Beijing’s message to the public is that there are ghosts everywhere (File)
Beijing:
As students poured back into Beijing’s top universities in early September, a propaganda storm around the campuses meant an ominous addition to their curriculum: a crash course in catching spies.
At government-run Tsinghua University, videos were broadcast on faculty screens instructing teachers and students to form a “defense line” against foreign forces, while Beijing University of Technology hosted a national security-themed garden party, the national official said. spy service.
Students at Beihang University, an aviation institute under US sanctions for its military ties, were even asked to play an interactive training game called Who’s The Spy? “In what special way will the students around you revive national security?” the Ministry of State Security wrote on its new WeChat account.
As President Xi Jinping erects a force field of security checkpoints to fend off perceived foreign threats to Communist Party rule, Beijing’s message to the public is that ghosts are everywhere – not just in universities. Police in Henan province have urged citizens to question pop culture neighbors they distrust to determine their patriotism, while Shandong province’s state media published posters with the slogan “There may be spies everywhere you go’.
The move comes after Xi chaired a National Security Council meeting in May that stressed the importance of thinking about “extreme scenarios” – a phrase the ruling party had previously reserved for describing preparedness for natural disasters. China has since passed a new anti-espionage law, accused consulting firms of working for overseas intelligence services and warned that foreign forces are infiltrating the energy sector.
Perhaps Xi has good reasons to unite the public around a common threat. China is locked in an ideological battle with the US, which is putting pressure on its economy just as the Asian giant enters a slowdown that risks sparking a new wave of social unrest. Last year, students led rare nationwide protests calling for the end of Covid Zero – and, in some cases, the removal of Xi.
“At a time of economic pressure, there are clear concerns among the top leadership,” said Katja Drinhausen, head of the politics and society program at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin. “Using collective fear as a way to build political and social cohesion is a very dangerous game to play.”
Spy agency
Since the Communist Party unified its intelligence services and established the Ministry of State Security in the 1980s, the organization has remained out of the public eye. It is the only cabinet-level ministry without an official website and until recently the only public platforms were hotlines for reporting activities endangering national security.
That changed last month when the ministry joined the Chinese social media app WeChat. Since then, it has published almost every day about its efforts to ensure national security, right down to telling primary school students which photos they cannot post on social media. That comes after CIA Director William Burns said in July that the agency had made progress in rebuilding its spy network in China.
The MSS has since provided details of two cases of Chinese officials it has detained for providing information to the CIA – a rare move for an agency that does not provide data on its arrests. It has even delved into geopolitics, warning the US that it must show “sincerity” if Xi attends a meeting of the world’s top economic leaders in California in November, where he will meet President Joe Biden for the first time this year .
“The increasing visibility of the MSS appears to be part of an effort to normalize national security as a top priority in government policymaking, encouraging it to adopt a public profile more akin to that of economic agencies ” said Neil Thomas, a fellow on Chinese politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.
The result is growing distrust among citizens in a country where many still remember the effects of asking citizens to betray each other. Former leader Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution was a violent period in which the public was encouraged to report the slightest hint that a friend, spouse or parent was associated with forces conspiring for the demise of the Communist Party.
In July, a Chinese employee was reportedly reported to the police by his colleagues after his failure to remember the lyrics to a popular Chinese song during a karaoke night, arousing their suspicions.
“He turned out to be a you-know-what,” wrote a user familiar with the group on the social media app Xiaohongshu, named after Mao’s Little Red Book that was used to force the country’s people to inform each other. China is offering up to 500,000 yuan ($68,160) to citizens who successfully report spies.
That post, which Bloomberg has not been able to verify, received about 16,000 likes as users enthusiastically exchanged tips for spotting spies. Not knowing jargon popularized by the annual spring gala broadcast or mnemonics taught in math class could all be hallmarks of a ghost, they said.
Misplaced suspicion
The drive to root out spies risks targeting innocent people. In a now-deleted post on Xiaohongshu, one person apologized after a suspected foreign agent turned out to be a university student taking photos for their fieldwork research. The person did not respond to a Bloomberg request for comment.
In the workplace, hypervigilance around the distribution of sensitive information is growing. State-owned companies provide training on state secrets, say people familiar with the matter. More documents are being marked as state secrets and can only be viewed at the office, said one of the people, who declined to be named for fear of state reprisals.
The government has also launched an app to help Communist Party members and government employees increase their knowledge and skills in keeping secrets.
The obsession with national security is fundamentally tied to protecting the future of the Communist Party. Minister of State Security Chen Yixin wrote in July that national security is about political security. “The core of political security is the security of the regime,” he added.
But that drive also creates a deep distrust of foreigners, which runs counter to the party’s recently stated goal of recruiting investors and revitalizing the private sector. Foreigners report that it is harder to ever meet friendly officials as the atmosphere of suspicion grows.
Sheena Greitens, an associate professor at UT-Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, said encouraging citizens to spy on each other would have “harmful consequences” for overall governance in China.
“It can lead to false reporting,” she says. “That can be counterproductive for the internal security services themselves, because it means that they are working on the basis of increasingly bad information.”
