A senior Chinese Communist Party official casts a suspicious eye towards an unmarked van lurking outside his building, as he rushes in and shuts the door. Inside his room, he picks up a framed photograph of his wife and their two children clinging to her before turning his gaze to footage of the National People’s Congress playing on TV.
“As I rose the ranks of the party, I watched as those above me were cast aside,” he narrates in Mandarin. “But now, I realize my fate is just as precarious as theirs.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Above everything, he says, he must find a way to protect his family. He picks up a phone to contact the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
It’s a scene that plays out in one of two Chinese-language videos released to the public by the CIA on May 1 as part of an effort to recruit Chinese informants. In the other video, a junior CCP official is depicted reaching out to the CIA after seeing that his work doesn’t improve his own life, while the senior official he works for lives a cushy life.
“The party teaches us if we dedicate ourselves to the path they’ve designated for us, we will have a bright future,” the junior official says. “But the results of our efforts are enjoyed only by a select few.”
Text that reads “Your fate is in your hands” shows on screen as the first video ends. “Heaven helps those who help themselves,” the second concludes.
The release of the videos follows the launch of a drive to recruit informants in China, Iran and North Korea last October, which included posting messages on the CIA’s social media accounts in Mandarin, Farsi and Korean with instructions on how to securely contact the CIA. The agency said it saw previous success in a similar campaign to recruit Russian informants following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“We want to make sure individuals in other authoritarian regimes know that we’re open for business,” a spokesperson for the agency said at the time.
“One of the primary roles of the CIA is to collect intelligence for the President and for our policymakers,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Fox News on Wednesday. “One of the ways we do that is by recruiting assets that can help us steal secrets.”
A note to CIA officers last month reportedly said China was the agency’s top priority.
“No adversary in the history of our nation has presented a more formidable challenge or a more capable strategic competitor than the Chinese Communist Party,” Ratcliffe wrote. “It is intent on dominating the world economically, militarily and technologically, and it is aggressively trying to outcompete America in every corner of the globe.”
Beijing did not officially respond to the videos as of Friday, but it has previously repeatedly said that the U.S. is waging a systematic disinformation campaign against China.
Experts, however, have expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of social media campaigns in reaching people in countries with strict surveillance and internet restrictions. “It seems like they’re basing this off the success they had in Russia—but I would question how effective this will be considering most North Koreans don’t have access to the internet,” Mason Richey, an associate professor of international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, told the BBC in October.
Similarly, Ja-Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore and non-resident scholar with Carnegie China, tells TIME that it’s not certain how well the videos will penetrate China’s “Great Firewall.”
But the agency said the videos, which seem aimed at officials disillusioned or dissatisfied with the Chinese government, are effective: “If it weren’t working, we wouldn’t be making more videos,” an official told Reuters.
Amid escalating tensions between China and the U.S., including a resurgent tit-for-tat tariff war since Donald Trump returned to the White House, both have “become more suspicious of each other,” Chong says.
“There may be more efforts to gather information from the other side, whether by compromising individuals or computer networks,” Chong says. There have been reports of increased cyberattacks from both sides, including Chinese state-sponsored hackers infiltrating the U.S. Treasury Department’s systems in December and China publishing the names of alleged U.S. National Security Agency hackers in April.
But alongside any success the U.S. sees in collecting intelligence in China, Chong warns, “there are likely to be correspondingly more domestic crackdowns too.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping has led sweeping anti-corruption and anti-espionage campaigns that have purged both high- and low-ranking officials and instilled public paranoia.
Read More: China’s Expanded Anti-Espionage Law Threatens Business Consultants and Advisers
China’s tightened grip on espionage in recent years has made intelligence collection particularly difficult, former senior intelligence officials told NBC News in 2023. China’s anti-espionage law gives the state broad-based powers to surveil and collect information, as well as to demand cooperation from corporations and individuals, Chong says.
CIA officials, however, told Bloomberg last October that Xi’s consolidation of power has also been a source of disaffection among the Chinese, which creates an opportunity for recruitment.
There’s also a high risk for Chinese spies. China is one of the few countries where people are still executed for espionage. In March, a former engineer at a Chinese research institute was sentenced to death for spying; Australian writer Yang Hengjun was handed a suspended death sentence in February 2024 on charges of espionage; and last November, a former state agency employee was sentenced to death for leaking classified information to foreign intelligence agencies.
The CIA is also still working to repair its reputation. Across a two-year period beginning at the end of 2010, China managed to penetrate and dismantle the U.S. intelligence agency’s network of spies in the country in what was revealed in 2018 to have been largely due to the agency botching its clandestine communication system. The breach led to the arrests and executions of at least 20 informants in China. The CIA reportedly secured its system from Chinese access by 2013 and has since moved towards rebuilding its network of spies in China.
“We value and respect anyone who is willing to engage in dialogue with us,” read the Chinese-language captions of the videos released this week by the CIA. “It is our responsibility to protect the people who come forward to contact us from around the world.” And describing the first, which targeted senior CCP officials, Ratcliffe told Fox: “This video explains to them how they can contact the CIA through our dark website and have an ability to improve their safety and well-being and that of their family.”
English (US) · 