The infiltrated spies with which China deceived the world

It is April 2001. Lin Din, secretary general of a key Chinese cultural exchange organization, is giving a talk to a select audience at the National Press Club in Washington, one of America's leading conference centers.

Chas Freeman, an expert diplomat in the Asian giant, introduces him.

Although Lin, a well-known figure among the American elite at the time, he did not need opening acts: in Beijing he had already met dozens of officials, academics and diplomats whom he had received with a warm welcome.

"China is deepening its reforms to build a more open, prosperous, democratic and modernized nation," Lin said.

And he later expressed his "most sincere hope" that in this century that was just beginning,

China and the United States work "together to build a healthy and stable relationship for the noble cause of world peace and the progress of human civilization," he literally cried.

It was all a lie.

Lin was, in fact, a spy, the "head of the Social Investigation Office of China's main intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS, in its acronym in English)", according to Alan Joske, an expert. of the Australian Institute of Strategic Policy, in an investigation that has embodied in the book

( Hardie Grant Books

2022

“At the time, his office was the main operating unit in the United States within the MSS, and he personally oversaw an extensive network of clandestine assets across the country,” Joske says.

On Wednesday, four days before the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party began on Sunday, Joske presented his study at an event organized by the American think tank CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies), broadcast on the Internet.

Lin's contacts included, along with investigators and diplomats, "an FBI employee who considered him her main source on China."

Lin's case exemplifies, according to Joske, the

of espionage in Beijing: the Asian giant's Ministry of State Security has used double agents to influence politicians, diplomats, officials, academics, organizations and even religious figures with the aim of shape the perception of China by foreign powers;

that is, a country that strives to walk towards democratic values.

However, the reality, says the expert, is that it has moved towards greater "authoritarianism", a trend that has been accentuated during the Xi Jinping era.

The ultimate goal of Beijing is, this expert analyzes, to “influence” its international policies and mislead them about Chinese politics.

Joske, an Australian researcher of Chinese origin, has come to this conclusion after studying hundreds of documents, articles, business records and books published by the Ministry of State Security itself.

But also, after tracking groups of Chinese influence, established mainly during the eighties, and made up of undercover officials, such as the cultural exchange organization that the spy Lin Din directed in the United States.

The magnitude of this espionage is colossal.

By his calculations, the number of professional intelligence officials working for the Chinese Communist Party, including all of its provincial and municipal extensions, "well exceeds 100,000 employees."

A method based on “the long term”

According to Joske, the Chinese Ministry of State Security was looking for recruits with a "long-term" method.

"I interviewed an academic who had been targeted by Chinese intelligence services three times, and the Ministry of State Security was the most patient and cautious," explains the expert.

Other agencies tried to deceive or bribe him, but the MSS, according to the researcher, “focused on trying to build a relationship with the academic of mutual trust, of convenience, of benefit;

they would help him get access to people in the Chinese government, people he might want to interview.”

"It's a way to make him a foreign intelligence asset, but without forcing him," he says.

And while all countries try to control how they are perceived by allies and rivals alike, Joske concludes that China's policy "involves some aspect of interference and not just influence."

"All the operations that I talk about in the book involve some kind of covert activity: there are people who present themselves as journalists or as cultural exchange officials, but they are really intelligence agents," says the researcher.

These spies "try to bribe and cheat."

The academic Joske interviewed "was taken to a massage parlor, offered money and asked to take information to the United States."

"That is not diplomacy because it undermines and interferes with the normal functioning of politics," estimates the Australian expert.

There are very recent examples.

The US Department of Justice indicted a Beijing spy this year for trying to smear a Chinese activist who had run for Congress from New York State - he was not identified, although his profile fits the human rights defender of Chinese origin Yan Xiong—.

“[The MSS] sent a team to monitor him, then they would try to access his tax records and charge him with fraud;

later they would try to trick him and send prostitutes to chase him down,” Joske describes.

But why haven't governments recognized the nature of Chinese influence operations sooner? Joske wonders, a question he tries to answer in his book.

In his view, Western intelligence agencies have been focused on other issues for decades.

In the Cold War, Russia was the main focus of the efforts.

"Later, what really mattered was counterterrorism," continues Joske, who believes there was no "political will" to investigate whether China "was a real problem."

“It was growing peacefully in the eyes of many people, it was potentially going to become a democracy and it was opening up its economy,” says the researcher, who assures that “intelligence operations in Chinese communities in other countries were very deep and extensive;

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