US spy games signal new low in ties with China
Three espionage cases involving Chinese citizens stealing sensitive technology related information have been publicised.
Espionage is a craft that always plays out in the shadows well away from the limelight. When intelligence officers are discovered or caught, they are normally placed under surveillance to uncover their network of assets or their governments are quietly asked to recall them. Otherwise, depending on how strained bilateral relations are, they are either declared persona non grata and expelled, or publicly identified and sent back. How cases of appre- hended intelligence officers are handled is an accepted barometer of the state of bilateral relations of the countries concerned.
Accusations by Washington that China has stepped up cyber espionage and other efforts to steal advanced and high technology have become more frequent since Sino-US relations began deteriorating in April 2018. US Vice President Mike Pence also alluded to this in his speech earlier this month. Interestingly, in the months since then, three espionage cases involving Chinese citizens stealing sensitive information related to aviation, aero-engines and underwater marine technologies have been publicised.
The disclosure publicised by the New York Times on 10 October that Yanjun Xu, a Deputy Division Director of the Sixth Bureau of the Jiangsu Province Ministry of State Security under China’s Ministry of State Security (MoSS)—China’s foreign intelligence agency— was arrested in Belgium and brought to the United States to face espionage charges, is extremely rare. Yanjun Xu, reportedly operating under cover of the Jiangsu Science and Technology Promotion Association, was tasked to obtain technical information, including trade secrets, from aviation and aerospace companies in the United States and Europe. Yanjun Xu was arrested in Belgium on 1 April, after being lured there in the hopes of obtaining information about GE Aviation.
Enticing an intelligence officer abroad to another country and then extraditing him to stand trial requires considerable time, effort and money and is very unusual. This is the first time this has happened in Sino-US relations and clearly shows that the bilateral relationship has hit a new low. William Priestap, the FBI’s Assistant Director for Counterintelligence, was quoted as stating, “This unprecedented extradition of a Chinese intelligence officer exposes the Chinese government’s direct oversight of economic espionage against the United States.” John C. Demers, head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, appeared to place it in the context of the ongoing tensions in SinoUS relations when he said, “This case is not an isolated incident. It is part of an overall economic policy of developing China at American expense. We cannot tolerate a nation’s stealing our firepower and the fruits of our brainpower.”
The revelation comes approximately four months after information became available that counter-espionage investigations, all leading back to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), are underway in 51 American states. Possibly linked was the arrest on 25 September, of Ji Chaoqun, a 27-year-old Chinese citizen living in Chicago for allegedly spying, including by helping with the recruitment of US engineers, defence contractors and scientists for intelligence services in China. The US Department of Justice revealed that Ji Chaoqun worked under the direction of a high-level intelligence officer in the Jiangsu Province Ministry of State Security, a provincial department of China’s Ministry of State Security (MoSS).
Ji Chaoqun was tasked with providing the intelligence officer with biographical information on individuals for possible recruitment by the Jiangsu Province Ministry of State Security. The individuals included Chinese nationals who were working as engineers and scientists in the United States, some of whom were US defence contractors. According to the complaint, Ji Chaoqun arrived in the United States in 2013 to study electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. In 2016, he enlisted in the US Army Reserves as an E4 Specialist. The U.S. Army 902nd Military Intelligence Group is said to have provided valuable assistance in his arrest.
Another instance of an attempt to steal hi-technology from the US was disclosed by the US Department of Justice on 21 June 2018. It said that 41-year-old Shuren Qin, a Chinese national residing in Wellesley, Massachusetts, was arrested and charged that day with, among other violations, violating export laws by conspiring with employees of an entity affiliated with China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to illegally export US origin goods to China. According to official documents, Shuren Qin was born in the PRC and became a lawful permanent resident of the United States in 2014. He operates several companies in China, which purport to import US and European goods with applications in underwater or marine technologies into China. Shuren Qin was charged with being in communication with and receiving taskings from entities affiliated with the PLA, including the Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU), a Chinese military research institute, to obtain items used for anti-submarine warfare.
The latest disclosure certainly ups the ante and suggests that the Sino-US relationship faces more turbulent times ahead. Jayadeva Ranade is a former Additional Secretary in theCabinet Secretariat, Government of India and is presently President of the Centre for China Analysis and Strategy. The prevailing conditions for the native minority Uyghur community residing inside China’s remote north-western province, Xinjiang, are rabid. The secret transfers of Uyghur detainees to prisons in the Tailai County [in northeast China’s Heilongjiang province] to address the “overflow” in the region’s overcrowded “political re-education camps” [implying and meaning prisons] is being reported widely. Since 1847, the Uyghurs were known to trade one good horse for one piece of pure silk. Their excursions into the uncharted peripheral regions of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and China, represent a long and dishevelled path. Around 1921, the inhabitants of Xinjiang were not exactly called Uyghurs and were referred to as Turks, Taranchis, Sarts, and Chantous [with the latter specifically used for the Turkic Muslims of Xinjiang].
The discourse of ethnicity in China’s history textbooks for senior high schools, published particularly between 1951 and 1956, exhibited a Han-exclusivist vision and version of Chinese history. In the immediate period following recognition of Communist China in 1949, the representation of non-Han people in Chinese history textbooks belonging to pre-modern Chinese history is noticeable. During the early 1950s, these people were treated as non-Chinese, and referred to as “foreigners”. The textbooks published by the Peoples Education Press (Renmin Jiaoyu chubanshe) in Beijing, held a profound influence on the teaching guidelines, and references for the history teachers, writings of scholars, academics and editors. More importantly, these textbooks were symbolic of China’s mainstream history writing and were the most extensively read and quoted historical texts.
The history textbook of 1951 recorded Chinese history exclusively as that of Han people, referring to non-Han people as foreigners (yizu or waizu). These texts managed to create a clear dichotomy between the Han population (known earlier as Hua) and other ethnic groups that were depicted in an exceptionally damaging and negative light. Non-Han populations were called backward nomads leading a morally inferior and retrograde life. Han people (Hanren) or Chinese people (Zhongguoren) were fungible terms that could be used interchangeably. This primarily implied that China (Zhongguo) and its history and culture were exclusive for the Han—creating an obvious dissimilarity between “us and them”. The 1951 textbook further suggests that China became a unified nation-state of the Han people by the time of the Qin dynasty, which was credited with the establishment of a “mono-ethnic” nation-state (minzu guojia). The subsequent history textbook of 1956, which was the first to be completely published under the new Communist regime, continued to label non-Han people as non-Chinese. What also remained constant was that the most prominent ethnic groups, namely, the Tibetans and the Uyghurs among others, were continued to be treated as “outsiders” in 1956, as such were in 1951.
Putting this marginalisation and subjugation in the contemporary perspective, the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) recently convened to scrutinise whether China is implementing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination as per the Charter’s guidelines in its 96th session. The CERD expressed grave concern and raised a string of imposingly relevant questions over China’s mass internment of ethnic Uyghurs in order to curb their basic and fundamental religious, cultural freedom and practices.
Confronted by questions including requests for explanations revolving around the legal grounds for the mass detention of millions of Uyghurs, China was asked to provide details on the religious freedom, language use, and cultural and economic rights of the ethnic Uyghurs residing in Xinjiang. The vice-chairperson of CERD, Gay McDougall cited numerous reports stating that almost 1.1 million people have been detained in “political re-education camps”, while another 2.2 million forcibly made to attend “open re-education camps”, whose network spreads across the province. In all, this amounts to nearly 10% of Xinjiang’s total Muslim population. The abuse of “political re-education camps” is widespread. They are fast turning into detention camps for Uyghurs caught in the Chinese clampdown on political dissent, freedoms of expression, association, and movement. It needs to be highlighted here that China’s Criminal Procedure Law (CPL) does not conform to the International Convention Against Torture, which principally means that its police is legally entitled to deny people access to lawyers and legal representatives, paving way for a greater degree of possible persecution and torture.
The cord of political and social repression visible all across China remains intensely pronounced in Xinjiang—a province that resembles more of a military garrison. From when historiographical writing was dominated by Han-exclusive narratives, to now, when the non-Han Uighurs are being subjected to all-pervasive suppression, the despair and relegation of China’s minorities continue. Dr Monika Chansoria is a Tokyo-based Senior Visiting Fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA).