Chinese Spies Are Targeting Access, Not Race

On Aug. 3, 2023, the U.S. Justice Department arrested U.S. Navy sailors Jinchao Wei and Wenheng Zhao for illegally transmitting restricted military information to China. In the Southern District of California, Wei’s mother allegedly encouraged him to spy for China, and Chinese authorities allegedly provided the 22-year-old sailor with between $10,000 and $15,000 for information about Navy ships’ weapon capabilities, power structures, potential vulnerabilities, and movements. In a separate case in the Central District of California, Zhao allegedly sent a Chinese intelligence officer “operational plans for a large-scale military exercise” and specifically disclosed “the location and timing of naval movements, amphibious landings, maritime operations, and logistics support.”

Many commentators offered colorful responses to the Wei and Zhao arrests. In a since-deleted post on X (formerly Twitter), Eric Sayers, a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, commented that it was “awkward the two sailors arrested are Chinese. Do we just ignore that?” In the Washington Examiner, John Schindler questioned why the Pentagon continues to “grant security clearances to Chinese Americans without special scrutiny.”

Over a decade ago, during the Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao eras, these might have been valid points. Today, though, China’s recruitment techniques are very different—and in some ways, more dangerous.

Before 2011 Chinese human intelligence operations contained elements of the “grains of sand” or “mosaic” intelligence collection approach. This approach originates from a popular quote that has circulated in national security circles: “If the Russians want to get certain sand from a beach that’s special, they’ll have a submarine come in at night. […] They’ll get a bucket full of sand, and they’ll take it back to the submarine and leave. The Chinese will have 500 people having picnics on the beach, each picking up the sand in a small can (or, each picking up a grain of sand), and bringing it back.”

“Grains of sand” adherents believe that China relies on a significant number of “amateur collectors” who collect low-grade, if not entirely unclassified, information, and then assemble that information into a more coherent intelligence picture once they’re back in China. Believers in this theory also argue the Chinese intelligence services recruit “ethnically-Chinese sources, regardless of citizenship, in the hopes of appealing to patriotism and implicit threats to family in China,” and do not employ professional intelligence tradecraft, not even “age-old tools like dead drops.”

At one point, this was mostly true. For example, from 1949 to 2011, almost all agents directly recruited by the Chinese intelligence services in publicly known human intelligence operations against the United States and Taiwan were ethnically Chinese or Chinese ethnic minorities, with the notable exception of Glenn Duffie Shriver. Additionally, public reports strongly suggest that pre-Xi Jinping, Chinese agents were not trained by their handlers on professional intelligence collection tradecraft and ways to maintain operational security. For example, notorious Chinese spy Chi Mak simply tore his Chinese handlers’ information collection “wish-lists” into small pieces and threw them into the trash, where they were later reassembled by U.S. investigators. Ministry of State Security agent Katrina Leung had affairs with two FBI agents and ostentatiously purchased a house for $1.4 million in San Marino, Los Angeles, making no attempt to stay on the down low.

But this approach almost always incorporated conventional methods of recruitment too—like money. The Chinese intelligence services paid turncoat CIA officer Larry Wu-Tai Chin at least $180,000 throughout the course of his career (we may never know the true amount, due to Chin’s prowess in money laundering). China approached former Taiwan Ministry of Justice official Chen Chih-Kao when he was having financial difficulties sustaining his Shanghai-based magazine business. And, of course, China paid U.S. study abroad student Duffie Shriver, a White man, a significant amount of money to attempt to place him as a mole in the CIA or the State Department.

Writing in 2011 to explain exceptions to the “grains of sand” approach, former CIA counterintelligence analyst Peter Mattis argued that the Chinese intelligence services largely functioned according to the “adapted internal security” model for intelligence operations. Under this model, China focused on internal security as the end goal of every human intelligence operation, mostly could not run intelligence operations from abroad due to resource limitations and placed higher emphasis on interpersonal relationships and potential future information transmission than a source’s existing access to classified information of interest at the time of recruitment.

But these trends are shifting fast under Xi. The Chinese intelligence services are quickly becoming more professional, making initial contact with sources overseas via social media platforms, prioritizing the recruitment of sources with direct access to classified or restricted information of interest, and, perhaps most importantly, recruiting sources of all ethnicities. China is almost certainly now adopting a “Western/Russian” professional, foreign-directed intelligence collection approach, perhaps due to China’s increased overseas economic and security demands.

A trio of Xi-era Chinese human intelligence cases best illustrate this shift. In May 2019, U.S. authorities sentenced former CIA officer Kevin Patrick Mallory to prison for spying for China. According to a Justice Department complaint, Mallory first made contact with Ministry of State Security-affiliated personnel on social media, contacted former U.S. government colleagues to seek information of interest to China, and ultimately passed several classified top-secret documents to his Chinese handlers. Mallory’s handlers also provided him with an unspecified customized communications device that could “toggle between normal and secure messaging modes” and trained him on steganography, an advanced form of intelligence tradecraft. This case highlights the increased professionalization of the Chinese intelligence services.

Just two months later, in July 2019, the Department of Justice sentenced Candace Marie Claiborne, a former State Department employee, to 40 months in prison for providing internal documents to the Chinese intelligence services. Claiborne also maintained a top-secret security clearance while serving as a Foreign Service Office Management Specialist in Iraq, Sudan, and China, and provided sensitive State Department information to China in “exchange for gifts for herself and her family.”

But the cases don’t end there. On Sept. 24, 2019, U.S. authorities sentenced former Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer Ron Rockwell Hansen to 10 years in prison for attempting to pass classified documents to Chinese authorities. U.S. law enforcement arrested Hansen as he attempted to board a plane to China with secret information, and Hansen admitted to meeting with Chinese intelligence personnel multiple times to discuss information of interest and receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation from China.

None of these individuals were ethnically Chinese. Neither were William Majcher, a retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer arrested by Canadian authorities in July for allegedly spying and facilitating transnational repression for China, or a U.K. Parliamentary Researcher recently arrested in September for allegedly spying for China. The Chinese intelligence services are now prioritizing the recruitment of individuals with access to information of interest over perceived loyalty, regardless of their ethnicity.

The Chinese intelligence services’ recruitment and use of non-ethnically Chinese sources continued during the coronavirus pandemic. In November 2022, the Department of Justice sentenced Shapour Moinian, a former U.S. Army helicopter pilot and U.S. government contractor, to 20 months in prison for acting as an agent of China. Moinian was contacted by Chinese intelligence personnel while he was working on military and intelligence community aviation projects as a cleared government contractor, and later traveled to Hong Kong, where he provided information and materials on various types of U.S.-designed aircraft to his Chinese handlers.

Even ethnically Chinese individuals arrested for spying for China in the Xi era were almost always current or former employees in the national security field, with access to information of direct interest to the Chinese intelligence services. For instance, in August 2016, Kun Shan Chun, a naturalized U.S. citizen from China and an FBI electronics technician, pled guilty to “acting in the United States as an agent of the People’s Republic of China, without providing prior notice to the Attorney General.” Former CIA officer and FBI linguist Alexander Yuk Ching Ma also disclosed classified information obtained throughout his government employment, to include the identities of CIA human assets.

Chun, Ma, Wei, and Zhao were all U.S. government employees or former employees with access to classified information, just like Mallory, Claiborne, Hansen, and Moinian. It’s clear that whether you’re ethnically Chinese or not, as long as you have information that is of interest to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), you’re a potential target, especially if you’re a current or former U.S. government official. Regardless of your ethnicity, you’re fair game.

Critics of this argument may claim that Chinese United Front operations still primarily seek to influence ethnically Chinese immigrant and heritage language speaking communities overseas, as well as Chinese students and scholars. Yet while Chinese malign foreign influence operations indeed continue to target the Chinese diaspora, they have also significantly expanded to include non-ethnically Chinese online influencers and political activists.

For example, American millionaire Neville Roy Singham, a benefactor of far-left social activism and nonprofit organizations, has been funding an influence campaign that advances pro-China propaganda. Singham is also the husband of Democratic political advisor Jodie Evans, who co-founded Code Pink, a non-profit feminist grass-roots advocacy and charity organization in 2002. While Evans and Code Pink have criticized China’s human rights record in the past, she recently described the Uyghurs as “terrorists,” defended China’s mass incarceration systems, and argued that the United States “crushing” China would “cut off hope for the human race and life on Earth.”

Implying that all Chinese spies and influence agents are ethnically Chinese is analytically incorrect and counterproductive to U.S. national security efforts. Setting aside the discussion of whether or not such comments are racist or anti-American, a prioritized focus on ethnic Chinese spies and influence agents may draw focus away from and impede comprehensive counterintelligence efforts to detect the next Mallory, Claiborne, Hansen, Moinian, Majcher, or Singham. Moreover, increased scrutiny of Chinese Americans during the security clearance process may, in the CIA’s words, “turn away unnecessarily personnel who can make a major contribution to the nation’s intelligence efforts,” including counterintelligence analysis and operations, using their language and cultural expertise.

Finally, a key talking point and theme for China’s propaganda and influence operations is that U.S. society at large, and the U.S. government and Justice Department in particular, are racist against Chinese Americans. To combat these narratives, the U.S. government should significantly enhance its engagement with Chinese American communities, including first-generation immigrant and heritage Chinese language speakers across the United States. Translated bulletins from the National Counterintelligence and Security Center and the FBI in Mandarin Chinese warning about transnational repression efforts are a great start, but nowhere near sufficient.

Fluent speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, and other Chinese dialects of any ethnicity in the U.S. government could increase language-enabled public outreach to Chinese diaspora communities, directly emphasizing that not all Chinese spies are ethnically Chinese while explaining how the Chinese intelligence services have exploited, abused, and intimidated community members through transnational repression. A paranoid witch hunt for Chinese Americans is not the answer—but instead plays right into the hands of the CCP.