China's Old-School Spies

Peter Mattis

Security, Asia

There’s nothing high-tech about it, but it works.

Chinese intelligence operations have long been regarded as mysterious and unfamiliar to those who witnessed the East-West intelligence contest across the Iron Curtain. The mystery remains in part because of a reluctance to examine the available record closely. Chinese officials and citizens engage all kinds of activities that can be viewed as intelligence work—from stealing intellectual property, to surveilling students to organizing overseas Chinese communities to covert influence to recruiting sources. But only some of this activity comes back to the intelligence services, the Chinese organizations charged with supporting the leadership’s information needs.

The U.S. espionage cases centered around Larry Wu-Tai Chin (arrested 1985), Kuo Tai-Shen (arrested 2008) and Glenn Duffie Shriver (arrested 2010) offer a window into the conduct of Chinese clandestine agent operations. They demonstrate China’s capability and highlight the Chinese use of the traditional tools of espionage that are shared among most of the world’s intelligence services involved running human intelligence operations. In many respects, the Chinese are not so different.