ARGUMENT: CHINESE ESPIONAGEHow China’s Spies Fooled an America That Wanted to be Fooled
As the U.S. and China edge closer to a new Cold War, China has replaced the Soviet Union (and its successor, Russia) as America’s primary intelligence threat. Julian Ku, reviewing Alex Joske’s new book on Chinese espionage, writes that Joske does not give enough weight to the fact that American political, business, and academic leaders, having been persuaded by the argument that China’s rise would be peaceful, were willing to tolerate some of China’s activities. China’s spies may have been trying to lull U.S. academics, business elites, and policymakers into quiescence, but “U.S. players sought engagement with China for their own interests and purposes and would have likely done so whether or not the MSS [China’s Ministry for State Security] was lying to them.”
In American popular culture, foreign spying remains deeply associated with the Cold War and America’s principal antagonist, the Soviet Union. Countless novels, television shows, and films cast Russian spies as dangerous (yet often romantic) threats to America.
Julian Ku, reviewing Alex Joske’s Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World in Lawfare , writes that as the U.S. and China edge closer to a new Cold War, it seems clear that China has replaced the Soviet Union (and its successor, Russia) as America’s primary intelligence threat, even if one is hard-pressed to identify even one decent novel involving Chinese spies.
He writes that “While reports of Chinese spy-related arrests in the U.S. have grown dramatically during the past decade, the academic and policy literature lack a serious book-length study of China’s intelligence operations in the United States,” adding,
[Alex Joske’s book] promises to fill this gap. Indeed, Joske’s work offers a rare, nonacademic study of China’s little-known intelligence agency, the Ministry for State Security (MSS). But while Joske does report on China’s spies, his thesis is quite different than one might expect. Rather than untangle the ways in which the MSS seeks to gather U.S. government or corporate secrets, Joske argues that the MSS’s greatest intelligence strength is its massively successful influence operation against U.S. political and business elites. In Joske’s telling, any U.S. military secrets gleaned by the MSS in recent decades pale in comparison to its amazingly successful efforts to deceive the highest levels of the U.S. policymaking world about China’s foreign policy goals and priorities. These deceptions, in Joske’s telling, kept the U.S. government from responding earlier to China’s threat to U.S. interests.
Joske, an enormously talented analyst with the influential Australian Strategic Policy Institute think tank, backs up his argument by drawing on largely ignored open-source intelligence on the MSS. While there is good reason to admire his impressive research and analysis of obscure Chinese sources, Joske overstates the force and impact of the operations he uncovers. While China’s spies may have been trying to lull U.S. academics, business elites, and policymakers into quiescence, Joske fails to give those U.S. decision-makers sufficient agency. U.S. players sought engagement with China for their own interests and purposes and would have likely done so whether or not the MSS was lying to them.
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There is much to Joske’s point that the U.S. government took the peaceful rise narrative too seriously. But the U.S. government’s willingness to swallow the narrative was not contradicted by other metrics of Chinese behavior. In the early 2000s, when the concept was introduced, China was not actively prosecuting its claims to the South China Sea, it eventually reached a rapprochement with the government on Taiwan, and it had not even started regular intrusions into Japanese-controlled waters around islands disputed with Japan. The plausibility of the peaceful rise narrative was complemented by Chinese policies (or nonpolicies). U.S. policymakers, facing a global terrorist threat after September 11 and dealing with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, could be forgiven for accepting the peaceful rise narrative at face value. It fit with their policy preferences and was backed by at least some evidence. U.S. policymakers may have been “influenced” to think China’s intentions were more benign than they actually were. But the preferences of U.S. policymakers would likely have driven the U.S. government to this conclusion even without MSS involvement.
Lu concludes:
Joske does a great service by revealing and recounting the history of MSS operations against U.S. elites by mining open-source materials ignored by most analysts and journalists. He rightly directs readers’ attention to the MSS as a serious player and its success in penetrating the highest circles of U.S. elite decision-making on China. The lesson of his book is that claims about Chinese intentions need to be sophisticated, nuanced, and evidence based. Conversations by China experts (I’m looking at you, Henry Kissinger!) with their “friends” in China can no longer (if they ever did) serve as a reliable indicator of Chinese government intentions. U.S. China analysis needs to get better, and it already has.
At the same time, U.S. policies cannot shut off all connections with Chinese civil society in an effort to cut out MSS front groups. The U.S. needs as much information and exchange with China as possible. As long as U.S. decision-makers go into these meetings and conferences with their eyes wide open, the U.S. policy process will still ultimately benefit. The U.S. discourse around China will also ultimately be better, even if Joske’s book reminds us that we all need to add a substantial “MSS discount” to the reliability of most Chinese interlocutors.
