China flexes muscles in spy games vs US
Investor visa ‘hard sell’
BEIJING, May 23, (Agencies): A cartoon posted in a dusty alleyway in the heart of Beijing warns passersby not to fall prey to the charms of foreign men: they might be spies.
It is a graphic reminder of a struggle usually waged in the shadows, and a sign of the Chinese government’s intensifying campaign against espionage.
The poster’s comic book tale of love gone wrong ends in tears and a stern warning.
But China’s real life spy games have had a darker denouement, according to a New York Times article Sunday alleging that authorities killed or jailed up to 20 people for spying on behalf of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The counterintelligence operation took place between the end of 2010 and 2012, the Times said, an exceptionally sensitive period in Chinese domestic politics that saw the downfall of some of the country’s most prominent politicians amid a delicate leadership transition.
In the years since, there has been a marked rise in warnings against the influence of so-called “black hands”, with state media frequently fretting about the infiltration of “foreign forces” into domestic politics and society.
The rhetoric has been accompanied by a tightening of the domestic security environment, including a recent raft of sweeping legislation formalising the government’s broad powers to counter threats from abroad.
Restrictions
In April last year, China passed a law placing strict restrictions on foreign NGOs, which are often accused by Beijing of trying to subvert the state and portrayed in Chinese media as fronts for US intelligence operations.
At the same time, Beijing ramped up a public campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of infiltration from abroad, ranging from the poster featuring the ill-fated lover to the promise of large cash rewards for informers.
Since coming to power in 2012, President Xi Jinping “has put a lot more emphasis and devoted a lot more resources to the internal state security apparatus,” including “severe internal checkups” on officials, said political analyst Willy Lam.
The shift was part of an anti-corruption campaign that unseated China’s domestic security czar Zhou Yongkang and its top spymaster Ma Jian.
Many of Washington’s agents were likely recruited during Zhou’s tenure, Lam said, when it was “relatively easy for people ... to buy promotions and put their hands on sensitive information to provide to the US.”
Following the changes, “both the US and Taiwan have faced more difficulty using the usual channels to recruit spies,” he added.
Asked about the Times story, China’s foreign ministry said it had no comment on the “normal discharge of official duties by Chinese security organisations.”
In an editorial Monday, the nationalist Global Times newspaper praised Beijing for rooting out the alleged traitors, writing that “international law will affirm that China’s anti-espionage activities are just and legal, while the CIA’s spying is illegitimate.” But US spying on China is not a one-way street. In 1985, former spymaster Yu Qiangsheng gave the US government its first major intelligence victory against Beijing when he handed over information that led to the conviction of CIA analyst Larry Wu-Tai Chin on charges of spying for China for decades.
Since 2000, Washington has identified 154 Chinese agents, David Major, a former FBI special agent, told a US congressional committee last year.
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BEIJING: As a controversial US investment visa scheme comes under fresh criticism, Sam Walls of Little Rock, Arkansas, faces a different problem as he courts wealthy Chinese.
Walls and his team at Pine State Regional Center are looking to raise $200 million through the EB-5 investor visa programme for a steel mill in the southern state of Arkansas — just the kind of project the scheme was set up to help.
But persuading a class of investors more accustomed to being pitched luxury high-rises in cities such as Los Angeles or Miami to buy into a heavy industry project in one of America’s poorest states is proving a hard sell.
“It’s a grind,” Walls said in an interview outside the EB-5 and Investment Immigration Expo in Beijing, a gathering of US representatives of EB-5 projects and local agencies that promote them to Chinese investors and was closed to the media.
Walls, who is 47 and does not speak Mandarin, spent three months in China last year promoting the project, often travelling by high-speed rail between Beijing and Shanghai. He was once woken by an attendant and, thinking he had arrived in Shanghai, got off the train — four hours short of his destination.
Walls’ challenge is compounded by the fact that he is trying to sell a new steel plant in a country with about 400 million tonnes of excess steel production capacity, with plans to shut down 50 million tonnes of capacity this year.
“About the time we came to market you couldn’t open the paper in China and not read an article about the demise of the Chinese steel industry,” said Walls, 47, who is raising funds to refinance the $1.67 billion Big River Steel plant, which opened in February in Osceola, Arkansas.
The EB-5 programme grants foreigners a US green card — making them legal permanent residents — in exchange for investing $500,000 or more in a qualified project. The vast majority of such investment comes from China.
But the EB-5 programme, which is up for US congressional review in September, has come under fire from politicians who point to fraud and abuse, and to the fact that a scheme originally intended to bring jobs to high-unemployment areas has often been used to fund projects in wealthy neighbourhoods.