BEIJING: Commenting over a question regarding the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) posting two Chinese-language videos on social media for “recruiting Chinese officials to steal secrets,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said on Tuesday that the US not only maliciously smears and attacks China, but also blatantly attempts to lure Chinese personnel, even government officials, to be their informants.
This is a serious infringement on China’s national interest and pure political provocation, the spokesperson said.
“China strongly condemns it. We will take all measures necessary to resolutely push back infiltration and sabotage activities from overseas and defend national sovereignty, security and development interest,” Lin said.
The CIA released two Chinese-language videos on social media on Thursday US local time, aiming to recruit Chinese officials to leak secrets to the US, Reuters reported.
The move follows the CIA’s October 2024 campaign to recruit new informants in China, Iran, and North Korea by posting online instructions on how to securely contact the agency, according to Reuters.
The CIA is confident the videos are reaching their intended audience an anonymous CIA official told Reuters, while adding that China was the agency’s foremost intelligence priority in a “truly generational competition” between the US and China.
Spokesperson Lin said that the US has long been using all kinds of despicable methods to steal other countries’ secrets, interfere in their internal affairs and commit subversion. Such behavior severely violates international law and basic norms governing international relations, and seriously endangers international security and stability.
The Chinese videos posted by the CIA on social media are another solid confession of what it does, Lin said.
Lü Xiang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Tuesday that such a blatant public approach of recruitment by the CIA has been proved to be ineffective, and the two new videos the CIA posted are more of a political stunt, through which the CIA director hopes to testify that government funds are not being wasted.
Bloomberg described the effort as “part of a broader strategy by CIA Director John Ratcliffe to boost intelligence collection on China, which has become Washington’s biggest competitor and adversary in areas including artificial intelligence and quantum computing.”
The CIA’s overt attempt to recruit Chinese officials to leak high-value and sensitive secrets to the US via such videos marks a public provocation and shows that the CIA has positioned China not merely as a strategic competitor, but as an adversary, Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Friday.
Lü noted that the CIA’s intent is to foment a negative social atmosphere in China and stir up curiosity, thereby achieving the goal of undermining social stability and cohesion.
People must recognize the sinister intent behind this move of US intelligence agency, which exposed the highly dangerous nature of the US intelligence system, seeking to deepen divisions within China and escalate societal tensions to serve US objectives. Not only China, but the entire international community should be fully aware of the deplorable and poisonous true face of the US intelligence network, Li said.
