In May 2017, Yao Zijian, aged 102, was guest of honour at an extraordinary ceremony in Beijing. As the oldest surviving Chinese spy, he found himself in the midst of a crowd of hundreds: parents and children of Chinese secret agents, who have fought on the “underground front” since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party – in the war of espionage.
The occasion was the ninetieth anniversary of the Central Committee Special Branch (Zhongyang Teke), the oldest of the Chinese secret services, set up in Shanghai on 11 November 1927 under the aegis of the future prime minister, Zhou Enlai. Later renamed the CCP Central Investigation Department (Zhongyang Diaochabu), it was for a long time the main political intelligence service, led until the 1980s by the remarkable Luo Qinchang (19182014).
Luo’s son, General Luo Yuan, addressed a speech to the offspring of these “great soldiers of the covert war”, lauding the qualities of the “nameless agents”, who were unwaveringly “loyal, fearless, cautious when alone, alert, capable and helpful to each other ... [T]he spirit that every Party member and soldier should learn from”.
This was more than an exercise in homage to the heroic underground militants who engaged in historic espionage, first against the French and British in the Shanghai Concessions, then against Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang and spies from Japan. As those in the audience were surely aware, this secret war is an ongoing reality under President Xi Jinping today.
The choice of the intelligence service to be honoured, the Diaochabu, was significant in this regard. In the 1980s, it had joined forces with the counterespionage branch of the Ministry of Public Security: the Gonganbu. Together the two services then formed a new Ministry of State Security, the Guojia Anquanbu, or Guoanbu for short.
It was the Guoanbu, still in operation today, that organised the anniversary event in 2014. Its first leader, minister Ling Yun, died in March 2018 at the age of 100. The publicity afforded to this ceremony also had another, more immediate purpose, serving as the launch of a new campaign against “imperialist spies” – that summer, a draconian new anti-espionage law was passed.
In the twenty-first century, the Guoanbu considers itself to be a global intelligence player as significant as the Soviet KGB was in the twentieth.
The Chinese intelligence services, an umbrella term including several other organisations beside the Guoanbu, rival the largest in the world: the American CIA, the Israeli Mossad, the Indian RAW, the French DGSE, Britain’s MI6, and of course the other intelligence services in the region, such as the Taiwanese MJIB and the Japanese Naicho.
This book explores the longstanding importance of intelligence in communist China. Its multiple origins go back to the fourteenth-century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Sun Tzu’s famous treatise The Art of War, as well as the influence of both Russian communism and, paradoxically, enemy states: the French and British secret services fought by Zhou Enlai and his spies in the 1930s, in the Shanghai Concessions.
Chinese Spies is an attempt to illustrate both the long history of the intelligence and security services since the creation of the Chinese Communist Party, and their ongoing role in politics today. In 2019, the CCP still preserves a Marxist intelligence tradition that dates back to the interwar period.
There is no equivalent to this unbroken tradition, apart from the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, which was founded by Leon Trotsky in 1918 and retained its name even after the implosion of the USSR. A century later, until 2019, it played a major role in defeating the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria. However, the ideological veneer of communism has disappeared from the Russian intelligence service, even though its good relations with the Chinese secret services are no doubt facilitated by the psychological behaviour pat- terns of President Vladimir Putin’s agents, rooted in those of the Soviet organisations.
Our story opens with the Battle for Shanghai in the 1920s, and ends with cyber conflict, the secret operations surrounding the New Silk Road, the global economic wars underway today, the battles waging on the internet, and the war against Islamist terrorism.
As a result of these new challenges, there has been a formidable increase in the authority of the Chinese intelligence apparatus, specifically since 2017, when Xi Jinping, self-proclaimed “supreme leader” of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the “leadership core” of the party, enhanced his powers at the 19th CCP Congress, making him the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.
This was a synthesis of the dual political heritage that Xi boasts: a form of neo-Maoism tinged with the cult of personality, and a post-Mao pragmatism in the service of a triumphant modernisation. According to “Xi Jinping Thought”, the most important thing is to maintain the “mass line”, at the same time as “deepening reform”, and to revitalise the country through the “renaissance of the Chinese nation”.
Chinese intelligence is distinguished from that of other countries in the degree to which it is influenced by politics. Each service is two-pronged, with a technical director, charged with handling daily operations, working alongside a political commissar, who is responsible for ensuring that the organisation’s ideological orientation con- forms to the strategy decreed by the CCP.
Specifically, this orientation dovetails with the “Chinese Dream,” in other words President Xi’s aim of preserving the supremacy of the party, while also pursuing his global strategy. That strategy is in fact not only global, but interplanetary, too: Beijing has already proclaimed its intention to fly the red Chinese flag on Mars, the “red planet”, in 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic of China.
China, a new “soft power” titan, prides itself on being the most effective pacifying force on the planet, with vast projects like the One Belt One Road initiative, an international infrastructure and investment scheme billed as a new Silk Road, or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which aims to shift the global economic and security centres from the West to a new axis led by the China-Russia partnership. This pact incorporates the former Muslim countries of the USSR, as well as Pakistan and India as recent members and Iran as an observer.
Meanwhile, President Xi is setting out to create what will be nothing less than the most powerful army ever seen in the entire history of humanity. Since early 2016, Xi Jinping has completely reorganised the People’s Liberation Army, originally founded in 1949.
He has simplified its command hierarchy, replaced the seven military regions with five “theatre commands”, and fused two strategic armed forces, besides the land, sea and air armies: the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (missiles, interplanetary rockets) and the Strategic Support Force (SSF), which includes for example the digital firepower required for cyber warfare. As we will see in later chapters, the SSF is an entirely distinct army of intelligence-gathering and reconnaissance.
Xi has also launched a new concept, the “strategic management of the sea”, designed to be pursued in tandem with the Silk Road strategy. According to some Indian analysts, between today and 2050 the PLA could, theoretically, engage in up to six different wars: for unification with Taiwan; the “retaking” of the Spratly Islands, southern Tibet, and Diaoyutai (called the Senkaku Islands by the Japanese, who claim them as their territory); unification with Outer Mongolia; and the recovery of territories lost to Russia.
This is the context in which Chinese intelligence has evolved. Of course, there is also a role to be played by internal security, the administration of the laogai (the Chinese gulag), and the repression of dissi- dents, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, who died in July 2017. But the latter part of this book is focused specifically on Xi’s reorganisation of the secret services abroad and their activities.
In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping conceived of the services as going hand in hand with modernisation. In the 1990s, Jiang Zemin allowed them to evolve from a community of regional intelligence services into a global apparatus, taking advantage of the temporary disappearance of the Russian KGB, which has reappeared today in a different form.
Xi Jinping has now developed this massive apparatus to resemble that of a global superpower. We will see how he did this as we follow the evolution of both the Guoanbu and the PLA’s new services. Together, in terms of both personnel and the range of organisations, they constitute the largest intelligence service in the world today.
Excerpted with permission from Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping, Roger Faligot, translated by Natasha Lehrer, HarperCollins India.