Grassroots honeytrap: The Christine Fang case

As well as trying to influence the highest levels of politics, the MSS helps the Party influence an unguarded force in American policymaking: local politics. Katrina Leung, the MSS’s star agent in California, played this game in the 1990s, involving herself in Republican circles (see chapter 4). But it’s the case of Christine Fang, an alleged MSS agent in California whose work was exposed by journalists Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian and ZachDorfman in 2020, that best illustrates the MSS’s work in this space.75

Moving from China to enrol at California State University, East Bay in 2011, Fang became president of the Chinese Student Association. She was active in student life and eager to become involved in politics, receiving an award from the university for her student leadership. Joining the local chapter of a public affairs association for Asian Americans, she built connections into state politics. What stood out to acquaintances was that she was older than most students and, with her white Mercedes, seemed unusually wealthy. She was also liaising with a diplomat at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco, suspected by the FBI of being an undercover MSS officer.76

In just a few years, Fang managed to cultivate friendships and relationships with several politicians and position herself as a conduit to the Chinese community. She was unusually active for a student, let alone one who’s not an American citizen, becoming a staple at political events in California’s Bay Area and helping out with fundraising. As Allen-

Ebrahimian and Dorfman write, ‘Fang’s Facebook friends list is a virtual who’s who of local Bay Area politicos.’77 In one photo she was pictured beside Russell Lowe, another alleged MSS asset and a staffer of Senator Dianne Feinstein at the time.78

Fang played a long game. She didn’t push policy positions and seemed more interested in networking. Any direct influence she gained in the Bay Area wouldn’t be particularlyconsequential in the scheme of things. Local politicians don’t have access to any classifiedinformation either.

Instead, the MSS is interested in personal intelligence on up-and-coming politicians. Itaims to study, compromise and influence those who are on the path towards greater things. Bytargeting politicians at the beginning of their careers, spies have a better shot at success asthey avoid the heightened scrutiny that senior politicians are subjected to from the public and security agencies. These freshly elected politicians are much less likely to be on guard either, as few would appreciate why the MSS would be interested in them. Politicians like Eric Swalwell.

When Fang arrived in California, Swalwell was at the lowest rung of politics. Things changed quickly. The former Dublin City councillor was only thirty-one when he began his bid for a seat in Congress as a Democrat, winning against a well-established incumbent from the same party. Fang became a frequent contact of his and was even friends with his father and brother on Facebook. She helped fundraise for his re-election campaign in 2014 and arranged for an associate to intern in his office.79

Swalwell wasn’t the only politician Fang grew dangerously close to, nor were her targets limited to California. According to Allen-Ebrahimian and Dorfman, she was also seen at political conferences and a Chinese embassy event in Washington, DC. At one conference, ‘an older Midwestern mayor “from an obscure city” referred to Fang as his “girlfriend” and insisted the relationship was genuine despite the clear age difference between Fang andhimself’. The FBI also listened in as Fang had ‘a sexual encounter with an Ohio mayor in a car’, who she’d said she wanted to practise English with.80

By 2015, Swalwell was appointed to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees the CIA. The FBI had to act and began warning Swalwell and others about Fang, prompting Swalwell to immediately sever ties with her. Later that year, she left the country suddenly. As with Katrina Leung two decades earlier, Fang ‘was just oneof

lots of agents’ operating for the MSS in America, a senior US intelligence official told reporters.81 This is only the tip of the iceberg.

 

 

CHAPTER 13

 

THE GODDESS OF MERCY:BUDDHISM AS A TOOL OFINFLUENCE

 

 

 

THE BODHISATTVA’S TOWERING and brilliant shape juts out from a vast ocean. Her tons of painted titanium sit some yards off the shore, like an Atlantean ruin bleached bone-white bycenturies of sun. The only interruption between sea and statue is the golden lotus-blossom platform she rests upon, looking down from 108 metres high with a cryptic smile. She is a modern image of the timeless Goddess of Mercy and Compassion, the most revered Buddhist deity in China. To the Chinese she is Guanyin, Kannon to the Japanese, Chenrezig to Tibetansand Avalokiteśvara in the ancient tongue of Sanskrit.

This Guanyin of Nanshan Temple stands close to the southernmost point of Hainan Island off China’s south coast. Like Hainan’s annual Bo’ao Forum, the gigantic statue is positioned in a geographical gateway to China. Depending on how you view it, the island is also a vantage point for China to look upon the rest of the world. Guanyin’s gaze traces down to Malaysia and Indonesia before landing somewhere on Australia’s north coast.

Guanyin’s full name in Chinese, Guanshiyin, means ‘perceiving from high the world’s sounds’. In one legend, she was on the cusp of ascending to a celestial realm but turned back at the last moment upon hearing the suffering of the world, vowing to end all pain. OtherBuddhist divine beings are seen as representations of happiness, light, demon-smiting or even the

end of time, but Guanyin has intimate appeal as one who listens to each being’slamentations.

She is the great uniter of Buddhists. Unlike other higher beings worshipped in China, Guanyin is a feature of the Theravada traditions of Sri Lanka, Thailand and Myanmar too. When the Hainan statue was unveiled in 2005 after six years of construction, more than ahundred senior monks from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau gathered in resplendent robes to celebrate its completion.

A political message was enshrined at its very opening: the monks assembled that day prayed ‘for world peace, and the peaceful reunification of China’. The king of Nepal attended too, bearing a gold-plated statue of Sakyamuni Buddha (approximately one-seventieth the height of the Guanyin colossus) to commemorate fifty years of China–Nepal relations. None other than the most senior Party leader in charge of united front work was sent down from Beijing to show his face, reminding attendees of the stake the world’s most powerful communist party holds in Buddhist affairs.1 This was politics, diplomacy and influence riding on the back of religion.

The ceremony’s hidden meanings mirrored the Guanyin statue itself. She is presented as a triptych of beings, one facing China, another Taiwan, and lastly the rest of the world. Each manifestation holds an object with its own significance. The main, China-facing Guanyin holds a scroll that represents wisdom. The Taiwan Guanyin’s lotus, of course, stands for peace and ‘peaceful reunification’. To the rest of the world, Guanyin bears a string of pearlssymbolising mercy.2

In history, Guanyin has been understood in equally amorphous terms.

Originally depicted only as a man, she is now generally portrayed as female. In archetypal terms, some see her as a mother figure not unlike the Virgin Mary. Others view her as an androgynous deity, surpassing the barriers of gender. In many statues she has eleven faces and a thousand arms, or sometimes six, but often just two.

Though its physical form is unchanging, this Hainanese incarnation of Guanyin has a backstory as phantasmagorical as the goddess herself. The true story of its creation lays bare how China’s intelligence agencies covertly exploit religion and united front work in their attempts to influence foreign societies and build clandestine networks.

The Shanghai connection

Ji Sufu stood proudly before Guanyin, out of place in his stark white dress shirt and black pants. The statue was a dozen metres taller than the Statue of Liberty, he liked to point out, and he had built it. The site would soon become a ‘centre of worship for the Southeast Asian Buddhist masses and a hot destination for global Buddhist cultural tourism’, he told the reporters gathered before him.3

Ji had been at the heart of the scheme since its inception in the 1990s. There were all sorts of matters to sort out, even though the island’s top leader, the Party secretary, was a supporter. It needed approval from the religious affairs authorities in Beijing, not to mention experts onBuddhism, artists, metallurgists and architects to contribute to the final design. Mostimportantly, it needed a site – a community of monks, a temple and, crucially, a respectedBuddhist master to partner with.

But why was Ji, a nondescript businessman from Shanghai with little apparent interest in Buddhism, conducting this orchestra? The truth is that he was secretly working for theShanghai State Security Bureau (SSSB), one of the most aggressive and internationally active units of the MSS. The Shanghai bureau is notorious for running long-term operations to infiltrate foreign governments and also boasts substantial cyberespionage capabilities. In 2004, it pushed a Japanese diplomat to suicide after blackmailing him over his affair with akaraoke bar hostess.4 Not long after, it paid an American university student in Shanghai to apply for jobs in the CIA and State Department, which scared the US intelligence communityoff hiring people with significant experience in China.5 In recent years it’s approached numerous US current and retired government officials, as well as scholars and journalists, successfully recruiting some and paying them to hand over sensitive information.6

Ji has an engineering background, starting his career at a top-secret military laboratory that specialises in developing infrared missile-guidance systems.7 In the 1980s, cadres whosepolitical reliability and discretion had been proven through years of military work made good recruits for the newly created MSS. So from engineering he made a sudden career shift,surfacing as a manager in Shanghai trading companies – all of which eventually trace back to the SSSB.

The companies are officially owned by the Communist Party’s Shanghai Foreign TradeCommittee, but this is a simple trick to hide the immensity of

the SSSB’s business empire. Most of them connect up to the agency through using buildings owned by it, ‘business executives’ who upon closer examination turn out to be intelligence officers, and front groups that are also used to cultivate foreign scholars and policymakers. Once you find a pinhole – a single solid connection to Shanghai’s businessperson spies – avivid moving image of cash, corruption and covert operations pours out.

Across China, both civilian and military intelligence agencies have numerous units in each major city. For routine corporate matters like purchasing office furniture or contracting builders, they often use predictable forms of what’s known as ‘administrative cover’. If youchance upon a charming military intelligence officer at a Shanghai bar, she might claim to be from the Shanghai Municipal Government Fifth Office, for example.8 (Shanghai has at least thirteen of these numbered cover offices, and Guangdong has eighteen.)9 Armed with this knowledge, it’s a simple matter of cycling through searches of different numbered offices.Odds are, you’re either looking at military spies or MSS spies.

In Shanghai, the little-known municipal government’s Fourth Office ticks the right boxes.An official study of Shanghai’s economy mentioned that the Fourth Office’s ‘cover companies’ were involved in ‘special industries’ but not commercial activity.10 One employee of the Fourth Office simultaneously worked at a cultural front organisation for the city’sintelligence services.11 This is the SSSB.

Business records reveal more about the metropolis’s spy networks. One company owned by the Fourth Office, a large trading corporation, is registered to a Spanish-style residence built at the height of the city’s Art Deco period. The Anting Villa, once home to a Nationalist Army general, was confiscated when the Communist Party took the city, then passed down to the city’s newly created security services.12

But the trading company isn’t the only front organisation calling the Anting Villa home. Whether because of thrift, laziness or overconfidence, Chinese intelligence agencies often reuse addresses for their fronts. A charity called the Shanghai New Century Social Development Foundation also shares an address at the Anting Villa. While it now tries to hide its mission, its goals haven’t changed from those recorded in an old government record:‘to support and encourage the whole of society’s active cooperation with state security work’ and ‘to fund state security activities’.13 Official records also show that the charity reports back to the

Shanghai International Culture Association, a local branch of the MSS’s long-standing front group for influence operations, CICEC.14

As a charity, the organisation has to abide by the government’s transparency and disclosure rules, unlike front companies that often have little online presence. Importantly, some of its public filings were written with little heed for the SSSB’s secrecy. For example,records show many of the charity’s board meetings are held at 1 Ruining Road, a towering office building on the banks of the Huangpu River that bisects Shanghai.15 Strangely, for a complex with enough floor space for more than 10,000 workers, there’s almost noinformation about it.16

One local taxi driver was equally puzzled by the building, writing on an online forum:

 

Today I dropped off a passenger at the entrance to 1 Ruining Road. The tower looked quite beautiful, narrow atthe top and bottom yet wide in the middle, but there wasn’t any nameplate at the entrance. So I asked mypassenger, ‘What unit is this?’ He told me it was a government unit. When I turned my car around, I rolled downthe window to ask the guard what unit it was. Incredibly, he replied: ‘It’s best if you don’t know and don’tunderstand what unit this is. You won’t be able to ask what unit this is – even if someone replies they’ll only sayit’s a government unit.’

 

The taxi driver asked his fellow forum users, ‘What sort of unit dabbles in such secretivethings?’ User milk19860911 replied: ‘State Security.’17

Out of convenience, this low-profile Shanghai charity’s board members have been meeting in the same classified facility where they work: the SSSB’s very own skyscraper.18

What exactly does the charity busy itself with? Its official reports, though vague, hint at a covert agenda. One year, almost half its budget went to helping ‘special talents’ fluent in Uyghur and Tibetan ‘settle into their jobs’ in Shanghai. Though it’s on the opposite side of China to the homelands of Tibetans and Uyghurs, the SSSB’s prominence means it carries out operations across the country and probably targets overseas diaspora communities from those regions. The foundation also rewarded individuals who ‘distinguished themselves’ – presumably star intelligence officers – with family health retreats outside of Shanghai to help them ‘feel the organisation’s care and praise’.19

The only public references to the foundation’s activities lead to an annual competition for students from countries along the Mekong River (known in China as the Lancang River).Working with Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan

University, the charity has brought hundreds of bright young men and women fromVietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia to China. The students team up to tackle the ecological and social problems challenging their shared river, which gushes out of theglaciers of Tibet.

Chinese state media captures the event through the lens of the Belt and Road Initiative and the ‘Lancang-Mekong Cooperation’ framework – China’s scheme to stake its influence over the region – describing the competition as ‘a high-end external propaganda project’. But, as with much of the Party’s united front and propaganda work, intelligence operatives come along for the ride too. It’s a perfect scheme for the SSSB to identify and cultivate the Mekong region’s future leaders.20

The donors to the charity are just as intriguing as the dozens of intelligence officers who run it.21 The regular givers are generous companies that agree with its mission. That is, they’re front companies for the SSSB, channelling profits from property development, international shipping and telecommunications equipment back into the agency. Thesebusinesses probably have an operational function too – managing safe houses and other facilities for the bureau, providing surveillance equipment to officers and providing cover when officers need to travel abroad or recruit an agent.

One of those donor companies brings us back to Guanyin. Hainan

Island’s Sanya Nanshan Gongde Foundation has given close to ¥6 million (A$1.3 million) to the SSSB charity in recent years, accounting for almost a third of its funding.22 Its chairmanisn’t a shadowy intelligence officer but a holy man named Yinshun, a Zen master, vice chairman of China’s official Buddhist Association, frequent speaker at the international Bo’ao Forum, and abbot of Nanshan Temple, which houses the colossal Guanyin statue.

This ‘Buddhist’ foundation is an alms bowl for the SSSB’s pet projects and influence operations, filled by millions who’ve come to worship the Goddess of Mercy. What did theatheistic officers of the MSS do to deserve Guanyin’s blessings?

 

Manufacturing holiness

According to official accounts, Hainan’s provincial Party secretary first gained an interest in setting up a major temple on the island in the early nineties. He had the name ‘Nanshan Temple’ in mind, inspired by tales of a medieval Chinese monk from the Nanshan sect ofBuddhism. Attempting to

reach Japan, this monk’s ship was blown off course and ended up in faraway Hainan. Only on his sixth attempt did he finally reach his destination, becoming an influential preacher and spreader of Chinese Buddhist culture in Japan. It was a powerful tale of friendship and exchange between the two countries.

The Party secretary spotted a suitable location on a trip to Sanya – a scenic spot backed by mountains with few established farmers – and got to work. Within a few months, he secured the backing of China’s Buddhist leaders and united front officials, who oversee the Party’s religious policy. Local authorities drew up their plans for the temple and eventually came upwith the idea of a colossal Guanyin statue as the project’s heart.

Money was a problem in those early days. Thankfully, generous Buddhist leaders offered their support; Taiwan’s Nan Huai-chin contributed a million dollars to the Party secretary’s dream. (Master Nan also acted as a secret backchannel between the Party and Taiwanese authorities, handled by the father of state security minister Xu Yongyue.) After many years ofplanning, negotiation and hard work, the goddess was completed in 2003, ready to withstand the fiercest tropical cyclones.23

In reality, corruption, mystery and spies defined the Nanshan Guanyin project from the beginning. The Party secretary had his own connections to China’s security apparatus: a decade earlier he ran the Ministry of Public Security, a counterpart to the MSS that carries outcounterintelligence work. Before then he was a leading official in Shanghai, which perhaps explains why the SSSB’s prints are all over the temple.

Shanghai State Security Bureau business figures like Ji Sufu joined the project in its early days. Their front companies could foot the bill the Hainan government struggled to pay on its own. Accountants from the Shanghai bureau were brought over, their experience atmanaging complex and costly operations coming in handy.24

Today, the company that owns and runs the temple complex is filled with an odd assortmentof Shanghainese men and women. Xu Yuesheng, general manager and Communist Party secretary of the company, also sits on the board of the SSSB charity that’s funded by Nanshan Temple. Government records show he’s attended charity meetings held inside the agency’s headquarters building.25 Another document claims that he works for a technology company, Shanghai Tianhua Information Development Co., which has also used the bureau’sRuining Road headquarters as its

address.26 If someone turns up behind an intelligence agency’s closely guarded walls and works for one of its front companies, they’re probably an intelligence officer.

Four other suspected SSSB agents sit among the company’s leaders in Hainan. Feng Fumin is one of them. He once headed the agency’s Political Department, a senior leadership role overseeing the smooth operation of the SSSB Party committee as well as domestic propaganda to improve the agency’s image. As one of the bureau’s most senior Communist Party officials, Feng would be trusted to maintain discipline while covertly dealing with religious organisations and companies.27

Despite the bureau’s leading role in the Nanshan Guanyin company, business records make it look as if it only owns a meagre 0.7 per cent stake through one of its front companies. The rest is owned by two investment firms from Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Both trace back to Wu Feifei, who started her business career as an executive in what remains one of the MSS’s main front companies, China National Sci-Tech Information Import and Export Corporation. Wu owns the corporation’s Shanghai branch and controls more than two dozen subsidiaries that specialise in property development, investment andBuddhist tourism.28 As for the Hong Kong company, Wu and SSSB officers such as XuYuesheng own most of it.29

All roads, it seems, lead to the SSSB, which reaps income from Guanyin and the Nanshan Temple. While the Nanshan Temple makes regular donations to the bureau through its charity, those are dwarfed by the large payments it makes to the agency’s front companies. According to the Nanshan foundation’s financial reports, it paid out ¥174 million (A$37million) to SSSB-controlled companies in 2019. About ¥3 million (A$600,000), in contrast, went to the temple itself.30

 

Marx’s monk

Master Yinshun, the abbot of Nanshan Temple and head of its MSS-backed charity, is the face of a new breed of Chinese Buddhists. More in tune with the pronouncements of Xi Jinping than Buddha’s word, Yinshun stands out with his unabashed flattery of the country’scommunist leadership. After the 19th Party Congress in 2017, he bragged that he’d hand-copied Xi Jinping’s tedious speech three times. ‘I’m planning to write it out ten more times,’ he added in an address to Hainan’s peak Buddhist association, which he chairs.

One needn’t speculate at the comparison he was making to sacred sutras, which the faithful often transcribe as a kind of meditation, for Yinshun believes ‘the 19th Party Congress report is a contemporary Buddhist scripture’. Assuming he writes a rapid forty characters a minute, he must have set aside a full day for each copy of Xi Jinping’s doctrine.

If this is the new Xiist sect of Buddhism, Yinshun is its high priest and international ambassador. Yinshun concluded, after meditating on Xi Jinping Thought: ‘Buddhist groups must consciously protect General Secretary Xi Jinping’s core status, practising theprinciples of knowing the Party and loving the Party, having the same mind and morals as the Party, and listening to the Party’s words and walking with the Party.’31

Yinshun has added a litany of political titles alongside his Buddhist honorifics. As a vice president of the China Buddhist Association, he is effectively a senior co-optee of the United Front Work Department, which controls the association. Yinshun also chairs the official Buddhist associations of Shenzhen and Hainan province.32 Most importantly, he’s a delegate to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the country’s peak united front forum.33 The role technically makes him a political advisor to China’s Party-state. In practice, he is merely a cog in its united front machine, faithfully working towards the Party’sgoals – a cadre in monk’s robes.

 

Buddhism made in China

The MSS was also behind another bold Buddhist venture, Yinshun’s Nanhai BuddhistAcademy.

In 2017, Buddhist leaders from across Asia visited Hainan Island to celebrate theopening of the academy, situated in the same complex as the Guanyin statue. Guests gathered before a temporary stage in the construction site that was to become an institution of Buddhist learning.

The shells of many of the complex’s buildings stood around the visitors, but it was hard toimagine the full splendour Yinshun planned for his school.

Sheets of green mesh were strewn across the newly excavated hillside to keep dust down. Already, over 6000 controlled explosions had been deployed to carve out terraces andpathways for the academy.

Mock-ups showed a stunning complex of modernist but unmistakably Chinese buildings, with secluded meditation halls and dormitories to house more than a thousand monks from faraway nations. A central promenade

faced the sea, leading down the hillside before ending in a jetty where visitors would arrive by boat. More than 200 monks had already signed up for the academy’s degree program.34

Like the Guanyin and Yinshun’s Nanshan Temple, this state-of-the-art academy owes its existence to the SSSB. Between 2019 and 2020, at least RMB66 million (A$14 million) of the academy’s funding has come from the temple charity controlled by the SSSB.35

To Indian observers, the announcement was an embarrassing reminder of their government’s failed bid for international Buddhist influence. Nanhai Academy compares itself to Nalanda, a famous medieval Indian Buddhist university that once received visitors from as far away as Korea.36 A few years earlier, the Indian government had tried to resurrect Nalanda, drawing in high-profile figures like Nobel laureate Amartya Sen as advisors. Yet theuniversity opened with a mere eleven teachers and fifteen students and no campus. In the meantime, classes were held in a government-owned convention centre while students stayed in a hotel.37 Construction carried on at a snail’s pace in India, while the Nanhai Academy’s main structures were already in place upon its unveiling in 2017.38 The symbolism of Chinabeating its southern neighbour in the race to resurrect an ancient Indian Buddhist institution is painfully clear.

As a further snub to India, the Nanhai Academy eschews Sanskrit, a canonical language of Buddhism. In fact, Sanskrit lexicon has left a significant mark on modern Chinese because Chinese Buddhist sutras are believed to mostly be translations of Sanskrit originals. The academy instead offers programs in the Chinese, Tibetan and Southeast Asian Pali traditions of Buddhism.39

China has a more specific reason for keeping Indian influence out of the Nanhai Academy too. Nanhai means ‘South China Sea’, the region where China has illegally occupied and militarised coral reefs, simultaneously angering and belittling countries like Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia, which also have claims to the waters.40 The nine-dash line, avague yet ludicrously expansive border China claims over the South China Sea, represents a touchy dispute that the Party wants to keep the Indian government out of.

As scholar Jichang Lulu writes, ‘The Academy’s international orientation does not conceal its PRC patriotic character,’ and Xi Jinping’s political agenda defines its activities. Itscreation has coincided with the emergence

of ‘a bolder global Buddhist policy’ under General Secretary Xi Jinping.41 Through its international exchanges, the academy functions as a base for Buddhist influence effortsdesigned to sign up Buddhist leaders to the CCP’s strategic vision.42 The United Front Work Department, as the agency in charge of religion in China, sits at the heart of China’s Buddhistinfluence program. Under Xi, it has formally subsumed the country’s religious affairs agency in a move designed to strengthen the Party’s control over religion.43 The department currently supervises an ungodly mix of Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, communism and political ambition. While it uses holy men to peddle the Party’s agenda abroad, it runs informant networks within Chinese temples, mosques and churches, working with security agencies tostamp out foreign influence over religion in China.44 Officially, the Nanhai Academy is subordinate to Hainan’s UFWD. Its deputy dean is not a priest but a local united front system official.45

While the UFWD’s agenda is clear – to manage and spread China’s global Buddhistpresence – exactly what MSS officers gain from their stake in the academy is kept tightly under wraps. Even Yinshun is unlikely to be informed of the operations they run through histemples and the academy.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine spies missing the opportunity to profile and recruit foreign Buddhist students from across Asia. They would be stupid not to ride on Yinshun’scoat-tails, watching if not actively guiding his political influence operations throughout the region.

Indeed, China’s Buddhist influence activities in the region are growing much more targeted and state-driven, according to Southeast Asia scholar Gregory Raymond.46 By training thenext generation of monks and building personal relationships with influential abbots and temples in the region, Yinshun has declared that the Nanhai Academy will ‘create a sinicisedBuddhist system’, reinventing Communist China as the sole global axis of Buddhism.47 Just as China seeks dominance over the South China Sea, Yinshun explained that his ‘South China Sea Buddhism’ concept is one ‘with China’s Buddhism as its core, radiating out broadly’ across the region and exporting schools of ‘Made in China Buddhism’.48

China’s history of Buddhism, shared with much of the region, helps it claim shared values, or even a shared future, with other Asian nations.49 ‘South China Sea Buddhism establishes the cultural foundation for the

South China Sea region’s community of common destiny,’ Yinshun wrote in a detailed report to the Chinese government.50

To this end, Yinshun convenes an annual gathering of world Buddhist leaders, including those from Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, called the South China Sea Buddhism Roundtable.51 Designed to promote the Party’s political vision, theevent has little focus on Buddhism except as it’s relevant to Party ambitions. In 2019, formerJapanese prime minister Hatoyama Yukio, who has repeatedly been feted by Party influence agencies, issued the roundtable’s opening address, reportedly offering his full support for the Belt and Road Initiative.52 Yinshun’s speeches at the event are framed around Xi Jinping’s trademark foreign policy concept: building a ‘community of common destiny for mankind’ with China at its core.53 As China expert Nadège Rolland explains, the clunky phrase ‘reflects Beijing’s aspirations for a future world order, different from the existing one and more in line with its own interests and status’.54

Yinshun seeks to implement the spirit of Xi Jinping’s ideology by ‘raising the discoursepower of China’s religious sphere on the international stage’.55 He claims that attendees to the roundtable have ‘confirmed the position that the South China Sea is China’s, and that China has already become the core of world Buddhism’. In reality, the memorandum signed by attendees contains no such language.56 That’s not to say many wouldn’t wholeheartedly agree with Yinshun’s claim. Foreign delegates to the roundtable often issue praise of the Belt and Road Initiative and ‘Buddhism with Chinese characteristics’ or pledge their commitment to the ‘One China Principle’.57

 

One Buddha, one China, one thousand targets

Yinshun primarily targets countries such as Mongolia, Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar with deeply Buddhist populations. In those lands, religious leaders often legitimise political leaders or speak out against them, such as when monks in Yangon refused to accept donations from the state’s military.58

Mongolia’s Sainbuyangiin Nergüi is one of Yinshun’s closest foreign contacts. He is the abbot of a temple in the capital of Ulaanbaatar and sends many of his monks to train inChina.59 Yinshun has appointed him a guest

professor at the Nanhai Academy and invited him to the South China Sea roundtables. At the 2017 roundtable meeting, Nergüi spoke more of international relations and economics than religion, tying the event to politics in ways that might make even Yinshun blush. After emphasising Mongolia’s adoration for the Belt and Road Initiative, he praised China as ‘the leader of world Buddhism’. Nergüi sees Yinshun and the Party as ushering in a new era ofBuddhism, asking them to ‘further and more tightly unite the world’s Buddhist groups and formulate policies’ on the religion. He highlighted one of the policies in particular: ‘All lamas and countries that believe in Buddhism support the one China policy,’ he said. ‘We only have one Buddha and we support the one China policy, therefore we attend this event.’ In other words, agreement with the Party’s policies is tantamount in importance to belief in Buddhism,and attendees to Yinshun’s events are hitching their religious credibility to the Party’s politicalbeliefs.60

Detailed in the research of independent scholar Jichang Lulu, Nergüi’s case highlights how Buddhist influence quickly reaches the profane realms of politics and moneymaking.61The abbot belongs to a large and well- connected family, and his siblings have flourished as local elites. During one of Yinshun’s visits to Mongolia, he was greeted by representatives ofa major construction company headed by one of Nergüi’s brothers, who was an Ulaanbaatar city councillor until his conviction on embezzlement and abuse-of-powers charges in 2009. Not the most virtuous company for Yinshun to keep, but the potential for political influence opportunities is undeniable. Another brother, previously posted to China as a diplomat, hasrisen to the top of Mongolian politics. After serving as mayor of Ulaanbaatar, he was appointed deputy prime minister in 2021, taking the lead on Mongolia’s relations withChina.62

While these operations are most effective in Buddhist nations, Buddhism

has a strong appeal and following in the Western world too. And Chinese abbots have a unique ability to disarm foreign guests, despite China’s history of religious repression and the scandals rocking its Buddhist establishment, notably when the head of the national Buddhist Association resigned after sexual harassment allegations in 2018.63

In particular, Yinshun has maintained ties to the United Kingdom; former prime minister Tony Blair delivered a video message to Yinshun’s 2020 South China Sea Roundtable.64Yinshun first travelled to the country in

2015, speaking at the House of Lords and touring Cambridge University.65 The Nanhai Academy has since signed a partnership with Cambridge to set up a joint digital Buddhist museum. Yinshun couldn’t resist claiming a political victory for China here. After the museum project began, he unveiled a ‘Cambridge Research Institute for Belt and Road Studies’ in Hainan even though Cambridge’s website makes no reference to its existence.66

Yinshun has also visited Australia several times. On one trip he met billionaire united front figure Huang Xiangmo, a prolific donor to Australian political parties and head of an organisation advocating for China’s annexation of Taiwan. According to media reports, Huang’s visa was later cancelled by Australia’s counterintelligence agency because theyfound him ‘amenable to conducting acts of foreign interference’.67

In fact, the MSS isn’t the only intelligence agency that works with Yinshun, nor the only one cultivating foreign religious groups. A front group run by Chinese military intelligence, the China Association for International Friendly Contact, has included the abbot in its international exchanges.68 This military intelligence front has for decades maintained close ties to a Buddhist-inspired Japanese New Age religion called Agon Shū.69

It’s not humour or faith that lies behind the SSSB’s embrace of Yinshun and Hainan’s Buddhist community but cold calculus. From a relatively undeveloped place without any notable history of Buddhism, Shanghainese intelligence officers quite literally built Hainan Island into a leading platform for Buddhist influence efforts. The Guanyin colossus is atestament to the agency’s creativity, resourcefulness and long-term planning. Buddhism is a window into how the MSS seeks to use religion as a tool for influence and infiltration in countries with different political environments to the United States. The case is one of many that indicates intelligence agencies covertly drive those who already raise eyebrows for theirinternational influence efforts and united front work.

 

 

CONCLUSION

 

FACING UP TO THE MSS

 

 

 

SET ON A quiet road in the western hills of Beijing, the Cold Spring Base is the MSS’s newestspy school. And it’s massive. With around 80,000 square metres of floor space, it’s larger than Australia’s counterintelligence headquarters. It features lecture theatres, table tennis rooms, classified briefing rooms, a large artificial lake and multistorey villas. A building directory, indiscreetly shared online, shows the complex has its own halal restaurant, indicating just how many ethnic Uyghur and Hui recruits the MSS has.1 An exclusive hotel sits at the centreof the complex, operated by the same state-owned company that manages other MSS guesthouses.2

As they study Party doctrine and methods of persuasion, surveillance and recruitment, these spies will also be honing their physical fitness.3 Across the ridge from the base they can look over the Chinese military’s eavesdropping headquarters. Walking an hour to the south they can pay tribute at the tomb of Larry Wu-tai Chin, the first MSS mole in the CIA who was outed in 1985.4

It’s an incredible step up from older MSS training facilities across China.

The Jiangnan Social University, a secretive MSS academy an hour’s drive from Shanghai,has its own shooting range but none of Cold Spring Base’s grandeur.5 Other MSS bases in Beijing’s environs are starting to look old and certainly can’t accommodate the agency’snewly enlarged ambitions.

The MSS has come a long way since 1983. For decades it was the People’s Liberation Army that most interested observers of China’s intelligence apparatus. Deng Xiaoping was a fan of these soldier-spies too and let them manage hundreds of overseas military attachéswhile the MSS

was kept out of embassies. MSS officer Yu Qiangsheng’s defection to the CIA in 1985 only made things worse, cutting short the inaugural minister of state security’s career. Mindful of this, the dozens of MSS officers posted abroad as journalists had to be painfully cautious. Several Chinese ‘journalists’ were publicly banned from countries such as Japan and India for espionage and subversion in the 1960s, but things were different now.6 China was opening up to the rest of the world and trying to do business with the West. As an MSS officer, it was better to complete one’s tour uneventfully than to be arrested in the United States, blamed forsetting back China’s diplomatic relations and doomed to an inconsequential desk job.

It’s only now becoming clear how the MSS thrived in spite of these circumstances. Though it couldn’t roam free abroad, it made sure it was everywhere within China. No foreign power could beat them on home ground. So when foreign targets or potential threats like George Soros arrived in China in the first decade of reform and opening, MSS officershad everything in place to monitor and control them. The ministry’s Social Investigation Bureau has been at the forefront of these efforts. It alone has directly managed dozens of front organisations and companies, and seeded spies into many more. MSS officers wereplugged into all kinds of ‘people- to-people’ exchanges with China: political, musical, literary, economic, scientific, journalistic or academic. You name it.

And as China’s economy, military and ambition grew, so did the MSS. During the 1980s it was only beginning a long process of building front groups and networks. Already, it was during this period that the MSS recruited FBI asset Katrina Leung and several others whom the US intelligence community believed were its own informants. Hong Kong, Japan and France were other priorities for these network-building operations. The agency ramped up its infiltration of Chinese communities in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre.

Towards the turn of the millennium, the MSS found its forte. It still lacked the skill of organisations like the CIA or Russian intelligence agencies when it came to clandestine operations but finally began to get its head around the US foreign policy system and appreciate the benefits of targeting weak points like think tanks, retired officials and the business community. After the embarrassing public failure of PLA influence operationstargeting President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, it

was the MSS’s turn to show what it could do. Finally, it was allowed to run operations out of Chinese embassies and now had a solid network of bureaus across China to back up its efforts. At the same time, a new generation of experts in the Western world rose into the leadership of the MSS, turning its focus from roughing up dissidents and watching foreignervisitors to actively shaping the world. Yet it was the same Social Investigation Bureau of the MSS that led the way with its unrivalled networks in the United States and in international Chinese communities, largely independent of any provincial bureaus or diplomatic missions.

The first key feature of these efforts was that instead of trying to play a Russian game of hardcore operations designed to flip CIA officers and break into classified facilities, the Social Investigation Bureau’s officers were careful and patient, and they wore their cover stories like skin. They became foreign policy scholars, cultural exchange officials, poets,filmmakers, businessmen and book publishers. Lin Di, the bureau chief in charge of these operations, spoke English, held a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and was well-known to many American China watchers. Like Lin, many of his subordinates were fluent in foreign languages, had books and journal articles to their name and often heldcredentials from world-class universities in Britain, the United States and France. Chinese spies of generations past couldn’t match the comfort with which they moved in Westerncapitalist circles. They could, quite literally, go to RAND Corporation conferences by day and eat dinner with their American agents by night. Unlike spies posted to embassies, Social Investigation Bureau officers were based in China and served in the same positions for years, meaning they built up and maintained international connections well beyond the usual three-year cycle of diplomatic assignments. Their contacts were almost exclusively among those who made regular trips to China, making them safe targets.

These methods meant MSS officers were playing a different game to Western intelligence agencies, striking at unprotected parts of democratic systems. When the FBI was looking for sophisticated espionage operations or the theft of defence technology, China Reform Forum and other influence operations seemed insignificant. At the same time, China work was under-resourced across Western intelligence agencies, and there was scant political will to take a hard stance against Beijing, so MSS operations faced little opposition. Counterintelligence agencies were also lulled into a

false sense of ease by the fact that these MSS officers usually weren’t using the kinds of sophisticated tradecraft that might indicate they were engaging in high-risk operations.7

The second key to the MSS’s success was that it had long been signing up prominentChinese officials and scholars to give its front groups a degree of verisimilitude and ensure it had plenty of informants among the kinds of people important foreigners interacted with. The networks it had built among pro-CCP Chinese community figures abroad, long dismissed byWestern intelligence officials as unimportant and ‘only’ targeting pro- democracy activists and other enemies of the Party, were another launchpad for foreign operations. Once the MSS was ready to actively operate against the West, these friends became even more useful. Well-known Chinese academics accompanied MSS officers on trips abroad, shoring up their cover stories and expanding their access in foreign capitals.

But perhaps the MSS’s most brilliant decision was to bring on board leading Chinesethinkers who were seen in the West as liberal and reformist. China Reform Forum, the think tank tailor-made by the MSS for influencing the outside world, was at the centre of these operations, drawing together talented officers from across the agency and sometimes evengaining the participation of Party leaders. This was a long-term game of building up relationships, bartering access to the Communist Party’s inner workings and elites, anddistorting perceptions of China’s direction.

The MSS was taking the West’s dream of a more free and open China and turning it into a weapon that gave China valuable time to build up its power and ability to challenge the existing world order. To many of the people targeted for influence, these undercover MSS officers and scholars stood out as the kinds of people who wanted to push China towards political and economic liberalism. They were ‘free agents’ who could help you get meetingswith important Chinese liberals, sometimes even Party leaders, and were willing to share gossip. It worked not just on China scholars but also on Western diplomats and policymakers, who cabled back information and disinformation passed on to them by undercover MSS officers. Every now and then they also tried to blackmail their American contacts and makedeals, offering greater access to Party leaders in exchange for siding with China on key issues like Taiwan. Few were any the wiser. Those who realised their friends at China Reform Forum were more than they seemed

sometimes genuinely believed these were reformists within the MSS who were willing tohelp foreigners influence the Party.

Zheng Bijian, the veteran Party ideologue serving as China Reform Forum’s chairman, transformed the MSS front group into flypaper for foreigners eager to learn about and shape China. His ‘theory of China’s peaceful rise’, which he coined after working with the MSS to study American attitudes towards China, lives on in today’s ‘peacefuldevelopment’ policy and gave a brand to the MSS’s influence operation. They were no longer just promoting friendship and sympathy towards China but pushing the theory of China’s peaceful rise. This schema for understanding China was praised and adopted by no less than Henry Kissinger and former Goldman Sachs co-president John L. Thornton, twobackchannels between Party leaders and the White House. Those whom many in the West placed their greatest hopes for China’s future in turned out to be serving a covert agenda.

Today’s political environment, where overt coercion and aggression towards Western nations is an increasingly normal part of the Party’s behaviour, has further unshackledthe MSS.

 

What went wrong?

Faced with such an enormous and poorly understood host of intelligence agencies, how can governments and societies around the world hope to push back?

It’s worth first considering what went wrong, because the circumstances that allowed past MSS operations to thrive haven’t gone away. Why was MSS bureau chief Lin Di allowed to build close friendships with influential Americans and speak at Washington, DC’s National Press Club? Why did no one intervene when former Australian prime minister Bob Hawkeentered business with an MSS affiliate? Why did diplomats from around the world continue to treat undercover MSS officers as sources when their colleagues in intelligence agencies should have stopped it? Why did experienced scholars of China fail to sound the alarm on these activities?

Why, for so long, has the challenge posed by the CCP and its intelligence agencies beendownplayed in the West? Reckoning with these absurdities will be the first step in defeating China’s intelligence and influence operations.

There’s no easy answer to these questions, especially when the MSS’s operations arethemselves part of that answer. It’s a cyclical problem.

Intelligence agencies are ultimately accountable to their governments, which set prioritiesand targets for information gathering. If political leaders fail to appreciate the significance of China’s rise then the resources they allocate to studying China naturally decline. The global War on Terror also drew attention away from China at a key moment and even became a driver of cooperation between Western intelligence agencies and the MSS. At the same time, the onus is largely on intelligence and foreign affairs agencies to assess the CCP’s activities and educate policymakers. They failed to effectively do this.

Mindful of these complexities, a few key failures and mistakes stand out.

 

1.   The failure to appreciate influence efforts by the CCP

The CCP’s political influence mechanisms remain poorly understood, but the situation was far worse in the past. Intelligence agencies and scholars have chronically overlooked theoverseas aspects of united front work. Very few recognised that the MSS wasn’t just playing a game of espionage but rather tasked some of its best officers to convince influential foreigners that China would rise peacefully and gradually liberalise. The MSS’s involvement in promoting such narratives should have also hinted that the Party may have had other intentions and was simply buying more time to build its power. Instead, American foreign policy took on board the idea that the United States should encourage China’s peaceful rise as formulated by Zheng Bijian. The US government sought to deepen China’s involvement in international governance and focus on areas of cooperation while downgrading concerns overmatters such as human rights, unfair trade practices and theft of intellectual property.

Had the significance of CCP political influence efforts been appreciated, they should have triggered very different responses from governments and their intelligence agencies. Countering political interference is fundamentally different to countering espionage and terrorism because the CCP’s influence operations tend to focus on individuals without access to classified information and often don’t involve traditional attempts to recruit agents. Rather than intervene to stop the MSS from building friendships with those individuals, intelligence agencies usually preferred to watch and see what happened. They might have stepped in oncethese efforts touched

on senior government officials but the need to prevent the MSS from influencing scholars and retired leaders wasn’t appreciated. Furthermore, many countries lack laws to prosecutepolitical interference, and there isn’t anything necessarily illegal about being manipulated by an undercover intelligence officer.

Together with anti-interference laws, targeted actions by security agencies and cleargovernment policies on the matter, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Transparency is an essential pillar of responding to political interference. Governments and media can cut off the legs of many an influence operation simply by publicly exposing it. The earlier thebetter. But first they need the capabilities to accurately identify and understand CCP influence.

Now that the threat of political interference is widely recognised, governments need to foster a community of experts in the CCP and its intelligence agencies. This will be a decades-long effort. Analysts in the government should be encouraged to specialise and cultivate their expertise on China rather than being moved between assignments every three years. University programs need to be established to train a new generation of fluent Chinese speakers with strong open-source research skills. The flexibility and creativity of independent research institutions will be a key part of this.

 

2.   The belief in misleading stereotypes about China and its intelligenceagencies

Stereotypes and misconceptions were widespread among observers of

Chinese intelligence agencies until recently, and these biased them towards downplaying or misunderstanding the threat. Over many decades, this has allowed the CCP to build entrenched intelligence and influence networks in many countries.

The ‘thousand grains of sand’ theory, whereby China purportedly uses masses of ethnic Chinese amateur spies to hoover up vast amounts of information that are then pieced together into useful intelligence, has perhaps been the most widespread of these misconceptions.8 Atfirst glance, this vivid idea might seem to encourage an active and well-resourced response to Chinese intelligence activity. But any attempt to uncover some essential character of Chinese intelligence is dangerously wrong. China expert Peter Mattis criticises the theory because ‘if “Chinese intelligence”

includes everything from the intelligence services to a corporation to a criminal entrepreneur, then the term becomes almost meaningless’. Mattis points out that it fails on empirical grounds because it grossly understates the role of professional intelligence agencies and wrongly focuses attention on ethnic Chinese people when the MSS has a long history of targeting foreigners too.9 Nonetheless, versions of this idea have been common amongintelligence analysts and in the broader China-watching community.

A related mistake has been the belief that CCP efforts to infiltrate and influence Chinese diaspora communities, particularly through united front work, are relatively harmless. The MSS’s foreign operations have always been hotly focused on suppressing what it calls the ‘five poisons’: Uyghur activists, Tibetan activists, Taiwanese activists, democracy activists and Falun Gong practitioners.10 Until very recently, intelligence agencies didn’t pay attention to these activities. They were seen as insignificant ethnic community affairs even as they impinged upon the freedoms of citizens.11 This has its roots in ignorance and ambivalence towards ethnic Chinese communities.

Today, the failure by governments around the world to care about united front work in Chinese communities is leading to serious and broad consequences. The diversity of Chinesecommunity organisations and media has collapsed in many countries. Where most groups were independent or aligned with Taiwan in the past, today many of the loudest community bodies in countries such as Australia and Canada are run by CCP-aligned individuals who have been courted by the Party’s united front work agencies. Recent political interference cases in Australia show that these united front networks now serve as an infrastructure for espionage and covert influence beyond Chinese communities and into mainstream politics.This also forms a vicious self-sustaining cycle when CCP influence over traditional media and dominance over Chinese social media platforms like WeChat stymies efforts by anti-CCP groups to push back, and by governments to educate affected communities on foreign interference.12

 

3.   Risk aversion in bureaucracies and intelligence agencies Intelligence agencies are hoarders. To protect these hoards, they strictly compartmentalise sensitive information, and little is more sensitive than information gathered on intelligence agencies in foreign countries. This process of gathering and protecting information is an art, but so is knowing

how to share and act on it. When it comes to sharing intelligence on China, insular culture and political sensitivities have helped the MSS’s influence operations flourish.

Excessive compartmentalisation of information hindered efforts by intelligence agencies to cooperate with other members of their own communities – the CIA with the FBI, for example. In the case of MSS agent Katrina Leung, this made it almost impossible to pick out and remove or flag the information she passed on while posing as an FBI source, informationthat sometimes made it to the White House. With China Reform Forum, it allowed diplomatsto cable MSS disinformation straight to Washington, DC.

Even worse, it predisposed intelligence agencies against intervening in these MSS operations, which was also exacerbated by the lack of understanding towards politicalinfluence efforts. This explains why foreign diplomats in China continued to rely on information from China Reform Forum even when some of their colleagues in intelligence agencies knew the think tank was an MSS influence front.

If even US government employees weren’t being warned then it’s little wonder that many scholars, retired officials and business leaders weren’t either. While intelligence agenciesoften do warn and debrief those they see coming into contact with MSS officers, they’re reluctant to do so when high-level retired officials, politicians and business leaders are involved.

One concern is that these warnings might end up in the press, which could lead to a change in MSS tactics. Even worse, some worried that warnings given to the wrong people would be ignored or even passed on to the MSS, so it wasn’t worth doing. To some, the access and opportunities offered by the MSS are too valuable to pass up.

Bureaucratic risk aversion has probably been an even greater factor in the weak response to Party influence operations. In consensus-driven bureaucracies where hearts and minds change at a snail’s pace, nothing is more risky than making an arrest or exposing an operation that reflects poorly on your political masters. As one former US intelligence officer explained, ‘The [FBI leadership] hate dealing with political cases because they feel like either way you’re going to piss off half the people no matter what you do,’ because neither major party wants to be exposed as the target of a concerted influence operation.13 This way, influence operations become self-reinforcing. By spreading its influence operations broadly across the

world’s political, business and academic leadership, the Party forestalled any response to those activities.

Another problem is that intelligence agencies have chronically underutilised open-source intelligence – information collected from publicly accessible sources. Intelligence gathered through secretive channels has a powerful mystique, even when similar findings could bemade with Google searches. As this book demonstrates, many Chinese government secrets can be pieced together by carefully reading Chinese- language books, newspapers, journalsand websites. Amazingly, no country (with the exception of China) has seriously invested in this approach to intelligence gathering, and open-source intelligence is viewed as a lessercalling and a bad career choice within intelligence agencies. While there’s much you can’t access from analysis of open information, its distinct advantage is that it’s low risk, it’s cheap and it comes with a lower level of security classification. This means open-source intelligence is easily shared within governments, and even outside of them. It’s an essential tool for countering foreign interference but one that is largely untapped.

Recognising the special characteristics of influence efforts should change these approaches. If you’re trying to disrupt an influence operation, sometimes a headline newspaper story is exactly what you want. Educating the public about the CCP’s political influence methods and narratives should be a priority. Releasing information about the scale and nature of the MSS will help encourage people to take its activities seriously. Raising the transparency of foreign interference through public reporting and prosecutions has to be hard-wired into the response. Having high-quality open-source intelligence on hand makes that much easier to do.

 

4.   The vacuum of research on Party intelligence organisations and the rise of theAccess Cult

Let’s not forget the importance of one of the main targets of MSS influence

operations: scholars, commentators and other non-governmental observers of China. Though they’re not experts on intelligence agencies, they profess to be experts on China, yet the degree of obliviousness and recklessness with which some of these people have treated the CCP is astounding. The case of the RAND Corporation, which continued to help China Reform Forum access the United States even after it was warned that the group was an MSS front, is symptomatic of a broader problem.

China’s intelligence and security agencies are generally left out of histories and analysis of the country in a way that would be unimaginable when writing about the Soviet Union, for example. As intelligence historian Christopher Andrew points out, ‘The intelligence community is central to the structure of the one-party state.’ It’s one of those forgotten lessons from the Cold War, and one that has been slow to sink into discussions about China.14China’s intelligence community continues to be glossed over when scholars write about contemporary China. One recent 650-page report about the CCP’s influence operations onlydevoted two pages to the MSS.15

Part of this might be chalked up to the inherent difficulty of studying intelligence agencies, but this excuse holds little water. Scant scholarly attention has been applied to the dozens if not hundreds of biographical articles and memoirs by retired Chinese intelligence agents. Government archives in many countries provide another angle on Chinese intelligence operations, yet little attention has been paid to them.16 You’ll be hard- pressed to find any substantial references in academic literature to the CCP’s Central Investigation Department, a predecessor to the MSS, even though it was a driving force behind China’searly diplomatic missions and foreign relations.17 Today, when the US government prosecutes Chinese spies or hackers, few follow up on the leads littered in court records andindictments that often name front organisations for the MSS and PLA.18

Instead, there is minimal scholarly interest in Chinese intelligence agencies. As a field, China studies research into the structure and operation of Party organisations has largely given way to theoretical or quantitative approaches that leave little room for studying the MSS. Open-source investigative methods haven’t featured enough in academic research onChina, although this is beginning to change. Since the gradual reopening of the People’s Republic of China after Mao’s death, it’s simply been more fruitful to work in the fields of study that emerged from that liberalisation. Demographic statistics and economic records that had never been accessible could suddenly be studied by foreigners. New opportunities for fieldwork opened up across China to interview everyday people. For those interested in Party politics, some officials were now willing to sit down for interviews and share their perspectives with American scholars.

These were all worthy avenues for inquiry but had the effect of drawing attention away from less fruitful and more sensitive areas of study. And when scholars managed to interviewMSS officers, they often didn’t realise

it because their interviewees were undercover. When they understood they were meeting with MSS officers, often through the MSS bureau outwardly known as the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, those they met were carefully selected individualstrusted to push the Party line, promote influence narratives and not give away the secrets of the trade.

Another explanation is that scholars know well what happens to those who cross intoverboten topics or are too politically incorrect for the Party’s liking. China experts like Professor Andrew Nathan, who helped publish and edit a collection of leaked documents on the Tiananmen massacre in 2001, have been barred from entering China. I was publicly banned from China in 2019. No one likes to self-censor, but it’s a reality for many who want to continue to visit the country. As Professor David Shambaugh, often viewed as an authority on the CCP, reportedly told a group of young scholars: ‘At some point, you’ll receive a call from a journalist, who will ask you about Taiwan, or Tibet, or Tiananmen … And when that happens, you should put down the phone and run as far away as possible.’19 The impact of this self-censorship upon China research, and particularly on the West’s understanding of sensitive aspects like the MSS, cannot be understated.

Self-censorship is the sibling of another source of ignorance and laxity towards the Party’s underbelly: the Access Cult. In a relatively closed-off political system, those who can access its inner sanctum gain credibility and authority. A cohort of scholars and retired policymakers such as former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke have built careers and business upontheir ability to meet with decision-makers in the Party.

But the MSS is all too aware of the power of access, and it’s a phenomenon the Party as a whole exploits to great effect. The MSS has explicitly offered to help individuals land meetings with senior officials as part of its recruitment pitches.20 While not all who take part in the Access Cult are involved with Chinese intelligence agencies, all accept its bargain of access in exchange for compromising their freedom and integrity. They rely on access for their reputations and income and will never knowingly cross a line that might compromise their continued good standing with the Party or the proxies they rely on to organise high-level meetings. As the case of China Reform Forum shows, what China whisperers learn through

the Access Cult is of little value. At best, they’re fed trivial information. At worst, they’re pawns in a covert influence operation.

The MSS’s China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations is another key part of these MSS efforts.21 Many know that it’s ‘affiliated’ with the MSS, but its contribution to intelligence collection and influence operations as the 11th Bureau of the agency is recognised by few.22 In fact, the institute was originally established as the outward-facing nameplate of an intelligence bureau that specialised in open-source analysis. The reason for its establishment was to give Chinese intelligence a channel for engaging internationally, andit actively helps the rest of the MSS target and recruit foreigners.23

Nonetheless, this MSS bureau’s international relationships are some of

the most extensive of any Chinese research institution because many assume it offers insight into the Party’s thinking. It holds dialogues and conferences with think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC and London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.24 The Australian Strategic Policy Institute previously ranexchanges with CICIR with the aim of seeking ‘common ground’ on cybersecurity by encouraging the Chinese government to limit cyber attacks.25 The Australian governmentonce sponsored one of its economists to complete a joint PhD at CICIR and the AustralianNational University.

The same university also partnered with CICIR to produce a significant report on Australia–China relations.26

 

The backlash

Despite the world’s past mistakes, the MSS now faces the toughest backlash in its history. The agency that once prided itself on never having allowed an officer to be captured abroad saw one of its own arrested and hauled before a jury in the United States. Xu Yanjun, an officer in the Jiangsu State Security Department, fell into a trap laid by the FBI after it cottoned ontohis efforts to steal American jet engine technology. Captured in Belgium, he was extradited to the United States in 2018. Other arrests that year dismantled the network of agents he’d been building up in America.27 And in November 2021 he was convicted of economic espionage. The US government was announcing loud and clear that MSS officers, previously only watched but never arrested, were now fair game.28

That’s not the only disaster that’s keeping MSS officers up at night.

Numerous governments are in the process of fundamentally reconfiguring their foreignpolicies as the charade of China’s peaceful rise crumbles.

Australia was an unlikely first to cross the point of no return. The country is heavily reliant on trade with China, although US companies still lead in investments.29 Xi Jinping toured the country in 2014, and Australia’s political establishment boasted strong ties to Chinese officials and Party- linked businesspeople. Political interference and united front work were adistant and obscure vocabulary. That is, until a series of contingent events in 2017 jolted the country into action. Early in that year, backbench politicians rebelled against ratifying an extradition treaty with China.30 In June, investigative journalists produced what were then the most detailed and revelatory reports the public had seen into CCP-backed interference inAustralian politics.31 By the end of the year, the prime minister, armed with findings from a classified study into the Party’s covert influence operations, tabled new laws that gave security agencies powers to intervene in such activities.32 The government also began contemplating banning Huawei from the nation’s 5G network.33

This was much more than a readjustment of the Australia–China

relationship. It was a tectonic realignment, the effects of which continue to play out. Waking up to the threat of political interference called into question the Party’s intentions and goodwill. It also brought understanding the CCP and its ideology into the heart of discussions about China, when their contemporary relevance had long been downplayed.34 Recognising the innocence with which much of the country previously engaged with China meant that the field was now open for a re-evaluation of the place of economic ties, research collaboration,education exports and human rights in the China relationship. Nothing about waking up to this was easy or inevitable. China’s retaliation – economic coercion, arbitrary arrests ofAustralians and ending high-level exchanges with the Australian government – only confirmed that Australia’s growing reliance on China was fraught.35 This new paradigmdoesn’t mean giving up on the benefits of exchanges with China. As John Garnaut, a key architect of Australia’s foreign interference strategy, explained, ‘It’s about sustaining the enormous benefits of engagement while managing the risks.’36

Australia is now seen as both a model for countering foreign interference and a canary inthe coalmine, sending out warnings of the CCP’s coercion

and covert activity.37 Slowly but surely, the misguided assumptions and narratives that informed decades of engagement with China are being discarded. The MSS operations that propped them up for so long are being unwound. Even in Australia, this process still has many years to go. The country’s capacity to shine a light on interference, enforce foreigninterference laws, deter covert operations and build the resourcing and expertise needed to inform those efforts is still being developed.

Though no other political system has ‘reset’ its relationship with China as suddenly as Australia, aggressive responses to the Party’s espionage are ramping up across the globe. In 2021, the CIA, still struggling to collect intelligence after the MSS dismantled its networks a decade earlier, announced the creation of a new mission centre dedicated to Chinaoperations.38 Daring spy-catching operations have seen FBI agents go undercover to pose as MSS officers to meet with suspected spies.39 (The bureau has come a long way. More than two decades ago it directed an employee who only spoke Cantonese, and not Mandarin, to impersonate an MSS officer.)40 Several current and former US government employees havebeen charged with spying for China in recent years. Baimadajie Angwang, an officer of the New York Police Department, was charged in 2020 with acting as an agent of the United Front Work Department.41 US prosecutors have also accused more than a dozen MSS hackersof committing espionage, although it’s almost certain that none will ever face court.42

The United States is not alone as it clamps down on Chinese espionage.

In 2021, governments around the world teamed up to point the finger at the MSS for widespread hacks of Microsoft Exchange servers.43 All large nations hack each other, but the MSS ‘crossed a line’, in the words of Australian cyber chief Rachel Noble, by letting cyber criminals move in behind it to steal and extort.44 Australian authorities have accused aMelbourne-based united front figure of working with the MSS to influence a sitting politician. Many other suspected foreign agents, including two Chinese academics, have had their visas cancelled.45 The UK government has expelled three MSS officers who were pretending to be journalists.46 It officially named lawyer and political donor Christine Lee as an agent of influence for the United Front Work Department.47 German authorities havecharged a political scientist with working for the Shanghai State Security Bureau.48 Japan, which still lacks laws against espionage and interference,

publicly blamed the Chinese military for cyber attacks and announced the creation of new police units to counter technology theft and cyberespionage.49 In 2021, Estonia, a Baltic state normally under constant threat from Russia, convicted a spy for China.50 Other PRC intelligence agents and covert influence plots have been exposed in France, Taiwan, New Zealand, Belgium, Poland, India, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, Singapore and Nepal.51 All that in a few years.

This list of counterintelligence actions is at once reassuring and unsettling. For every MSS spy who’s caught or whose case is leaked to the media, dozens if not hundreds continue to operate. Out of all these cases, few touch upon the CCP’s influence operations.52 But maybethat’s about to change.

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

 

 

 

This book would not have been written were it not for the encouragement and feedback I received from John Garnaut. Peter Mattis also encouraged me and taught me much about studying China. I owe a great debt to four friends in particular, for bringing me into theirtrust, sharing their wisdom and acting as sounding boards: a Chinese-Australian scholar who prefers not to be named, Jichang Lulu, and two old friends with unrivalled expertise in the field.

Clive Hamilton always offered his support to me, and the confidence and knowledge I gained from working with him at the very beginning of my career were essential for this project. Bob and Dimon have also been generous teachers and friends.

At Hardie Grant, Arwen Summers, Julie Pinkham and many others put in an enormous effort to see through the realisation of this book. I would also like to thank the editors who helped cut and refine its drafts.

Murong Xuecun taught me much about being a writer and how to let go of manuscripts and place them in your publisher’s hands.

Many others from Australia, Europe, the United States and Asia helped through their friendship and guidance or by agreeing to talk about their experiences of China’sintelligence operations. I am grateful to them all.

Finally, I would like to thank my family and close friends for supporting me during the largely solitary experience of writing a book.

 

About the Author

Alex Joske was the youngest-ever analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and is known for meticulous Chinese-language investigations grounded in authoritative and independently verifiable sources. His research on Chinese Communist Party influence and intelligence efforts has withstood intense scrutiny and shaped the thinking of governments and policymakers globally. He lives in Canberra, Australia, and previously lived in Beijing for six years.