CIA looks to recruit new Chinese spies with social media videos

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The CIA has released two Chinese-language videos on YouTube and other social media channels in a campaign to sow disillusionment among Chinese Communist party members and boost efforts to recruit spies in China.  

The US intelligence agency posted the videos on social media platforms, including Instagram and Facebook, on Thursday. They are titled “Why I Contacted CIA: To Take Control of My Fate” and “Why I Contacted CIA: For a Better Life”.

“No adversary in the history of our nation has presented a more formidable challenge or capable strategic competitor than the Chinese Communist party. It is intent on dominating the world economically, militarily, and technologically,” said CIA director John Ratcliffe. 

“Our agency must continue responding to this threat with urgency, creativity and grit, and these videos are just one of the ways we are doing this.”

The move follows a previous effort to release videos in Russian to urge elites in that country who are unhappy with President Vladimir Putin and his full-scale invasion of Ukraine to become intelligence assets for the CIA.

Six months ago, the CIA released videos in Chinese, Farsi and Korean that provided text instructions for contacting the US intelligence agency.

But the new posts are the first videos in which narrators express concern about the Chinese political system — and leaders and colleagues vanishing — in explaining why they contacted the agency.

“These kinds of recruiting videos are unprecedented for CIA China operations,” said Dennis Wilder, former head of China analysis at the CIA.

Wilder said the videos sought to exploit concerns among leading members of the CCP about President Xi Jinping’s campaign to purge officials, including high-profile purges at the top of the Chinese military.

The Financial Times recently revealed that Xi had purged General He Weidong, the number-two officer in the People’s Liberation Army.

“Beijing will view this as a decided escalation of the espionage war with the United States and redouble its already massive counter-intelligence programmes and search for US spies,” Wilder added.

In one video, the narrator says: “I see my position rise within the party as those above me are cast aside. But now I realise that my fate is just as precarious . . . My biggest fear is that my family’s fate is tied to mine. I must have a backup plan.”

In the second, he says: “Our leaders’ failure to fulfil these repeated promises of prosperity has become a well-known secret . . . The hardest part of a journey is the first step. It’s time I start working towards my own dreams.”

China prevents its citizens from accessing YouTube, Facebook and other western social media platforms, but people can view the CIA videos by using a VPN that makes it easier to bypass internet censorship restrictions.

The posts are part of a CIA effort to rebuild its spy network in China after the country’s Ministry of State Security more than a decade ago imprisoned or executed dozens of Chinese citizens suspected of spying for the US. Beijing discovered their identities after discovering the covert communications systems CIA operatives were using with their assets.

In 2023, then-CIA director Bill Burns said the agency had “made progress” rebuilding its spy network in China, saying, “we’re working very hard over recent years to ensure that we have strong human intelligence capability”.

China has boosted efforts to root out foreign spying, including expanding a counter-espionage law to cover a wider range of activities and cracking down on firms doing due diligence and other business research in sensitive fields. 

The MSS has launched a campaign to urge citizens to report suspicious activities and train people and businesses to share less information publicly. In 2023, it created an official WeChat account that regularly publishes cases involving alleged espionage by both Chinese citizens and foreigners, along with guidance on identifying and preventing spying.