How China turns members of its diaspora into spies
economist.com
economist.com
There's no mandatory spying expected if the position is funded privately or by the host institution.
I expect that the spying is just limited to their fellow state funded students although I have heard of significant tension between mainland and Hong Kong students about this. I don't know if Hong Kong students have to spy.
Tangential: in my personal experience, the need for CSC funding for UK PhD programs is due to the very little available funding opportunities for foreign students. Doing a PhD without financial support in an expensive country is ridiculous for most families in China.
Most students would actually try to avoid that if it's possible to secure funding in alternative ways (like the paid PhD programs elsewhere in the world), as CSC funding comes with a requirement of returning to China after finishing the study and this limits opportunities of the students to work abroad afterwards.
In Turkey when they have a new shiny politician, there's a running joke to check if they went to University of Exeter. For some reason, all the lightly islamist politicians of Turkey have been to Exeter at some point in their life.
Until recently these threads were flagged and removed from HN, and participants to conversations stating these things were warned of possible future bans.
It looks like the conversation has changed quite dramatically. The geopolitical tone has trickled down to tech and VC.
Firms like a16z are going all in on "American dynamism", which is basically about competition with China.
It's almost every week you hear about China's sixth gen fighters, NGAD, drones, military spending, etc. in the media. Now the various institutional interests want to invest in capabilities to deter this.
But this kind of conversation, even if handled delicately in a way that was super mindful of not being xenophobic, was entirely forboden just a few short years ago.
Talking about Chinese national students as possible spies. Wow. My ban avoidance scar tissue still tingles with this subject matter. I'm wondering out loud if this geopolitical tension and rivalry is kosher to talk about now.
I don’t buy the xenophobia argument.
However I hope the collateral damage to the innocent Chinese expats can be minimized. The reason of many of those to stay outside of China are concerns about the the ruling party and the desire to keep a distance from it. (Admittly also a higher quality of life, but no longer true in many cases.)
> natural behaviours
Always the argument of people perpetrating evil (or nonsense): It's natural! Murder, rape, hatred ... killing your sibling or parent is natural - it's in the Bible! Starvation, disease, warfare, cheating on your partner, theft, ... every bad thing is natural.
So is every good thing, and many/most/all cultures have long said you have the moral choice, in Abrahamic religions ever since we left Eden. We have the knowledge of good and evil.
> A population that actively resists or perverts these natural behaviours through xenophilia is not long for this world.
Nothing is worse for humanity than warfare, and it's common cause is xenophobia and nationalism. The West has done very well embracing new immigrants. The USA is almost all immigrants or their decendents.
You don't have to embrace hate or these nonsense arguments. The treasures of freedom and peace and justice are at hand; you only have to take them up. They are far more capable and productive than these fears - look at the most free, most safe, most prosperous countries in the history of the world, with no peers or competition. They are all built on universal human rights - universal!
This reminds me of the paradox of tolerance. You know there would be no hand wringing in china about whether they could even discuss the possibility that some Americans in china could be spies.
Of course. China is in America's telecommunications systems. It's a problem:
https://fortune.com/2024/12/27/china-espionage-campaign-salt...
That's a major claim, do you have a link to an article or source?
>Amongst other things, the contract also commits the recipient to “regularly submit” a formal “Situation Report” (called the Study/Research/Training Situation Report for Personnel Studying Abroad 出国留学人员学习/研修情况报告) to the relevant Chinese embassy or consulate, and “participate in annual PhD student reviews” there.
[1] https://ukctransparency.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/China...
There might be something else but this looks like a progress evaluation form and is hardly concerning.
There is indeed something else
> An online announcement from January 2019 by the Chinese consulate in Belfast even suggests recipients should report important papers published, patents obtained, and inventions made by those they work with at British universities.
I was unable to load the url for this, but it's not looking good. A certain line is crossed when you have to start reporting on ip that isn't yours.
The level of detail and the scope would matter a lot. It's very different whether the student is required to show that he coauthored 2x Science, 1x Nature Photonics and have a patent about something pending, or he need to furnish detailed information about an on-going/unpublished work.
I would also expect these dodgy reporting to be done in a more delicate way if they do exist then what's shown on this PDF. Citing the report in my first reply suggests that PDF is simply not a good source.
sending someone abroad to compile information on other people just seems off, even if some of that is public.
These are supposed to be students.
Why do people write literature reviews? You write about what you think is significant.
The students have to report on each other. Effectively spying on each other.
Also note that there are many private universities in China and private research institutions which send a significant number of students where I imagine this requirement doesn't apply.
The North Korean hacks into several companies are an example of how bad it is now, add in some good deep fake technology and soon you will not be able to distinguish who is actually working for your company.
I think this is one of those things that sucks but may be necessary.
You need to trust the knowledge workers that make up your economy to not send your research to a hostile nation so they can take advantage of your R&D investments.
And you need to know that your critical infrastructure (beyond Internet and trains, think about electricity and running water) isn't vulnerable to being slowly pwned and then shut down all at once in a catastrophic event that coincides with a forcible military reunification of one Asian country with another.
Although the latter problem is less malice and more general incompetence in the cyber security realm. Can't solve that with a security clearance or RTO. Solar Winds anyone?
unfortunately among many circles, it is the opposite. More and more "zero trust" .. more logging and audit, more spot checks, more re-logins .. It is a culture clash, always-on networking has made it much worse, since security professionals have endless lists of problems they see.
Shades of HIPAA. It tries to tackle security and privacy of patient data but it winds up applying large corp requirements (inappropriately) to small practices. There seems to be little distinction of who the regs are being applied to.
One upshot is that small practices have to dedicate resources to understand/audit/report/comply with requirements that don't apply to them.
ex: Extensive audits of how a practice secures local patient data that doesn't exist - because it fully resides on remote provider platforms.
A few years ago everyone thought that would happen to Ukraine, that Russian hackers would shut down everything from water delivery to weapon systems. The hackers almost certainly tried, yet the lights remained on. Imho we overestimate the power of "nation-state hackers" and underestimate the resilience of our systems.
On the other hand, because of early mover advantage, a lot of utilities in the US computerized fairly early but the upfront cost of maintenance remained high.
Aren’t companies required to establish an employee’s origin by bureaucratic means? IDs, SSNs, notarized copies, work permit, etc? Why are North Korean guys even a problem, it feels like they shouldn’t be able to fake identification numbers and permits, unless something is fundamentally wrong with the country’s accounting.
The problem is that identity theft is so ridiculously easily in the US that it's trivial for bad actors to just steal someone's identity. The solution is to fix identity theft.
Not one thing to fix this was done. Anyone could buy my information and be me, NOTHING was done to fix this insanely huge problem.
In my experience, National Security tends to mean the security of (primarily) the US Gov and (secondarily) Gov contractors and major campaign donors. National Security applies to individuals when justification is needed to deploy systems that surveil Americans (not suspected of a crime).
> For a long time the U.S. military resisted the use of PALs. It feared the loss of its own independence, and it feared malfunction, which could put warheads out of action in a time of crisis.
I’m also heavily “leaked”, but nobody can do anything with my numbers without actual counterfeiting. I could share my ids here if not for pseudonymity. The fact that your identity can be legally hired into a company without your proven id hard copies, that’s the root of the problem, imo.
The US is plagued by stupid right wing people who think that ID is satanic, and stupid left wing people who think that ID by nature will marginalize poor people. Because we’ve allowed the federal government to outsource ID to the states, the US is stuck with inadequate identity framework for a long time.
Doesn't this result in more over the shoulder opportunities by insider threat actors (i.e. spies) in conventional open office settings? Unclear how this meshes with outsourcing also.
You were instructed that anything you had in your vehicle when you got to the gate (in the middle of nowhere) might be confiscated. Show up with the rental car, keys, ID, and necessary equipment only. Nothing but you and your clothing would leave the site, yes it cost a laptop each visit (that we sent ahead). ID, car and keys stayed at the gate.
Blindfolded while onsite until you got to the equipment, someone would take you to the bathroom.
It was a lot, but I suspect some form of “all electronics dropped here” should be the SOP in a lot of places.
It kinda horrifies me when I hear about congressional members upset about not being able to take their phones to some meetings and so on.
I don't buy the explanation that being unfree is somehow intrinsic to East Asian cultures. We have had plenty of authoritarian regimes in Europe, too, and several hundred years ago few people could call themselves personally free.
I don't want this model of governance to spread around the globe again. It has been tried before, with disastrous results. Unless we abandon the concept of universal morality completely, treating your own people as disposable serfs is wrong.
This is the inherent risk of all authoritarian regimes: if the top boss goes crazy and demands, say, that you all start to kill sparrows, there is no way to stop him or remove him from power. No division of powers.
The very same mechanism caused the Russo-Ukrainian war.
There is significantly more politics involved in how the CPP is run than you think and people complain more than you seem to believe. It’s far from an open democracy but it’s not North Korea either.
Frankly, they're practically as free as Americans and Europeans. In some respects they're more free. There's far less violent crime and property crime, too, so living in the city feels more free in ways which should be obvious -- women can walk around alone at night and not fear for their own safety. Imagine walking around Memphis at midnight, alone and unarmed, or parts of London... even as a man, it would be very ill-advised.
China's business culture, also, is very explicitly laissez-faire, competition between firms is brutal, and there's less red tape than you'd get in Europe.
They do a lot of things right.
> treating your own people as disposable serfs
How do you mean? How is the average Shanghai banker any more or less of a serf than a banker in Frankfurt or Indianapolis? Democracy?
Says it all about your biases that you seriously think this is actually a dangerous proposition in terms of real statistical risk.
I don't have stats for individual Chinese cities, but China's rate is 0.46 per 100,000 people. In China, it's plausible that the cities are safer than the countryside, and I don't think that Beijing's number is substantially higher than the national average.
Basically, you are 139x more likely to be murdered in Memphis.
Look at the trends and think about what you're saying. What you're calling "authoritarianism" (very vaguely defined) has brought order from chaos. I don't know if there's a single large American city that is now safer than Beijing. Sure, things were different in 1960. "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
Frankly, I'm not even convinced that the average Chinese person has less say in his or her Government than the average American or (especially) European.
The average banker anywhere isn't likely a serf, but the average banker is not an average citizen.
An average citizen in China was, for example, subject to three years of Zero Covid policy gone wild. AFAIK it took some street unrest, very untypical for China, for the government to reconsider.
For all their faults, Western governments didn't stick to three years of nonsense during Covid. The people who would got voted out, because they could be voted out.
A banker is like any other professional. But we can go one step down: Is the average taxi driver more of a "disposable serf" in China than the West?
And consider your use of the word "disposable." If you travel to China and defraud Chinese citizens, they will throw the book at you. If you travel to China and murder a Chinese citizen, they will execute you, and quickly. I've personally been involved in a civil (commercial) legal case in China, and I walked away extremely impressed with the speed, low cost, and the fairness of their legal system, whereas the system in the West seemed almost completely broken to me. (That civil case in China cost less than $10k, start to finish, including trial. In US Federal Court, $300k+ before we even got to trial, thanks in large part to "discovery" and pretrial motions which were -- accurately -- deemed unnecessary in China. Ran out of money before trial and had to settle, lol.) Chinese people enjoy extremely robust legal protections. Their own government evidently doesn't consider them disposable; quite the contrary, it signals that they're not to be trifled with.
If you travel to Finland and murder a Finn, you'll probably get a statistically average sentence of 12 years.
In which country is the innocent life of its citizens more "disposable"? Are China's "disposable serfs" not afforded obviously better protection from evil and harm?
Look, my point is that the Chinese do an awful lot right. In the administration of law, commerce, industry, etc., we should look at them and realize that we in the West have a lot that we can still learn. It's not all bad.
As for Covid, that's a very particular matter and the US/EU/UK/Canada/Australia didn't exactly cover themselves in glory.
Living in the US, I never do that ... not worried about thieves. Somehow not robbed.
People see some articles or movies and they just assume every negative thing is an enormous / constant threat I think.
You have the obvious examples of Taiwan and (formerly) Hong Kong - actual Chinese political entities, free and democratic and strongly embraced by the people there, and much more prosperous than Communist-controlled China. Also, Japan, South Korea, ...
Just going by a blind guess and knowledge of the world, I guess it's pretty much correlated with economy and geopolitical dominance, so I'd expect America to be number one simply as a result of it's wealth and strategic dominance in the last century, and then China somewhere around the level of the rest of NATO or Russia or something (though I'm sure rapidly rising, which would explain the growing anxiety of the corporate mouthpieces in The Economist).
"One of the largest and most secretive intelligence organizations in the world, it maintains powerful branches at the provincial, city, municipality and township levels throughout China."
Fair enough.
But as wild speculation with no real insight, I'd guess that such a large mass organizational structure probably also precludes the same rigid centralization and advanced capabilities of other intelligence agencies i.e. it probably operates more as a snitching hotline to gather less specific intel on a wider range of people with less ability to perform any actionable espionage type operations, instead of a horde of spies illegally infiltrating every western government, university, and business.
But again I got no real idea.
Doesnt get talked about in the media much but it happens.
I’m sure it happens just because there are lots of people. But I’m having a hard time coming up with a western nation that has a significant political dissident diaspora. I’d guess that the war on terror might generate one somewhere?
After he declined to spy on China, the FBI accused him of being a Chinese spy. The accusations turned out to be completely spurious, and the FBI agent involved was found to have knowingly spread lies about the scientist. But before his name was cleared, he was fired by his university, and the FBI made all sorts of public declarations that he was a spy.
0. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/27/1027350/anming-h...
But, perhaps related, I learned of this the other day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_front_(China)
Emigrants always have ties to the originland.
The typical country is closer to Cambodia or Honduras not a world power. China can leverage it, but most countries aren’t China.
I think by the very nature of what’s going on you’re demonstratedly wrong on this point.
America has a vast economy, huge military R&D spending, massive foreign entanglements etc, and it’s arguable if the CIA is worth its budget. I’m not arguing it should be defunded, but there’s been significant debate even within the intelligence community around the topic for a bunch of different reasons.
Scale that down to a developing country with 10 million people and human intelligence gathering within foreign countries is almost guaranteed to be a waste of time and money.
China can coerce it's diaspora through their family ties and social circle back home[1]. That isn't normal and is very difficult to pull off in democratic countries.
1. https://www.propublica.org/article/operation-fox-hunt-how-ch...
Look at the Assange fiasco for example, or Guantanamo Bay, or the use of rendition to allied states by the CIA, or sitting in on torture conducted by allies (recently in Yemen), etc.
Not to mention the complete disregard of international law when it comes to Israel, and in the same, hypocritical breath, repeatedly insisting that the Russians must follow international law (which they should).
The Chinese mob (wink wink) has the biggest money laundering operation in the world. They have brokers who pick up (source) and deliver (destination) the cash. They do all the currency conversion. And then have an internal market to auction the conversions. All over Chinese government controlled networks like WeChat. Very clever.
The Triads have been doing this kind of dark market money transfers for decades (it's mentioned in the book Mr Nice like it was old news in the 80s). I've met Chinese people who use it to send/receive from family and investors in mainland China. I've met agents who investigate the networks of companies Chinese mobsters make to cover up their tracks.
Financial Times doc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjGIp7kdS6E#t=8m32
Dirty money will always exist, and currently exists in every single country. But in the past 20 years, there have been a rise in the amount of rich Chinese. Just like rich Japanese of 80s through their RE investments and etc.
Ironic given that his daughter attended Harvard, which is very pricy on a 2000s-era party salary.
Around that time, the Xi admin began limiting the amount of currency outflow from a single household to around $50-100k a year. That isn't enough for international tuition in most cases in the US, or moving abroad.
As such, anyone who wanted to move or pay tuition in the US began leveraging shadow banks.
There were much less invasive ways to nudge businesses to convert black/grey money into white money but the method the Xi admin began enforcing in the 17-18 period also helped with solidifying control.
Kinda sad tbh because a lot of these reforms are needed, but they became politicized.
If China wants to reach out and make an example of students in the US who turn their back on their homeland, they can do so very easily and in a manner that both has plausible deniability and sends a clear message to other students. We're an open society and it's impossible to protect everyone from other nation-states if they see an individual as a threat to the nation-state's interests.
Not that any given country wouldn't still try, but I think it would be difficult and it's not clear what you'd get out of it.
Not good, but the incompetent capitalist class cheers on the scapegoating.
I'm exaggerating the above, but until recently China wasn't deemed to be a problem either, so the narrative does seem to play a role.
What changed is Xi Jinping became president. Until then China was considered a good citizen of the world. Xi Jinping started attacking neighbors, claimed ownership of south china sea, and so on, and this aggressive behavior damaged China's reputation.
Basically, USA is scared that a political ideology that's not compatible with the western standards can become the most successful one that lifts its citizens. It will never be liked by any of the governments, because locals will be able to point towards China and say "well, why do they have it better?!".
Or for the conspiracy minded, they ‘let him’ escape to Taiwan and told him to go set up a pro democracy org in the states and this aling parents thing is all just cover
六四清場，國外有稱「六四屠殺」，也被中国政府称为是平息反革命暴乱，即在1989年6月3日晚至6月4日早晨，以中国共产党领导人邓小平为首的中央军事委员会命令中国人民解放军戒严部队於中国首都北京市對六四事件示威者進行武力清場的事件。
I’m sure he has plausible deniability, but I left that meeting thinking wow that professor is really a spy. This was before the pandemic.
Does this work? https://p97.tr4.n0.cdn.zight.com/items/Z4uE5g1O/9b63a223-7f9...
Thanks for letting me know!