wang Jisi, a long-standing and senior member of China Reform Forum,

exemplifies this strange duality. As president of Peking University’s School of International Studies, Professor Wang is often considered among the country’s leading and most reasonableforeign policy scholars. No ‘America worshipper’, he is nonetheless wary of overstating China’s power and ability to challenge the United States. He often emphasises the space for

cooperation between the two countries and practises this himself, serving on the board of the International Crisis Group, as a fellow at New York’s Asia Society, and as a PrincetonUniversity scholar.38

At the same time, Wang has been closely associated with the MSS for decades. He became a member of the Social Investigation Bureau’s CICEC front group in the early 1990s, joining its strange medley of scholars, artists and undercover officers, like future Minister of State Security Geng Huichang.39 Even before then, Wang was joining MSS officers on trips toJapan (including one who had previously been declared persona non grata while posing as a journalist) and the United States.40 As head of American studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in the early 1990s, Wang was a colleague of MSS US operations guru Lin Di, who covertly managed the academy’s foreign exchanges for many years. In 1998, Lin,then operating as CICEC’s secretary-general, accompanied Wang to workshops in Tokyo and Washington. In 2003, Wang would join Lin and other MSS officers, now acting as researchers in China Reform Forum, at a RAND Corporation conference. These were the same events Lin used as cover to rendezvous with his Californian agents.41 Wang also headed the Central Party School’s Institute of International Strategic Studies at the peak of itsdeep collaboration with China Reform Forum. Similarly, leading reformist economist Fan Gang took part in many of these activities while a member of at least two MSS front organisations.42

Jin Canrong runs a more hawkish line than Wang Jisi but has equally strong MSS connections. The man known affectionately to Chinese nationalists as ‘Political Commissar Jin’ has gained a large following for brash pronouncements like ‘China is a dragon. America is an eagle. Britain is a lion. When the dragon wakes up, the others are all snacks’.43 Asassociate dean of Renmin University’s School of International Studies, he’s among China’s most prominent scholars of international relations. He was also interviewed by the FBI on a recent trip to the United States and blasted the measures as ‘ridiculous’.44 And he has connections to the MSS’s front groups: he’s been a member of China Reform Forum and the China International Public Relations Association.45

Reformist or conservative, hawkish or dovish, the MSS seems to have an in with many while keeping a watchful eye on the rest. This is an intelligence agency able to reach across China’s society to orchestrate operations against the most sensitive of targets – world leaders.

CHAPTER 11

‘CHINA NEVER FORGETS ITS FRIENDS’:ELITE CAPTURE

ZHENG BIJIAN AND the MSS’s peaceful rise bandwagon drew an incredible crowd of admirers. In 2004, the year after he introduced the concept at the Bo’ao Forum, a who’s who of the Indo-Pacific gathered once more in Hainan for a special roundtable on ‘China’s peacefulrise’. This time, Zheng surely had little to worry about when it came to the international appeal of his operation. ‘Against the backdrop of wave upon wave of theories about “China threats” and “China collapse” … I have noticed lately that people are quite interested in the topic of China’s peaceful rise,’ he remarked.1 Though his concept had already fluttered out ofthe rhetoric of Party leaders, the elite audience before him was a testament to its remarkablyimmediate and resounding success. To the MSS, this itself was enough proof of concept.

Rounding off his speech with a message of ‘peace, development and cooperation’, Zheng returned to the row of coffee-brown lounge chairs reserved for VIP speakers. Next in line were Fidel Valdez Ramos, Ernesto Zedillo and Bob Hawke, respectively the former leaders of the Philippines, Mexico and Australia. Former US president George H. W. Bush, who hadserved as the top American representative in Beijing nearly three decades earlier, was anotherguest, praising China’s peaceful rise as ‘very reassuring and very, very important to the Asianhorizon and Asia’s landscape’.2

Before them sat a few dozen of the world’s leading statespeople, business figures and scholars on an enormous circle of tables surrounding a mound

of potted flowers. RAND Corporation economist Charles Wolf Jr, whose exchanges with China Reform Forum were used by the MSS to facilitate intelligence operations, was one of the first speakers that day. Other frequent DC interlocutors for China Reform Forum followed, including John Hamre, CEO of the Washington, DC Center for Strategic andInternational Studies and a former deputy secretary of defence, and then John L. Thornton, the former Goldman Sachs co-president who’s one of the Brookings Institution’s largestdonors. Senior Chinese officials and scholars were interspersed among them, including MSS officer Ding Kuisong and many of the agency’s old friends. Peking University international relations scholar Wang Jisi was there, as was Liu Changle, CEO of Hong Kong’s PhoenixMedia empire and a former PLA officer.3

The roundtable’s agenda reads like a checklist of target areas and narratives for MSS influence operations. After heavy discussion of China’s economic growth, the participants moved on to US–China relations and the barriers to Chinese development, as well as the role of media in promoting ‘peaceful rise’. Over dinner, the topic shifted to the role multinationalcorporations could play in the Party’s schemes. Philips, the Dutch electronics giant, sponsored the event and sent its CEO to speak on the topic alongside the MSS’s Ding Kuisong. The year before, China Reform Forum helped the Philips CEO secure an audience with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.4 Continuing the next day, China Reform Forum ran dedicated sessions on France and Japan, both top priorities for the MSS Social InvestigationBureau’s intelligence operations.5

The MSS was making the most of the Bo’ao Forum’s opportunities.

China Reform Forum drew an equally impressive crowd to its peaceful rise roundtable the next year. This time they partnered with New York’s Asia Society to run the event, which included speeches by Singaporean statesman Lee Kwan Yew, Nepalese deputy head ofgovernment Kirti Nidhi Bista, French presidential advisor Jérôme Monod and Korean presidential advisor Moon Chung-in.6 Just about every major American foreign policyresearch organisation sent a senior representative. On the sidelines of the conference, Zheng Bijian and his MSS entourage arranged individual meetings with key international contacts such as John L. Thornton (see chapter 12 ).7

Whether they meant it or not, these global luminaries were lending their reputations to a misguided hope that the Chinese Communist Party would

follow the path Zheng described. They may have differed in their exact belief in the proposal, but the respect they afforded China Reform Forum cemented its worldwide ties and the currency of its undercover MSS officers. Certainly, almost none were aware that the theory of China’s ‘peaceful rise’ wasn’t just a propaganda narrative but a deliberate influence campaign by the Party’s covert agents, some of whom were sitting right beside them.

Of all the speakers China Reform Forum mustered at the Bo’ao Forum, Bob Hawke bestexemplified the MSS’s patient and persistent manipulation of elites and their good intentions. He also shows how the agency peddles access to the Party’s highest leaders as its greatest tool for influence and compromise.

Bob Hawke

Hawke, Australia’s prime minister from 1983 to 1991, was an ardent believer in close ties to China, seeing that Australia too might dine on the fruits of China’s economic reforms. Australia had in fact arrived late to the game. It only established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1973 and had a lot of catching up to do. Successive Australianprime ministers travelled to the country to build personal ties to Party leaders. In the mid-eighties, Hawke welcomed Hu Yaobang and his premier, Zhao Ziyang, in what Australian China scholar Geremie Barmé dubbed a ‘burgeoning bromance’ between the two nations’ chiefs. This was the most optimistic period of recent Chinese political history. ‘Reform and opening’ seemed to be materialising right before one’s eyes in those days. Many of the men at the top of the Party were easygoing, upstanding and invested in economic – maybe even political – liberalisation. ‘I found it personally easy to get along with [Zhao],’ Hawke said.‘We were on the same wavelength.’8

Hawke’s friends in the Party leadership were the losers. Early signs of the storm to come, such as the Party’s 1983 campaign against ‘spiritual pollution’, were ‘downplayed by many at the time as nothing more than a side-show to the real story of China’s economic reforms’,writes Barmé.

Two years after Hu was ousted for exercising his own initiative and sympathising with calls for political reform, the protests in Tiananmen Square sparked by his death had now been horrifically quashed.9 It was a physical refutation of every principle Hu stood for, strikingthe Australian prime minister deeply. Hawke remembered Hu (‘he looked like a little

bright bird’), who once travelled with him to the remote Mount Channar iron ore mine in Australia’s Pilbara desert, as ‘a lot of fun’ with a habit of ignoring prepared materials tospeak off the cuff. ‘[Hawke] was devastated for two reasons. One was the horrendous, horrendous reported loss of life, and the other was that he saw it would be a disaster for China,’ said Hawke’s biographer and wife.10

Hawke wept as he went over gruesome details of that Sunday’s Tiananmen massacre. A Chinese funerary wreath stood before him, marked in black ink with the character dian for ‘mourning’, as he addressed a memorial service of hundreds inside Canberra’s Parliament House. ‘Thousands have been killed and injured, victims of a leadership that seemsdetermined to hang on to the reins of power at any cost – at awful human cost,’ he said in a trembling tone. Then, a few paragraphs into his prepared speech, the prime minister reached for another set of notes and began to read directly from a classified cable sent by the Australian embassy in Beijing. In the chaos and shock of that week, the number of dead waswidely estimated at over 10,000, an overly precise translation of a Chinese word that often means something more like ‘many thousands’ or simply ‘a huge number’. Accounts from thetime claiming military vehicles drove back and forth over the bodies of students, turning them to pulp, were probably wrong. But the overall picture of murder was true. Hundreds ofinnocent civilians had been gunned down, their blood staining the streets of Beijing. Some were killed in their homes by excited soldiers firing at random into the buildings around them. Twisted bodies lay on the city’s central avenue, pressed in their bikes by tanks.11

The Tiananmen massacre was an inflection point in Australia’s relationship with China. A few days after his speech, Hawke surprised his cabinet when he acted alone to announce that the government would be extending the visas of all Chinese nationals in Australia, and 42,000 ultimately gained asylum. It was the most significant event in the history ofAustralia’s Chinese community. ‘I have a deep love for the Chinese people,’ Hawke later explained.12

It was this emotion that kept him connected to China and led him to see the best in the country even after 1989. Hawke had planned to visit China later that year before calling it off because of the massacre. ‘The personal relationship went into a deep freeze,’ said Hawke.13In 1991, he lost office. The final chapter of his career – now as a businessman – had begun,and the

same allure of Chinese economic reform that drew him in as a statesman and politician retained its powerful pull on him.

Back in Beijing

Four years after the Tiananmen massacre moved Bob Hawke to tears, he received an unusual message from the Chinese consul in Sydney, asking if they could meet. He hadn’tbeen to China since 1986 and wasn’t sure what the diplomat had in mind when he arrived at Hawke’s office in the city centre. After awkward pleasantries, the Chinese official told Hawke he’d been instructed to ask if he would be willing to visit China. Finally, the Party’s leadership was reaching out once more – not just to Hawke but to the world. Hawke leapt at the opportunity. Still mindful of 4 June, he nonetheless ‘wanted to go forward because the relationship was so important.’14

Arriving in Beijing that July, Hawke reflected on the significance of the invitation. ‘It shows something about the deep intelligence and thinking of the leaders,’ he later commented, seeing in it a profound pragmatism and willingness to set aside differences. He was offered the chance to meet General Secretary Jiang Zemin, a quirky and charismatic man fond of reciting the Gettysburg Address in heavily accented English, and waited in theDiaoyutai State Guesthouse until the leader was ready.15 Finally, he was whisked to a meeting room in the Party leadership compound. He saw not just Jiang but his inner cabinet too seated before him, about six people in total.

As Hawke recounted, ‘I walked in, walked across the room and Jiang Zemin got up and he walked out towards me and he said, “Mr Hawke, there’s one thing I want to say to you.” And I thought, “Shit, what’s this?”’ Jiang surely remembered his condemnation of the Tiananmenmassacre. He would have been aware of Hawke’s past friendship with his purgedpredecessors as general secretary. The capacity of Party officials to lecture and berate foreigners was as well known as their occasional magnanimity. Instead, Jiang extended his hand and said, ‘Mr Hawke, China never forgets its friends, and we want you to know that we regard you as one of our best friends.’ All Hawke’s nervousness, built up by the long wait and the meeting’s imperial setting, must have evaporated at that moment. ‘They’dunderstood that my tears had been out of love for China and the Chinese people. And they’d understood this and they were welcoming me back. It

was a marvellous moment,’ he recalled.16 Just a week earlier, Prime Minister Paul Keatinghad visited Beijing too – Australian embassy officials described his agenda as ‘business, business, business’.17 The People’s Daily featured Hawke’s visit on its front page, describing how Jiang Zemin praised his ‘far-sightedness and perceptiveness’ in emphasising Australiancooperation with the Asia-Pacific.18 In January 1989, Hawke had proposed the creation of what became the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting.

The special bromance between Chinese and Australian leaders was back on track. Hawke thought the fate of Zhao Ziyang, who eventually died in house arrest, was ‘extremely sad’, but the importance of building ties to the Party leadership came first. After all, most assumed that China’s economy would grow and with it Chinese politics would naturally grow moreagreeable.19 The question of the Tiananmen massacre was swept under the rug, for it would have been impossible for Hawke to move forward with China otherwise.

The Party’s leaders had their own agenda. Alongside Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, the conservative premier known as the ‘Butcher of Beijing’ for his part in the Tiananmenmassacre, was almost certainly there to greet Hawke. The massacre was the defining moment of Jiang and Li’s political careers, cementing their power within the Party. Few benefited more from it. They knew what happened to Party leaders who were inclined towards politicalreform and against the Party’s own misconduct.

For all Jiang Zemin’s reputation outside of China as a reasonable leader with unusualfondness for the West, especially compared to Xi Jinping, the general secretary struck a remarkably different tone internally. A newly uncovered internal document shows adifferent perspective on the man.

Speaking to a secret nationwide MSS conference months after Hawke’s visit, Jiang declared that ‘The West indeed hopes to see China in turmoil’. He believed ‘capitalism ultimately seeks to defeat socialism’, and to this end the United States was ‘fighting a global war without smoke’. Jiang’s answer to this, much the same as Xi Jinping’s today, was to emphasise the sanctity of communist rule. ‘If we don’t have a solid political regime and we don’t have a vigorous people’s democratic dictatorship, then there’s no point discussing anything else,’ Jiang told the intelligence officers gathered before him, reminding them of theSoviet Union’s inglorious demise. ‘If we

lose the realm carved out for us by countless martyrs, then what’s the use of having greater economic development?’20

The China in Hawke’s eyes and the Party’s China were two very different things. There’s nomore striking demonstration of this than the untold details of how Hawke’s return to Beijing was arranged. Though the invitation came down through the consulate-general, it was an ‘unusual’ research society called the China Institute of Strategy and Management (CISM) that officially hosted Hawke.21 The group was acting as a conduit for Beijing’s effort to rebuild its international status by befriending world leaders. On the same day he entertained Hawke’s audience, Jiang Zemin met with former Thai prime minister Chatichai Choonhavan, who had also travelled to China at CISM’s behest.22

CISM named Hawke its first foreign advisor and held an international conference for his visit. ‘The future should give East Asia a chance,’ went his speech, which became the lead article of the first edition of the institute’s influential journal.23 The ‘vicious xenophobe’ Wang Xiaodong was a regular contributor to the group and the translator of Hawke’sarticle.24 Its journal became a hotbed of contributions from red royalty like Xi Jinping, then alocal official in Fujian province. Importantly, the group’s secretary-general, Qin Chaoying, was the son of a senior propaganda official and close to Xi Jinping’s family.25

Hawke almost certainly didn’t recognise that his well-connected friends

at CISM were in fact deeply involved with the intelligence community. Qin himself later became a member of the MSS Social Investigation Bureau’s China Reform Forum front group.26 China’s post-Tiananmen embrace of world leaders such as Hawke was a professional influence operation.

MSS officers were all over the group. A photo that appears to show Hawke’s appointmentas an advisor to CISM includes a curious set of faces. Secretary-general Qin grins as he hands a gift to Hawke in the foreground. Behind them, Yu Enguang looks on with a steely expression from behind his trademark shaded glasses. The institute’s records describe him only as one of its senior advisors and a member of China’s National People’s Congress. Under his real name, Yu Fang, he was the vice minister in charge of MSS efforts to manipulate foreign elites.

In the same photo, Qin Chuan, another senior advisor to the group and the father of itssecretary-general, sits beside Yu. Best known as the former editor-in-chief of the People’sDaily, Qin was chairman of an MSS front

called the China International Culture Publishing Company at the time. While he served as the company’s figurehead, MSS Social Investigation Bureau officers used the business to provide cover for operations in the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, including handling FBI asset Katrina Leung.27 Luo Qingchang, an MSS advisor and the headof its predecessor agency, was another CISM member. Also affiliated was an MSS officer who worked in India and Hong Kong before becoming manager of an MSS trading company.28

Military figures were heavily represented too. CISM started its existence as the internalthink tank of the PLA’s Academy of Military Science, where it served to gather experts from across the intelligence community for workshops and to write reports. Two weeks after the Tiananmen massacre, it was upgraded to an ‘externally open’ group permitted to carry outinternational exchanges. Former vice premier Gu Mu, an architect of China’s economic reform, was its president (his son was a senior military intelligence officer).29 Xin Qi, a rising star in the Chinese military’s influence operations and political warfare department, was another CISM member.30

By befriending Hawke, CISM had now added an operational side to its history of intelligence analysis. And Hawke was one of many targets. The same year as his visit, the organisation established partnerships with America’s RAND Corporation and Atlantic Council, both prominent defence think tanks. Later, former Japanese prime minister Hata Tsutomu joined Hawke as one of the group’s foreign advisors.31 More recently, Japanesecounterintelligence officers found a suspected MSS officer using CISM as cover in an operation to infiltrate Okinawa, which hosts a US military base, and access sensitive technology.32

Cash for access

The former prime minister’s wealth was always something of a mystery. The signs of his success were easy to see. After leaving politics, Hawke developed an exclusive seafront property in Sydney’s inner north into a four-storey mansion, complete with a rooftop putting course.33 The house sold for over A$9 million shortly before his death in 2019.34Over his lifetime, he travelled to China more than a hundred times on business trips.35 But,‘quizzed on any particulars over the years, Hawke has always

demurred on giving any detail’, stated Australia’s Crikey magazine.36 Exactly who the former prime minister was working for in China was a commercial secret.

It all began with that 1993 return to Beijing. Hawke appreciated the warm welcome he received from Party leaders but was also interested in business opportunities. As if by sheer chance, when Hawke was waiting in his hotel lobby on the same trip, a man with an ‘elfin face’ introduced himself to the former prime minister. The man, Jiang Xiaosong, hadrecently returned from studying and working in Japan’s film industry. His mother wasamong China’s greatest movie stars. They exchanged greetings and cards and moved on. A few years later, the two reconnected.37 Jiang, now at home as an entrepreneur and investor, wanted to transform the Hainanese fishing village of Bo’ao into an international conference venue. Signing up Hawke, former Filipino president Fidel Ramos (also an advisor to CISM) and former Japanese prime minister Hosokawa Morihiro as the faces of his new venture, Jiang launched the Bo’ao Forum for Asia in 2001.38

While Hawke lent his considerable reputation to the Bo’ao Forum, now

among the most important channels for CCP elite influence, he also stood to profit considerably from CISM. ‘They wanted to set up a commercial arm and asked me to be chairman, and I accepted,’ Hawke said of his 1993 visit.39 Everything fell in place smoothly. The next year, Hawke flew to China once more to work out the details of the joint venture. Over a few days of meetings, the two parties worked out the business’s name, ownership structure, areas of work and other matters.40 Hawke wanted to call it ‘China Strategic Investment Advisory Co Ltd’ but had to settle for ‘Lanmo Strategic Investment Advisory’. Normally, only major state conglomerates are allowed to use ‘China’ in their name, but Hawke’s company still received special treatment. The usual requirement that businessesinclude a location, such as Beijing, at the beginning of their name was waived.41

What business did CISM, a research society for Chinese spooks, have setting up a commercial wing? CISM secretary-general Qin wanted to commercialise his elite status and the political connections his organisation offered. ‘Qin was a member of the princelings, and at the time still a researcher at the Academy of Military Sciences,’ said one of his colleagues.He was ‘typically rather quiet and spoke little at public gatherings, but if

you conversed with him in the right setting the broadness of his thought, insightfulness of his cognition and sharpness of his analysis left you with a deep impression. This was a man withgreat political aspirations.’42 And he needed Hawke’s help.

The company’s aim was to market Hawke and Qin’s door-opening abilities to foreign companies hoping to make deals in China and assist Chinese companies going abroad. Hawke was widely known in China and among its political class but could never have matched Qin’s intricate understanding of the Party’s elite culture. ‘Lanmo’s niche was that itexploited Hawke’s enormous resources internationally, integrating them with the rather large domestic political and government resources of the Institute of Strategy and Management,’ explained one of the company’s former executives.43 Hawke bragged to The Sydney Morning Herald, ‘I have a very good rapport with the Chinese. I have very good contacts with the government, I know where to go and who to see. I think I’m better known in China than just about any other Australian.’44

Years later, Hawke casually remarked that he’d ‘spent quite a bit of time with the Chinese International Institute of Strategic Studies, which is an extremely high-level body’. The group, in fact an arm of the same military intelligence agency that funnelled illegal donations to Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign, was run by ‘the last head of security intelligence in the PLA’, he said.45 Hawke felt he was influencing China through these expert spy handlers and influencers. ‘You’re talking with people who help to make decisions there,’ he argued.46 Meanwhile, Australian diplomats in Beijing were placed in an uncomfortable position: obliged to welcome the former leader to Beijing and help set up meetings when asked but concerned by the company he kept.

The consultancy got off to a great start. General Alexander Haig, previously President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, worked with Lanmo to help explore nuclear energy projects in China. They also engaged Australian mining companies, a Japanese recycling business and numerous Chinese state-owned enterprises as clients. One of their earliest projects was a successful effort to ensure that delegates from the Conference Board, a peak body for America’s largest corporations, could land meetings with Party leaders and high-level officials in Beijing.47 Hawke also recommended the Communist Party legalise gambling so that he might ride the expansion of the country’s horse-racing industry.48

Lanmo was dissolved sometime in the 2000s, despite its early successes. ‘I do some of my work in China through them, but not all,’ Hawke said in 1998. Of course, he had his own ventures with both Chinese and foreign companies and sat, for instance, on the China Advisory Board of Australian mining giant Fortescue Metals.49 But the significance of Hawke’s dealings with Qin Chaoying and his odd bunch of intelligence community insidershas been overlooked and is remarkably hard to dig up.50

It was CISM that acted as a cut-out for Party leaders when it invited Hawke back to China,operating in tandem with Beijing’s efforts to win key friends among foreign statesmen. Andit’s doubtful Hawke fully understood his Chinese partner’s agenda: they were just doing business. Chinese intelligence officers like Yu Enguang would never have attempted torecruit Hawke as an agent. There simply wasn’t any point.

Instead, Hawke’s value was that he sold China to the rest of the world, reframedAustralia’s image of the nation after the Tiananmen massacre, and gifted his reputation to influence vehicles like the Bo’ao Forum. He was personally taking part in the story of China’s incredible economic rise with his consultancy. Through the fruits of his ‘marvellous’ return to China, he helped craft an image of a modernising and liberalising China.51

To many Australians, Hawke still symbolises a golden era of Australia– China relations and a model for engaging with the Party-state. In 2020, Labor Party shadow minister Jason Clare invoked Hawke’s legacy to criticise the Australian government’s failure to securemeetings and phone calls with Chinese leaders. Disputes over China’s economic coercionagainst Australia ‘should be able to be sorted out on the phone or face to face. That’s whatBob Hawke would have done,’ he said.52

CHAPTER 12

THE PARTY YOU CAN’T LEAVE: TRUMP,BIDEN AND BEYOND

INFLUENCE VEHICLES AND intelligence fronts like the China Institute of Strategy and Management are often short-lived. A serious blow was dealt to these groups when the MSS began to uncover CIA infiltration of its ranks around 2010. The number of exposed CIA assets within China reportedly numbered in the dozens, including the aide to an MSS vice minister involved in China Reform Forum. The MSS’s frantic and merciless destruction of these networks sparked a painstaking re-evaluation of its own foreign operations to determine whether they’d been exposed.1 Scores of plots, methods and operatives had been ruined by the CIA’s moles – which were they? Given its prominence among the MSS’s operations and the positions held by some of the moles, China Reform Forum was almost certainly tainted. Its value for highly sensitive operations in risky terrain such as the United States was vastly diminished.

Today’s China Reform Forum is but a husk of its former self. Even before the MSS realised the extent of CIA penetration among its officers, the front group was on a downward spiral. Zheng Bijian’s departure in 2007, perhaps due to his advanced age, left China Reform Forum without its greatest asset.2 The group still keeps up an impressive listof exchanges with policymakers and research organisations around the world but has passed its peak as an influence platform.

Whatever China Reform Forum’s fate, the MSS never let go of Zheng Bijian. It wasn’t about to give up on its most useful door-opener and

affiliate. China Reform Forum was only one part of Zheng’s exchanges with American elites, which have since touched on presidents Trump and Biden. At the same time, the MSS has attempted to compromise key local politicians in the United States.

Zheng goes platform hopping

Within a year of stepping down as China Reform Forum’s leader, Zheng appeared out of the blue as chairman of CISM. It was no coincidence that Zheng had been selected to lead the group.3

On top of Zheng’s presence, traces of MSS influence operations specialists were all over the organisation. A decade earlier, the very same body spearheaded the Party’s efforts to befriend and enrich former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke.Yu Enguang,the charming former vice minister of the MSS in charge of political influence operations, used his well-worn alias to serve directly under Zheng as the group’s senior vice chairman.4 A few years earlier, the group’s secretary-general had been named a senior council member of China Reform Forum.5

If CISM was being primed for another elite influence operation then what was its target? After a year of careful preparation, in October 2009 the institute joined hands with Washington’s Brookings Institution to hold a major conference on clean energy at Beijing’sDiaoyutai State Guesthouse.

Fighting climate change through clean energy still seems like an obvious area for cooperation between the United States and China. The two countries are leading emitters of greenhouse gases but also at the cutting- edge of renewable energy technology. Just asmutual interests in countering terrorism provided a foundation for warm relations under the Bush administration, this similarly global threat might pave the way towards realising China’s peaceful rise. After the 2008 global financial crisis, US public opinion reflected a major jump in positive attitudes towards China.

The percentage of Americans reporting a favourable opinion of China rose by eleven points to 50 per cent in 2008.6

Both organisers of the forum had clear government support and attracted the kind of high-level attendees that suggested greater forces were at play. Just as the Party’s leaders used CISM to rekindle their relationship with Australia’s Bob Hawke, this bilateral energy forum looked like a chance to set an optimistic tone for relations with the newly instated Barack Obama White House. The United States sent former vice president Al Gore, an

outspoken advocate for climate change action, and ambassador John Huntsman to speak at the event. Former president Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger, delivered a keynote address over dinner. Key White House appointees, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu, spoke via video link.7

In turn, the CCP rolled out some of its most senior officials, particularly those typically chosen to engage with foreigners. Many had MSS ties. Li Keqiang, future premier of China, gave the opening address while Premier Wen Jiabao spoke to a closed-door gathering of attendees. Liu He, the senior Chinese financial official who is now one of Xi Jinping’s keyinterlocutors with the United States, spoke too. Liu was also a senior member of the MSS’sCICEC front group. Tung Chee-hwa, a vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and former chief executive of Hong Kong, gave another address.8Described by China expert Peter Mattis as one of Beijing’s key ‘proxies’ for influence abroad, Tung has been a prolific donor to American foreign policy institutions and universities, sponsoring exchanges in conjunction with a Chinese military influence front.9

John L. Thornton: The middleman

Zheng Bijian’s clean energy forum contributed to a much more specific effect: empowering Brookings chairman John L. Thornton as a communication channel between the two nations. The former Goldman Sachs co-president built his career on investing in long-term relationships, chiefly in China, and has since become a key intermediary between the leaders of China and the United States. In the process, he unwittingly fell into the sights of an MSS influence operation.

In the late nineties, Thornton built connections to key Chinese economic officials who have since risen into national leadership roles. Wang Qishan, who led Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corrupt political rivals and occupies a central position in China’s US diplomacy, is one of his oldest and most important contacts.10 To this day, those relationships have earned him a secretive role shuttling messages between the White House and Zhongnanhai.

When Thornton announced his surprise resignation from Goldman Sachs in 2003, he was travelling in China. He explained to the media that he would be taking up a professorship atBeijing’s prestigious Tsinghua

University (Xi Jinping’s alma mater) to direct a leadership training program there. He’d grown tired of being co-president at Goldman Sachs, where he was known for his ambitious personality, and his prospects for the chief executive job were slim. The immense potential of China’s rise promised a greater legacy than any investment bank presidency.11

Thornton continued to advise Goldman Sachs on China but found new institutions to stand on. He was elected chairman of the Brookings Institution board, placing him at the top of one of America’s most prestigious think tanks, traditionally a Democratic-aligned organisation.Shortly after, he gifted US$12.5 million to the institution’s China program, now called the John L. Thornton China Center.12 He also served as a special China advisor to the president of Yale University.13 Like every other major American foreign policy institution, Brookings had already been engaging with China Reform Forum, hosting Zheng Bijian and the MSS as theytested out the ‘peaceful rise’ theory on its target audience.

The group’s well-advertised elite connections would have immediately stuck out to Thornton. It was affiliated with the Central Party School and headed by a man with General Secretary Hu Jintao’s ear. Its staff had new ideas, a reformist agenda, an unusual air of freeagency, and a willingness to talk about the Party’s inner workings that was uncharacteristic of Chinese think tankers. They were the kinds of people Thornton learnt to gravitate towards in his banking days – interfaces between outsiders like Thornton and the inner circle of the Party leadership.

Thornton soon became one of the group’s top American contacts, and he was often in Beijing for his duties at Tsinghua University. Zheng Bijian was the main attraction when he met with China Reform Forum, but MSS Social Investigation Bureau chief Lin Di sat in on at least three meetings with Thornton. Wang Xuejun, another senior MSS officer, was present at many of the meetings.14 Thornton also attended and spoke at the group’s Bo’ao Forum ‘peaceful rise’ roundtables.15

With these undercover MSS contacts among his Chinese interlocutors in the 2000s, Thornton gradually built what journalist Josh Rogin calls ‘one of the most reliable and high-level networks with the families that run the CCP’.16 Thornton undoubtedly felt he was being given the chance to glean the inner workings of China’s Communist Party as he picked up more accolades within China. The China Reform Forum website once listed dozens of worldleaders and kingmakers as advisors, but almost all look like

they were added without consent: people like Lee Kuan Yew and Hillary Rodham Clintonwho may have met Zheng’s delegations once or twice but don’t appear to have done any more than that. John L. Thornton is the exception. He’s included the title in some of hisonline biographies.17

Thornton also accepted an advisory role at China’s sovereign wealth fund as well as the Chinese government’s Confucius Institutes program, which seeks to influence universities around the world. In 2008 he was awarded China’s ‘Friendship Prize’, the highest award bestowed upon foreigners.18 Today he’s chairman of the Silk Road Finance Corporation, an investment fund dedicated to financing activities under the Belt and Road Initiative, a key strategic policy of Xi Jinping.19

By 2009, the beginning of Obama’s presidency, Thornton was well and truly entrenched as a leading interlocutor between America and China.

According to a former Trump administration White House official, Thornton ‘lobbied very hard’ to become ambassador to China during the Obama years but was passed over for the governor of Utah, Jon Huntsman Jr, a Republican who in his youth had been a Mormon missionary in Taiwan.

Thornton still sought to play the middleman. After the success of the first bilateral cleanenergy forum he’d organised with Zheng, they held an encore in Washington, DC’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Ambassador Huntsman spoke at the conference’s opening but it was Thornton who had the privilege of reading out a message from President Obama to theaudience. Zheng followed with a statement from China’s President Hu Jintao. In spite of their parallel roles as messengers for their nations’ leaders, the differences between Thornton and Zheng ran deep. One was an ambitious former banker working above and around the USgovernment, the other was an old Communist Party insider who had spent the past decadesecretly assisting China’s top intelligence agency.

Thornton’s importance to China only grew after Donald Trump’s election in 2016. At face value, Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and chief strategist, couldn’t have been more opposed to Thornton’s views on China. Bannon helped craft and animate Trump’s campaign-trail attacks on China and globalist elites. He once compared China to 1930s Germany, arguing it was poised to unleash conflict upon the world and locked in aneconomic war against the United States.20 Thornton, with his Goldman

Sachs pedigree and Chinese inroads, seemed to personify everything Bannon was against.

Nonetheless, Bannon reached out to Thornton after Trump’s election victory. The pair in fact had a long history, starting in 1985 when Bannon worked alongside Thornton at Goldman Sachs after a career as a US Navy officer.21 He viewed Thornton as a kind of mentor. According to journalist Josh Rogin, Bannon asked Thornton for help on China ‘because China is the whole thing’. Thornton replied, ‘Steve, I’ve been waiting for thirtyyears to hear someone in that chair make that comment.’ He’d played a role in the Obama White House’s relations with China, but now he was being offered a whole other level of influence. Thornton elected to stay out of the administration, preferring to work behind the scenes with Bannon and Trump.22

Bannon mistook Thornton’s access for expertise. He was right in thinking few could matchThornton’s connections within the Party aristocracy, but he may not have recognised how that privilege warped Thornton’s vision. He certainly wasn’t aware that China Reform Forum and Zheng Bijian were fronts for the Party’s intelligence agency. As one senior Trump-era WhiteHouse official said, they never received any warnings from US intelligence agencies that Thornton had unwittingly engaged with the MSS.23

Thornton’s beliefs about China’s future have been characterised by the same false narratives the MSS Social Investigation Bureau pushed on foreign scholars, diplomats and elites. In 2008, he argued in an essay for Foreign Affairs magazine that the Party was actively considering moving towards democracy. While Thornton held no illusions of a hasty transition to a genuine multiparty system with elections for all leaders, what he heardfrom his Party contacts was encouraging. ‘A senior Communist Party official I know marvelled privately that ten years ago it would have been unimaginable for someone in his position to even be having an open discussion about democracy with an American,’ he wrote. Opening up to Thornton, this Party official advocated direct elections of provincial-level officials but stopped short of supporting fully open multiparty elections.24

As they did with countless others, Zheng Bijian and China Reform Forum guided Thornton’s assessments of China, although the details of Thornton’s interactions with Partyinsiders are confidential. Unknowingly, American peace advocate Jeremy J. Stone had similarly relied heavily on MSS contacts for access in China and described China ReformForum’s

Ding Kuisong, in fact an undercover intelligence officer, as ‘one of those few free agents in China with good connections but without any bureaucracy sitting on him’.25 As Thornton penned his essay on Chinese democracy, Ding was privately claiming to US diplomats that democratic change in China was inevitable.26 Aside from organising exchanges andconferences with Zheng and MSS fronts, Thornton arranged for the Brookings Institution to publish a translated volume of Zheng Bijian’s speeches, the first in a planned series of works by leading Chinese thinkers.27 To Thornton, Zheng Bijian was the definitive living Chinesethinker. Introducing him at their joint clean energy dialogue in Washington, DC, he described Zheng as having been ‘the most innovative and deepest thinker on public policy issues in China for a very long time’. Not the kind of praise one hands out lightly. ‘We could have no better, no more influential voice,’ he added, ‘than Chairman Zheng Bijian.’28

Importantly, Zheng reinforced Thornton’s belief in the importance of actively friendly and positive relations with China. ‘Zheng’s concept of a peaceful rise doesn’t depend on China alone,’ he wrote in his foreword to Zheng’s speeches. ‘It also demands that the rest of the world help China create an international environment where this sort of rise can take place.’In other words, the burden lies in large part with the United States to ensure the CCP chooses to behave respectfully and responsibly on the world stage.29

Thornton’s writings reflect the same optimism about China that Party leaders and the MSS learnt to capitalise on decades earlier. With George Soros in 1988, they accepted him and led him to believe they would protect and foster his efforts to promote open society in China. Dubbing their front group China Reform Forum, the MSS clearly hoped to play on visions of an economically and politically open China. Speaking to Washington, DC’s National Press Club in 2001, undercover MSS bureau chief and China Reform Forum leader Lin Di claimed China was becoming a more ‘democratic’ nation.30 Paradoxically, officers and fronts of the MSS, one of the most conservative and anti-American parts of the CCP, were uniquely poised to present themselves as friendly liberals and reformists.

In his 2012 Foreign Affairs article on China, Thornton declared that ‘How a country manages the transfer of power at the very top sends an unmistakable signal to all levelsbelow’.31 By this standard, Xi Jinping has since dashed any hope of democratic change in China for the foreseeable

future. His rule has been characterised by the end of presidential term limits, vicious purges of his political rivals, extreme oppression in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, and a crackdown on the freedoms and powers of private sector leaders. Though Chinese democracy now seems an unlikely prospect, the importance of ensuring China’s peaceful rise and building closepersonal relationships with Party figures remain core to Thornton’s beliefs.

These misplaced hopes shaped Thornton’s advice to the Trump administration. Thornton impressed upon Trump the importance of befriending Xi Jinping and framed the chance to ‘recast the US-China relationship’ as a defining opportunity for Trump to secure his legacy.32‘He had this whole thing that the relationship between Xi and the president had to be just right and that they had to love each other,’ said one former senior White House official. ‘His view is that … like it or not, China is going to be the one that dominates the future so let’s try to benefit from that.’ Thornton also stressed the need for Trump to make a goodwill gesture to Xi Jinping, claiming the Party leadership was incredibly reasonable and Xi himself wastrustworthy. Trump was a fan of the idea, and Thornton soon visited Beijing where he passedon these messages to Xi Jinping and Wang Qishan.

Using Thornton to convey these messages to Beijing had its advantages. He could do it reliably, and discreetly. ‘The official channels included too many people to be leakproof,’ explains Rogin.33

Thornton’s shuttle diplomacy had some initial successes. The Trump–Xi summit, held inApril 2017 at Florida’s Mar-a-Lago resort, was an outcome of his advice.34 Even Bannon briefly adopted a more diplomatic tone. In a 2017 speech to business figures in Hong Kong, he stressed Trump’s admiration for Xi Jinping and the need for the two countries to ‘work out’ their differences.35 After Bannon left the White House less than eight months into Trump’s presidency, Thornton brought him to Beijing for a friendly meeting with WangQishan.36

One of Thornton’s main efforts was to position those who were more favourable to China as the administration’s interlocutors in the trade dispute. Tensions between the two capitals were growing over China’s unfair trade practices and theft of American intellectual property, and the Trump administration threatened a trade war. ‘His mission was to find themost pliant interlocutor in the administration that the Chinese could negotiate with,’ arguesa former senior White House official.37 He tried to

promote Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, as well as treasury secretary Steve Mnuchinand commerce secretary Wilbur Ross for the role.

But Thornton could only forestall what looked like an increasingly inevitable correction in US–China relations. ‘In the end, no amount of smooth operating was going to paper over the fact that China wasn’t making any concessions on theft of our intellectual property,’ said the former White House official. Instead of Kushner or Mnuchin, China ended up with a ‘hardliner’ as their negotiating partner in the form of Robert Lighthizer.38

Biden and China

While Thornton’s influence over the Trump administration’s China policy was short-lived, he’s continued to act as a high-level backchannel during Joe Biden’s presidency. In September 2021, an unidentified individual revealed to Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post that Thornton had just completed a six-week tour of China, comparing it to Henry Kissinger’s secret China visit in 1971, which set the foundations for US–China relations.39US climate policy envoy John Kerry and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman alsoseparately travelled to China in the early months of the Biden administration, but Thornton’s trip was different. Kerry and Sherman received frosty receptions and were only allowed to visit the coastal city of Tianjin, not the capital itself.40 According to China scholar Dean Cheng, the US official visitors had effectively been humiliated by their counterparts and ‘the Biden administration risks signalling to Beijing that Washington is desperate for a deal’ toimprove relations.41

The treatment the CCP afforded Thornton could not have been more different. Despite holding no formal role in the US government, Thornton met face to face with one of the CCP’s most senior leaders, Han Zheng. A meeting with Zheng Bijian, of course, was on Thornton’s itinerary too.42 Thornton also took up an offer to visit Xinjiang, the site of extreme and ongoing human rights abuses against the region’s non-Chinese ethnic groups, against the warnings of a White House official who believed the trip would be seen as anendorsement of the Chinese government’s policies there. Han pressed a list of complaints and asks on Thornton, iterating China’s demands and telling him to share what he had seen in Xinjiang, where the CCP claims its genocidal policies are counterterrorism efforts.43

The Party’s leaders were re-appointing Thornton as their go-between with the White House.

It’s clear who Thornton backs. Though John Kerry is nominally the US climate changeenvoy, Thornton reportedly told Chinese leaders that Kerry is Biden’s lead on China policy.44 Aiming to force the United States to choose between minimising climate change and challenging China, the CCP has driven a wedge into Biden’s foreign policy team.

As Biden’s climate and energy policy chief, Kerry has used his newly created executive position in an attempt to position climate policy at the heart of US–China relations. In their meetings with Kerry shortly after Thornton’s visit, Chinese officials refused to cooperate on climate change until the United States rolled back its criticism of China’s human rights abuses and other issues, according to The Washington Post. Returning from China empty-handed and embarrassed after the Chinese foreign minister only offered to meet through a teleconference,Kerry has shifted his focus to building a strong personal relationship between President Biden and Xi in the hope of overruling the all-or-nothing offers made by Xi’s officials.

Thornton’s positions are echoed by many others. He reflects the sentiments of a group of top Wall Street bankers who have emerged as the most influential American believers in China’s peaceful rise. If they’re right, they seek to gain from China’s economic growth. On top of that, promoting policies of cooperation with a genocidal, totalitarian and increasingly anti-capitalist political party has benefits in and of itself. As Rogin explains, Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman and Blackrock CEO Larry Fink were among ‘the most active set of outsiders trying to get Trump’s ear on China’. Of these, many ‘depended onBeijing’s good graces for billions of dollars in annual revenue’ and compete for access to China’s financial services sector. Schwarzman, for his part, worked hard behind the scenes to stop Trump from enacting tariffs on China. He funds an eponymous program at Tsinghua University where outstanding Chinese and foreign students study alongside each other. Rogincharacterises him as ‘perhaps Wall Street’s top dealmaker with large Chinese corporations’.45

During the Trump administration, Thornton worked with China to invite these bankers to exclusive ‘China-US Financial Roundtables’ that gave them access to key Party officials likeWang Qishan. All those in attendance understood that their business interests depended in part on preventing

greater competition between the United States and China. ‘Those of us in the financial industries of both countries realise that we have an obligation to help improve US-China relations,’ one participant told the Financial Times. ‘This relationship is too important to be wrecked by a few people.’46 Beijing was hoping to resurrect high-level economic dialogues with the United States. Within the Trump White House, these dialogues were seen as stalling mechanisms that delayed real action against China.47

Since Biden’s election, this Wall Street faction has reconvened. Again, its backroom talks with Party leaders go beyond finance and straight to the topic of US–China relations.48 However, China’s complicity in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has hardened the Biden government, which is focusing its efforts on strengthening alliances in China’s wake.49

The China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy At the elite level, the MSS’s long-term investment in Zheng Bijian continues to pay off. After serving as the face of influence operations by China Reform Forum and then the China Institute of Strategy and Management, in 2010 Zheng set up a new vehicle: the China Institute forInnovation and Development Strategy (CIIDS).

The MSS’s involvement in CIIDS is harder to spot than in China Reform Forum where serving MSS officers administered the group, but this probably reflects the MSS’s improved operational security rather than a loosening of its ambition. Lin Di, the former MSS bureau chief who led US operations and was Katrina Leung’s handler, is a senior advisor to CIIDS.Likewise, some of CIIDS’s staff were brought over from MSS fronts: one CIIDS secretary-general has maintained a second job as manager of China Reform Forum’s office.50 In addition to Zheng, many of CIIDS’s senior council members have also been key figures in MSS front groups.51 One of the MSS Social Investigation Bureau’s front groups, run by a former China Reform Forum officer, helped CIIDS produce promotional videos for itsconferences.52

CIIDS’s activities follow in China Reform Forum’s footsteps but are more narrowly focused on targeting political elites. One of its first major events saw Zheng Bijian shift hisfocus to Australia. In 2011, CIIDS held a high-level forum on ‘trade and friendship’ with Australia that attracted Australia’s deputy prime minister as well as its ambassador to China.53

While it’s unclear whether anything concrete came out of the conference, it added to the status and mystique of Australian Chinese billionaire Chau Chak Wing, who partnered with CIIDS to organise the event. The forum was the first international event held in Chau’sImperial Springs resort in the southern province of Guangdong, Chau’s homeland. ThePeople’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Party, dubbed it the ‘Guangzhou Bo’ao Forum’, a new venue for China to entertain and befriend elites the world over.54

Chau was at the peak of his influence and repute in Australia. Over the previous decade he’d earned himself a place in Australian politics through steady donations to politicians and public institutions and was known for being extraordinarily well connected in China.55Australian political leaders credited him with helping seal a A$25 billion deal to export natural gas to China.56 After migrating to Hong Kong and Australia in the 1990s, Chau gave millions to both sides of Australian politics and landed his daughter a job in the office of New South Wales premier (and future foreign minister) Bob Carr. The University of Sydney’s museum is named after him, as is a postmodern building designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry at the University of Technology Sydney.57 More recently, he gave millions toAustralian veterans’ charities and the Australian War Memorial.58

One incident in particular hints at Chau’s unusual behind-the-scenes

power. In 2011, Australia’s then foreign minister Kevin Rudd, a Chinese speaker, made a last-minute rendezvous with Chau. As reported by The Sydney Morning Herald, one Australian diplomat called Rudd’s behaviour ‘extraordinary’ because of how little notice Australian officials were given of his sudden trip to Guangzhou on the way back from meetings in Europe. ‘The meeting with Dr Chau, which was not part of the official schedule,came as Mr Rudd was mounting his guerrilla campaign to undermine Prime Minister Julia Gillard,’ wrote journalists Nick McKenzie and Angus Grigg. ‘It has been suggested Mr Rudd was seeking Dr Chau’s continued support’ as he prepared to eventually retake Australia’s top job in 2013, they reported.59

After mounting controversy over Chau’s ties to Australian politicians, and Australian counterintelligence agency ASIO’s warning to both major parties that Chau’s political donations may be a conduit for interference, the Australian Labor Party announced it would no longer accept donations from Chau or Huang Xiangmo, another billionaire property developer accused of

working with the CCP.60 Then, Australian parliamentarian Andrew Hastie used parliamentary privilege to allege that Chau was a co-conspirator in a plot to bribe United Nations officials, which had been exposed by the FBI.61 In 2022, the late Labor Party senator Kimberley Kitching also used parliamentary privilege to suggest that Chau was the unnamed ‘puppeteer’ behind a foreign interference plot revealed by ASIO earlier that year.62

Despite this, Chau won a defamation suit against the two journalists who initially reported on his ties to the CCP, John Garnaut and Nick McKenzie.63 And former Australian prime minister Rudd, now president of the New York–headquartered Asia Society, has kept up exchanges with Chau’s partners from the 2011 Australia–China forum, Zheng Bijian and hisCIIDS.64 Chau remains a leader and financial backer of the Club de Madrid, a not-for-profit composed of dozens of former world leaders including past presidents and prime ministers ofNew Zealand, Canada and Latvia.65

The homeless billionaire: Nicolas Berggruen

German American investor Nicolas Berggruen is a natural partner for CIIDS. Speaking English with an accent that’s ‘more French than anything else’, he’s known as the ‘homeless billionaire’ for once shedding his properties (but not his private jet) to live from a suitcase in luxury hotel suites. Nicolas, the son of German art dealer Heinz Berggruen, made billions from savvy private equity investments and now dedicates himself to political causes.66Famously private and far from a household name, he has found his niche in the geopolitics of China.

His personal intellectual project, the Berggruen Institute, helps connect CIIDS to global elites and is key to its success. Berggruen’s mission? Only to improve global governance andsave democracy. California, where he has proposed setting up a committee of prominent figures to propose policies directly on the state ballot, is one of his main focuses.67

But at the global level, China is Berggruen’s primary interest.68 The circumstances of the institute’s founding in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis set the tone for its activities today. According to its website, Nicolas Berggruen and scholar Nathan Gardels established the think tank to examine ‘the widespread perception of failing political institutions and Western democracies, and the question of how China’s rise would affectinternational cooperation and governance in the 21st century’.69 The answer

they propose is a future that depends heavily on learning from China and appreciating its rise. In the process, their institute has become what scholars Clive Hamilton and Marieke Ohlberg dub ‘the most shamelessly pro- Beijing think tank’.70

The Berggruen Institute’s emphasis on understanding the cultural and philosophical origins of a society pushes it into orientalism when it comes to China. Gardels claims that democracy is unsuited to Hong Kong, while Nicolas Berggruen characterises the CCP as a ‘service organisation’ driven by the needs of the Chinese people.71 He writes that China ‘is dedicated to the ancient Confucian traditions of stability and harmony’, seeing the CCP as a reflection of these imperial habits rather than its unabashed Marxist– Leninist principles. He also believes that ‘the Party is largely meritocratic and competitive’, a common trope that has little grounding in the reality of Xi Jinping’s China, where the family ties of princelingsdefine elite politics. It’s a claim that also overlooks the fact that entry to this supposedlymeritocratic system is dependent on one’s acceptance of Party rule and all that it entails.72 Similar ideas were promoted through The Washington Post and The Huffington Post, which until recently hosted dozens of articles curated by the Berggruen Institute including some by Zheng Bijian.73

As it ponders the benefits of one-Party rule, the Berggruen Institute convenes its own collection of world leaders called the 21st Century Council. CIIDS’s Understanding China conferences double as a meeting place for this council, which is how Zheng draws in such a crowd to these events. They’re the centrepiece of CIIDS’s efforts. First held in 2013, not long after Xi Jinping’s formal rise to power, Understanding China encapsulates the MSS approachto elite influence. Through CIIDS, the Party invites retired world leaders, respected academics and business leaders to this exclusive event. They’re granted rare audiences with a series of senior Party leaders including the general secretary himself. Practised barbarian handlers like foreign affairs official Fu Ying and the economist Liu He, a vice premier andformer vice president of the MSS’s CICEC front group, also attend the conference to deliver speeches and make connections with their foreign guests. As the gathering’s name indicates, the conference aims to help its high-level attendees ‘understand China’ on the Party’s terms. With the kind of privileged access they’re offered, CIIDS’s guests might not only be encouraged to take softer positions on China but are also

given greater credibility around the world. Not many people have the right to say, ‘I caughtup with Premier Li Keqiang last week.’

In 2013, two former Australian prime ministers – Rudd and Paul Keating

– as well as the former leaders of Mexico, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Spain, Chile andItaly attended. Big tech leaders like Google’s Eric Schmidt and scholars such as Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani attend too. In the words of Berggruen Institute co-founder Nathan Gardels, these world leaders ‘had the opportunity to take off Western lenses and understandChina’s strategy from their own perspective’ through meetings with Party leaders, who claimed that strengthened political control and greater economic and social liberalisation in China were ‘two sides of the same coin’.74 (Xi Jinping has since made reasserting state control over the economy and Chinese society core parts of his agenda.)

Thứ Năm, 6 tháng 4, 2023