China’s Misunderstood Spies
Chinese intelligence services are often assumed to use a vacuum cleaner approach to espionage. It’s a view that risks undermining other countries’ security efforts.
This month, Moscow publicly announced its federal security service had detained a Chinese spy, Tong Shengyong, who the Russians say they caught attempting to purchase documentation for the S-300 surface-to-air missile. The case has puzzled observers, because Beijing had already purchased the S-300 system several years ago, and started fielding its own knock-off.
Speculation has abounded over why the Chinese intelligence services would waste their time stealing details of a system they already possessed. The mechanics of Tong’s case are less important, however, than what it says about Chinese intelligence services and their operations – or at least foreign perceptions of that threat.
Most analysts believe the Chinese intelligence threat is largely amorphous, a vast human network vacuuming up many bits of information. China’s seemingly unique approach to intelligence is known by various names, including ‘human wave,’ ‘mosaic,’ or the ‘thousand grains of sand’ approaches to intelligence. Ultimately, it’s a view of Chinese operations fundamentally at odds with normal understandings of intelligence.
There a three major assumptions about this approach. First and most importantly, is that Chinese intelligence officers don’t rely on the traditional tradecraft of clandestine collection, such as paying or blackmailing for secrets. Second, that their secret services rely on the efforts of ethnic Chinese émigrés and citizenry abroad rather than the willingness of foreign citizens to betray the trust afforded them.And third, that the Chinese intelligence services play a secondary role relative to large, informal networks of amateurs, vacuuming up information irrespective of Beijing’s economic, military, and political priorities.
But is this really an accurate picture?
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