A Necessary Alarm about PRC Espionage Against the United States and Others

In the current environment of wariness towards the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s continuing challenge to the world status quo, Nigel West’s China’s Spies provides an extensive list of the PRC’s espionage activities. Although not much should be of any surprise to those already aware of the PRC’s activities over the decades since its Communist Party seized power, China’s Spies is a necessary alarm for those who still nurse delusions of a rosy partnership with a benign rising power. China’s Spies mostly documents PRC espionage against the United States, but other Western victims are included. As West plainly sees it, we have not been taking the PRC espionage threat seriously, nor have we gained sufficient knowledge of its internal workings to adequately counter it.

In short, West provides a go-to list of PRC violations of Liberal Westerner international norms of behavior, contrary to the “soft power” propaganda generated from Beijing, propaganda often accepted and even repeatedly forwarded by useful idiot Westerners. West paints an aggressive, broad but deliberate world-wide espionage apparatus, intent on building up PRC strength by hook or by crook. This is done with little regard for costs or damage, and with the unlimited resources which a totalitarian regime can muster, but against which Liberal Westerners have forgotten how to respond.

West views a shift in PRC tactics as broadening from past simple commercial espionage more concerned with domestic issues such as dissidents and industrial technologies, now to active subversion and direct political and military competition against foreign powers. The PRC presents a particularly difficult adversary because its Ministry of State Security appears to operate in a relatively unsupervised manner and rarely has any defectors. In addition, Westerners more used to the former Soviet Union’s tactics were not prepared for the PRC’s broader approach which expanded as Liberal Westerners themselves provided more opportunities for penetration. Susceptible non-Chinese individuals with money problems and a need to avoid detection are too enticingly easy targets for the PRC to ignore. Interestingly, non-Chinese targets often lacked ideological motivation, which might reflect the declining morale of Liberal Westerners in general, as supported by recent polls which indicate a depressingly large percentage of them who are not proud of, and are not willing to defend, their own countries.

China’s Spies covers the PRC’s world-wide efforts ranging from the relatively expected collecting of names of important business executives and facilitating influential trips to the PRC, to the more violative and active undermining of conservative politicians in favor of liberal candidates. The work covers creation of clandestine illegal “police stations” which monitored and harassed Chinese dissidents and pro-democracy activists now in the U.S., with tactics such as threats against targets’ relatives who are still in the PRC to force targets to return to the PRC, and even other more extreme non-judicial, illegal, abduction methods.

PRC espionage can simply take the form of securing control over valuable companies or property via outright purchases, or illegal reverse-engineering of proprietary technologies. PRC companies can also engage in seemingly normal production contracts with a foreign company, but then purposely undermine the products to destroy that foreign company which had competed with another PRC company. Joint ventures are often one-sided relationships in which the PRC ends up fully rewarded while the foreign company is left with little or nothing. PRC espionage is also not above using sexual relations for its purposes despite a baseless reputation for prudishness (but again not a surprise for those familiar with how the Communists arranged defections and traitors among its political opponents). The totalitarian PRC government can often operate by directing one PRC company to indirectly support another to the detriment of foreign competitors, or even by seizing visiting foreign executives to exchange for captured PRC operatives.

China’s Spies notes that Liberal Westerner counter-intelligence operations were often hamstrung by perceived politically incorrect racial-profiling and adverse effects on Chinese students studying in the U.S. The difficulties in proving actual espionage in Liberal Westerner courts often results in prosecutions, and lower penalties, for the lesser violations of disclosure requirements. However, over-zealous counter-intelligence witch-hunts would play directly into the PRC’s long-standing recruitment efforts to lure ethnic Chinese back to the motherland along with their foreign expertise and perhaps stolen secrets. Subtle inducements could lead to deeper commitments even if the ethnic Chinese individuals did not originally intend or are even unaware of betraying their current adopted country. (Cautious ethnic Chinese still ought to consider how the PRC claims jurisdiction over diaspora Chinese regardless of citizenship, although caution might also suggest considering how German-Americans during the 1930s should have avoided groups like the German American Bund.) Innocently packaged PRC-backed grants can ensnare individuals into disclosing information which they might otherwise have not disclosed, or at least attract other potential recruits with access to valuable information.

China’s Spies has eleven chapters: Honey Badger (joint FBI/CIA investigation which revealed how badly United States intelligence had been penetrated), Political Influence (PRC penetration such as by legitimate and illegitimate political fundraising, and direct involvement such as with Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell, member of the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, or with Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein’s San Francisco office), Compromise (“honeytrap” tactics), the People’s Liberation Army (military intelligence, cyberwarfare, disruptions, and theft of secrets), Unit 61398 (cyber-attacks), One Thousand Talents (recruiting ethnic Chinese), Huawei (control through telecommunications industry), Signals Intelligence, Commercial Espionage, Taiwan, and concluding with The China Threat.

China’s Spies’ largest chapter is on commercial espionage, which might have been better organized chronologically or by industry for clarity. While West does implicitly note that today’s commercial espionage can easily be linked to military and national security, China’s Spies’ separate commercial section inherently diminishes the linkage, and weakens West’s point that the PRC’s overall reach was transitioned by its deliberate intent. PRC aggressiveness arguably simply increased as the it gained more resources, without any genuine change of original intent. China’s Spies’ chapters could be better organized, with some of the smaller chapters easily fitting into other associated chapters. The chapter separations obscure how the PRC has a broad holistic, unrestricted approach to warfare and competition, with no dimensions off-limits - contrary to what is often assumed by naive Liberal Westerners.

China’s Spies perhaps could also use a much longer comparison with the now defunct Soviet Union/Iron Curtain espionage history for a more auspicious narrative of how the PRC’s espionage can be, or might be, defeated. A quick comparison with recent espionage activities by other foreign countries, while arguably outside the scope of China’s Spies, might place into better context the real or imagined threat posed by the PRC. However, a comparison with Communist espionage activities prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, and our responses to them, would be an especially valuable reference point for the amount of danger represented by the PRC. Many Liberal Westerners seem to have forgotten that for a period before the Soviet Union’s collapse, that leftist totalitarianism was an existential threat, offering a seductive “communist” alternative to the Liberal Westerners’ beliefs in capitalistic economic growth coupled with genuine freedoms. Yet even after an endless history of communist and authoritarian failures in centralized economies and chained peoples, many Liberal Westerners now apparently embrace “socialism” and centralized direction with little or no thought, content that a nice sounding label on the same failed policies will somehow correct the inevitably same failed result. In a way, West suggests that the biggest problem is actually that Liberal Westerners have pathetically short memories, forgetting former existential challenges and panicking over freshly labelled but simply old threats.

China’s Spies reports on only one aspect of the PRC, as that is West’s reasonable purpose and focus, and it lacks the tone of other warnings, such as by Gordon C. Chang’s Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America (2024) that describe the unrestricted warfare against the United States by an aggressive PRC leadership. However, China’s Spies similarly and clearly paints a PRC strategy of an absolute zero-sum espionage competition with hopes of eventual PRC world supremacy. China’s Spies does posit that the PRC has shifted its espionage focus because of how Liberal Westerners have failed to respond robustly. However, China’s Spies never really emphasizes that the PRC has never actually hidden its intent to bide its time, to husband its strength, and to strike when able. In fact, the PRC’s turn-key controlled rabid nationalism has always anticipated a proposed reversal of China’s supposed victimhood from a “Century of Humiliation”, despite that humiliation already long ended in 1945 by Chiang Kai-shek’s previous Guomindang government through China’s Allied role during the Second World War. Under the PRC’s current victimhood mentality, which conveniently self-justifies victimizing its alleged historical oppressors, Liberal Westerners do not deserve any consideration of fair play or reciprocity. We should also remember that the current PRC regime still venerates its former supreme leader Mao Zedong, who famously stated that "What if they killed 300 million of us? We would still have many people left.”

Mao’s attitude is especially relevant when West notes that the PRC apparently sometimes flings crude espionage attempts which costs its operatives dearly, without highlighting how the PRC historically often used human waves of cannon fodder to achieve its objectives, with little regard for the costs to its own people. Similarly, even waves of captured operatives would serve a purpose of destabilizing its opponents through paranoia or distracted responses. The generous support of capitalists willing to sell rope for their own hanging, and Liberal Westerners anxiously avoiding politically incorrect racial profiling, have enabled the totalitarian/authoritarian PRC to directly compete with Liberal Westerners for world supremacy. Nigel West effectively provides a stern warning for a more robust response against the PRC.

If West’s warning is heeded, and we take appropriate remedial action, the PRC’s aggressiveness may turn out to be yet another failure. Trust in the PRC becoming a responsible player in international society diminishes with each PRC transgression noted by the world. Violations such as unjustifiably attacking Philippine Coast Guard ships, illegally creating South China Seas “islands”, or attempting to intimidate a democratic Taiwan are not lessened by aggressive espionage activities and disregard for fair business practices. In the PRC’s desire for world stature, it may find that its aggressive espionage will have severe negative consequences to its reputation, and damage the PRC’s ultimate standing in the world community.

"Just as water, which carries a boat from bank to bank, may also be the means of sinking it, so reliance on spies, while production of great results, is oft-times the cause of utter destruction." ?? Tu Mu (803–852), commenting on Sun Tzu’s Art of War – Use of Spies.

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Our Reviewer: Ching Wah Chin, a member of NYMAS, has lectured and written widely on East Asian History. His reviews include The Pacific War and Contingent Victory: Why Japanese Defeat Was Not Inevitable, Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City, The 1929 Sino-Soviet War, War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat, Future War and the Defence of Europe, Nations in the Balance: The India-Burma Campaign, December 1943-August 1944, Ring of Fire: A New History of the World at War, 1914, All the World at War, and On a Knife Edge: How Germany Lost the First World War.

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Note: China’s Spies is also available in e-editions.

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