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How China turns members of its diaspora into spies
- tehjoker 2y ago[flagged]
- idunnoman1222 2y agoHow does this work? How would you even trust China to not just throw you in jail? I guess the US government figured it out because he went to China and then came back and they’re like oh yeah that makes no fucking sense 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
- tiahura 2y agoThere should be a substantial CIA effort to recruit at every US university with more than 2 Chinese nationals. Student loans forgiven and green cards for the family.
- throw10920 2y agoThe idea is good, but will probably only really work for students with weak family ties back to the PRC, which will be pretty rare. For those with loved ones in the PRC, there is ample documentation that the CCP will threaten their families to get them to come back (one of the techniques used in Operation Fox Hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fox_Hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fox_Hunt). Arranging for a "family vacation" to the US that turns into permanent residence will only work a few times before the CCP catches on.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoChinese nationals who come to the US are often rich enough to not have any student debt.
- popcalc 2y agoYeah, they pay in cash up front. I've seen sometimes physical bundles of bills.
- alecco 2y agoWhy is this downvoted? The comment sounds plausible. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjGIp7kdS6E#t=8m32
- tokioyoyo 2y agoYou're right, but also lumping every rich Chinese into a "part of a mob" is kinda funny. We talk about how we've outsources a buttloads of manufacturing to China, how they're making a killing out of their industrial policies and etc. Obviously there will be millions of people in China who are rich through their businesses. Just like in the states. 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.
- popcalc 2y agoYou cannot as a private person legally move more than about 100K USD out of mainland CN per year. You have to resort to criminal elements. Only they have the network. It's one of those things everyone does but lives in fear of being used against them by an enemy down the line.
- Mountain_Skies 2y agoAbout twenty-five years ago, two Chinese students at my university were killed for seemingly no reason. Whoever killed them didn't steal anything. They hadn't been in any known conflicts with others in the community. It seemed completely random. But it wasn't. Turned out the husband was the son of the governor of some rural province in China. The father got into some kind of conflict with rivals, so they sent someone to the US to murder his son and daughter-in-law to send him a message. They were in the US under aliases but that didn't protect them, neither did being on the other side of the planet in a small, rural college town. 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.
- memonkey 2y agoi could not find a source for this anywhere on the internet after trying multiple queries.
- whimsicalism 2y agocan you link any source about this happening? seems like it would be high-profile and documented but can't find any reference to this event so i kinda think you made it up if i'm being honest
- supriyo-biswas 2y agoI wonder if this'd just lead to a perverse incentive[1] where the share of Chinese nationals in universities increases as an effect. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
- duxup 2y agoI suspect to some extent those students allowed to go are already filtered by China, and they have family back home. 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.
- bearjaws 2y agoSoon enough anything that is even remotely a security threat (pretty much any non-trivial app) will require clearance and in office work. 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.
- throw10920 2y ago> Soon enough anything that is even remotely a security threat [...] will require clearance and in office work. 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?
- mistrial9 2y ago> You need to trust the knowledge workers 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.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago> More and more "zero trust" .. more logging and audit, more spot checks, more re-logins 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.
- NooneAtAll3 2y agoIs this... not a normal practice for all intelligence services of the world? Emigrants always have ties to the originland.
- Retric 2y agoNot really, for most countries this kind of intelligence gathering is really expensive with low ROI and so not worth it. (Edit: word order for clarity.) The typical country is closer to Cambodia or Honduras not a world power. China can leverage it, but most countries aren’t China.
- s5300 2y ago>> with low ROI and so not worth it for most countries. I think by the very nature of what’s going on you’re demonstratedly wrong on this point.
- Retric 2y agoIntelligence is only worth what you can leverage it for. Knowing a stock is going up tomorrow by 5% isn’t worth much for most people, but it’s worth a far more to someone who can toss 100m into it. 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.
- devsda 2y ago> Emigrants always have ties to the originland. 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-china-exports-repression-using-a-network-of-spies-hidden-in-plain-sight https://www.propublica.org/article/operation-fox-hunt-how-ch...
- jtkasgy 2y ago[flagged]
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- NemoNobody 2y agoThis bc we now realize that China is screwed in the future - the Chinese population will be well under a billion people by 2100 - long before then the only thing their society will be able to do is deal with the problems that come from dropping 500 million people. This is all bc of the 1 Child policy and it cannot be easily fixed - if it can be fixed at all. China can only take Taiwan with the Millennials or Gen Z generations - Xi Jinping knows this and wants Taiwan to be part of his legacy. Now is the best time to do this if they are ever going to. I've long been saying that it Trump is reelected that they will invade that January he takes office.
- niemandhier 2y agoI hope you are wrong, but the Russian invasion of the Ukraine might support your view. Russians have a terrible low fertility, integrating the Ukraine into Russia might have been a last shot at staying the ethnic majority in the country. Update: Ih had stetes wrong numbers of the composition of the Russian population before, claiming that only 40 million of russias inhabitants were ethnic Russians. The concern with shifting ethnic composition might be true never the less: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/russia-tomorrow/a-russia-without-russians-putins-disastrous-demographics/#conclusion https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/russia-tomorr...
- hikingsimulator 2y agoI don't know where you get your statistics, but Russia's demographics is roughly 70% "ethnic russians," which amounts to about 100m people.
- krapp 2y agoDo people like you see Nancy Pelosi standing at the foot of their bed like the Hat Man when they try to sleep or something?
- timcobb 2y agoCan't access the article :/ But, perhaps related, I learned of this the other day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_front_(China) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_front_(China)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gcr 2y ago[flagged]
- cyanydeez 2y agoExcept, there were communist infiltration plans in the 1950s. The same as theres coordinated russian plans supporting conservative nationalists. If you want rational protectionism, America would need to stop treating businesses as the unit of concern and enact stronger worker privacy and consumer protections. The same way CIA backdoors are intrinsic unsafe, so are lax employee and consumer protections.
- whimsicalism 2y agogreat, we are rehabilitating mccarthyism now
- cyanydeez 2y agoNo, we are acknowledging Russian threats. Being paranoid about a threat is not the same thing as there being no threat. Reading comprehension can help you.
- krapp 2y agoIf any actual communist spies were rooted out by McCarthyism it was entirely coincidental, given that the actual purpose of McCarthyism was to oppress and blacklist undesirables like Jews and homosexuals and further Joe McCarthy's own political aspirations by collecting compromat on people. The definition of "communist" in those times was very loose. Just like how QAnon is obsessed with satanic pedophile rings that don't really exist, despite the existence of pedophile rings being real, because they don't actually care about child abuse as much as accelerating mistrust of and harassment against the LGBTQ community by implying any non-heterosexual identity is equivalent to pedophilia. A stopped clock is still right twice a day. If it's rational to mistrust foreigners because they might be spies, history suggests it's just as rational to mistrust the motives of people who spread fear and uncertainty about nefarious enemies within. Americans have far more to fear from their own government's attempts to grasp for power than they do from Chinese spies.
- pmlnr 2y agoThis is a heavily paywalled article. Dear OP, how do you expect us to read it? (no, archive.is doesn't have it un-paywalled.)
- neom 2y agohttps://s.h4x.club/Z4uE5g1O https://s.h4x.club/Z4uE5g1O
- layer8 2y agoThis only shows the headline and the lead picture for me, not the main text.
- neom 2y agoclick the download button it will download the full pdf
- layer8 2y agoIt doesn’t for me, instead it shows a sign-up page for Zight.
- neom 2y agoLooks like they changed things, time to switch off Zight I guess. Does this work? https://p97.tr4.n0.cdn.zight.com/items/Z4uE5g1O/9b63a223-7f9d-49c1-afb7-a01daac248b0.pdf?v=63ed29e2d183b3e6c361770cdb567808 https://p97.tr4.n0.cdn.zight.com/items/Z4uE5g1O/9b63a223-7f9... Thanks for letting me know!
- layer8 2y agoThat does work, thanks.
- casenmgreen 2y ago[flagged]
- memonkey 2y agoJust curious, do you apply this same logic to US government and history? What kind of evils get prescribed to the so called democratic land of the free?
- Trasmatta 2y agoThis is a total non sequitur. It's implying that you can't criticize ANY corrupt government without first criticizing all of them.
- memonkey 2y agoyou think it's a total non sequitur but im just asking what i think is a simple question: whether that logic is applied fairly and accurately within the context of being a world superpower. otherwise you just end up potentially looking like a hardline racist parrot to some readers.
- Trasmatta 2y agoDo I also need to include disclaimers about Russia, North Korea, Iran, etc, being bad anytime I criticize China as well? Or are they exempt for some reason? Are you following your own advice, to criticize fairly and accurately across the board?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- SpicyLemonZest 2y agoI don't apply the same logic to any country's history. It wouldn't make sense to hold modern China accountable for the Qing, or the civil war, or the Cultural Revolution. Like the original commenter, my biggest concern by far with the Chinese government is their repeated public statements that they plan to violently conquer a neighboring country and integrate it into their own. The US has undertaken a lot of military adventures I don't agree with in the past few decades, but annexation is a red line that almost every country in the world agrees to and respects.
- coliveira 2y ago[flagged]
- cjbgkagh 2y agoMany other countries would help people with opportunistic industrial espionage so there is a distinct advantage to proactively working with their spy agencies. This is not the case in the West, there is still industrial espionage but it's established and not opportunistic so far fewer people are involved.
- lazyeye 2y agoAlso, you can point out what you believe to be the bad behavior of the West and nobody will accuse you of being racist...
- DonHopkins 2y agoThat's because "the West" is not a race. Maybe there's a reason you're so butt-hurt that people keep accusing you of being racist. Have you tried just not being racist?
- lazyeye 2y agoYour comment is ridiculous.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- maxglute 2y ago[flagged]
- rqtwteye 2y agoDon't most countries do this? I am pretty sure the US has lots of spies everywhere and they spy on allies (famously on Angela Merkel's phone) and enemies. Israel spies on other countries including the US. Does China do anything differently?
- breadwinner 2y agoDoes CIA recruit US citizens living abroad into spying for the US?
- cplusplus6382 2y agoYes
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- amelius 2y agoI couldn't access the article, but should we now be alert to colleagues with CCP thumbdrives or keyloggers?
- inglor_cz 2y agoAs a non-Chinese and a non-American, I care less about the usual geopolitical games, including spying, and more about how the Chinese government treats its own citizens. No freedom of speech or conscience, no political freedoms: just work and be an obedient small truckle in the mechanism of the Leviathan. Plus the return of the Cult of Personality, which once even the CCP tried to abandon, but ultimately failed. These are not results of American meddling, these are their own internal choices. 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.
- rexpop 2y agoI should think it were fruit of the same root.
- crop_rotation 2y agoWhile I don't like the lack of freedoms in China, the Chinese government has done an amazing job lifting it's people out of poverty. I am not Chinese but I think most people around the world would gladly take that over being poor (most western people do not know how bad and undignified life in poverty can be)
- asdff 2y ago[flagged]
- inglor_cz 2y agoThe same government has the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution on its conscience, two initiatives that caused a lot of poverty and destruction for its citizens. 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.
- thinkingemote 2y agoIn the UK Chinese funded international masters/phd students have to send back to China reports about their fellow students as a condition of their funding. 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.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoI take it these reports don't stop when they are interns?
- thinkingemote 2y agoDepends if the funding stops. I think if they get a job at the university and do not need the funding, then the reports can stop.
- qwezxcrty 2y agoI'm not sure about CSC (China Scholarship Concil) funded students, but being an intern funded by a Chinese university myself some years ago, I didn't need to report anything back beyonds a final scientific report signed by my US advisor. 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.
- mrtksn 2y agoUK itself is a particularly interesting case, 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.
- justblahblahhh 2y agoThink of how many Indian spies exist in the US... Is it OK just because there is no anti India narrative in the US?
- crop_rotation 2y agoIndia is nowhere near being a superpower that could challenge the US so I think the threat is not the same. Plus Indian society is a bit more open and free than Chinese so lots of people told to spy can easily come out.
- throwaway104710 2y agoThe superpower aspect is true. Otherwise, India is very friendly with Russia. But we (i.e. big capital) want their H1B labor and outsourcing, so the narrative isn't there yet and many tech companies are headed by Indian CEOs. 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- crop_rotation 2y agoIndia is friendly with Russia yes but power wise India is just a non entity. It has nothing to make US feel threatened.
- asdff 2y agoIndia is a nuclear weapon state
- breadwinner 2y ago> until recently China wasn't deemed to be a problem either 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.
- r053bud 2y agoI used to work with a few Israeli software engineers who did this openly and told me all about it.
- Schnitz 2y agoI disagree with this being presented as if it was special. It’s standard operating procedure for intelligence agencies worldwide.
- lazyeye 2y agoIts probably more a question of scale that makes China unique.
- monadINtop 2y agoDo you have any numbers that would verify that? Or even any other statement on that issue? Pretty sure determining the "scale" of any kind of intelligence activity is unbelievably murky, as you might be able to imagine.
- Cyph0n 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_State_Security_(China) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_State_Security_(...
- monadINtop 2y agoNice a Wikipedia article. Where can I find any indication of comparative scale compared to any other nation, like I asked? 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).
- Cyph0n 2y agoIn a nutshell, it has a unique structure, a wider mandate, and operates a bit differently than your typical intelligence service - especially domestically. "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."
- axxto 2y ago[flagged]
- pnw 2y agoThis shouldn't be news to anyone paying attention to Chinese geopolitics.
- anonfordays 2y agoPeople's Liberation Army at the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre: 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。
- rambojohnson 2y ago[flagged]
- anramon 2y agoAmazing how this site's comments have been decaying in quality since a few years now. Obvious propaganda article, from a media that doesn't even try to hide that it's mainly a propaganda media, is commented on seriously without any kind of reality filter, and it gets to the top comments...
- pphysch 2y agoIt's a full-blown relapse to Cold War anti-intellectualism. Not good, but the incompetent capitalist class cheers on the scapegoating.
- KyleBerezin 2y agoI've been using HN long enough to know this kind of comment has been repeated since the old days. It's just a weird ad-hominin comment people make when they aren't used to disagreeing with the majority.
- kolbe 2y agoThe only thing you ever say is baseless criticisms of the intellectual prowess of HN and the media. Either justify these criticisms, accept we are the way we are, or leave.
- crocal 2y agoWhat else is new? This was already well known among grad students in the late 90s. We even knew there was some kind of hierarchy, with one of the student acting as «political officer».
- SaintSeiya 2y agoCuba's dictatorship does the same blackmailing its immigrants in U.S to spy for them, and using immigration waves to insert hundreds of its "agents" into the country.
- daft_pink 2y agoI’ve been in a meeting where the Chinese professor in USA on a joint country course sends many of their students to a technology conference and I’m not sure how, but most of his students who attended the conference somehow decided to write their reports on US military uses of technology instead of what Facebook or Google demoed. This meeting had students attend from both China and USA. 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.
- bryan_w 2y agoI mean, if they can get Naomi Wu to bend at the knee, none of their citizens are safe