China's sprawling spy agencies are designed to root out the 'five poisons' at home and abroad, British intelligence says

• China has built an expansive intelligence apparatus, with tens of thousands of officers.
• It is focused on combating the "five poisons" that the Chinese Communist Party sees as its top threats.
• Chinese spies also take a "whole-of-state" approach to gathering intel that could benefit Beijing.

China's growing military and economic might has attracted worldwide attention, but Beijing has also developed a sprawling intelligence apparatus to support its goal of supplanting the US and wielding influence around the globe.

For the Chinese Communist Party, achieving dominance abroad requires control at home, so China's massive spy services are designed to quash threats to the CCP's hold on power wherever they arise, according to an assessment by British intelligence.

'The Five Poisons'

In a recent report to parliament, the British intelligence services detailed the operations and goals of the Chinese intelligence services. China "almost certainly" has the largest intelligence apparatus in the world, with tens of thousands of officers, most of whom work for three civilian and military agencies, the report said.

The all-powerful Ministry of State Security is a civilian organization with executive powers that gathers intelligence using human sources and tries to catch foreign spies and intelligence officers through counterintelligence operations.

The less influential Ministry of Public Security is also a civilian agency with law-enforcement duties that mainly conducts counterintelligence. Finally, the Chinese military's Strategic Support Force is responsible for signals intelligence. Much like the NSA, it conducts electronic collection and gathers intelligence from computer networks and internet activity.

According to British intelligence, these services have been tasked with rooting out the "Five Poisons" — Taiwanese independence, Tibetan independence, Xinjiang separatists, the Falun Gong, and the Chinese democracy movement — which the Chinese Communist Party considers its principal national-security threats, and with expanding China's "global reach and influence."

China's leaders see Taiwanese independence as the top threat. The island has been self-governed since the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949, but Beijing considers it a breakaway territory and has vowed to absorb it, by military force if necessary. While the CCP has never ruled Taiwan, President Xi Jinping has said "reunification" is "a historic mission" of the party.

The Chinese Communist Party perceives Tibetan independence as a major national-security threat. China annexed Tibet, which borders Bhutan, Nepal, and India, in 1951 and it is now an autonomous region within China. There is still a Tibetan independence movement, led by Tibetans overseas, that Beijing has sought to suppress. China also views the Tibetan spiritual leader, known as the Dalai Lama, as a separatist threat.

The plight of the Uighur Muslim minority is well known in the West. There are about 12 million Uighurs in Xinjiang, a province in northwestern China. Chinese authorities have sent more than a million Uighurs to "re-education camps" or to jail in recent years and subjected others to mass surveillance, forced labor, and other forms of repression. Human-rights groups have called Beijing's actions crimes against humanity and the US has called it "genocide."

Falun Gong is a religious group established in the early 1990s that blends traditional and new age beliefs as well as meditation exercises and texts and promises salvation. It had millions of adherents by the time the Chinese government banned it 1999, viewing the group as a challenge to its power. China continues to jail or send practitioners to "re-education" centers, but millions of Chinese still practice Falun Gong, most of them abroad.

The Chinese intelligence services are also collecting information on the Chinese democracy movement at home and abroad — including in the US — in an attempt to subvert it.

According to the British intelligence report, Xi has sought to make Chinese intelligence activity more professional through reform and investment. "Expenditure on the internal security apparatus has outpaced even China's recent dramatic military modernisation," the report says, citing estimates that China now spends almost 20% more on domestic security than on external defense.

A whole-of-nation approach

While China's intelligence services are focused on countering domestic threats, they are also looking outward for advantages that will advance Beijing's bid for superpower status.

Officials from the US and the UK say espionage is a central component of Chinese efforts to become dominant in an array of advanced technology sectors and to find shortcuts in developing sophisticated military hardware. In 2021, the acting director of the US National Counterintelligence and Security Center said Chinese espionage was responsible for $200 billion to $600 billion a year in intellectual-property theft.

While the Chinese government is focused on countering the US and suppressing threats to its rule, it views the UK through the lens of its struggle with the US, the British intelligence report said, adding that Chinese intelligence services "target the UK and its interests prolifically and aggressively, with economic espionage a prominent motivation."

Those services cast a wide net, pursuing classified as well as open-source information from which Chinese leaders may get some benefit. They are willing to use professional spies and everyday citizens, such as businessmen and students, to hoover up that information.

"In more ways than one, the broad remit of the Chinese Intelligence Services poses a significant challenge to Western attempts to counter their activity," the report said, citing assessments by British intelligence officers. "To compound the problem, it is not just the Chinese Intelligence Services: the Chinese Communist Party co-opts every state institution, company and citizen. This 'whole-of-state' approach means China can aggressively target the UK, yet the scale of the activity makes it more difficult to detect."

Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate. He is working toward a master's degree in strategy and cybersecurity at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies.