China’s fight against espionage is “extremely serious”, a spokesman for the country’s rubber-stamp parliament said late last month. He said the techniques used by foreign spies are becoming increasingly difficult to trace. To deal with this, the legislature approved a new, more comprehensive, version of the country’s anti-espionage law on April 26. Among foreigners in China, this is causing panic. In what Chinese officials call their “smokeless war” against spies, the risks to innocents are rising.
Concerns were growing even before the law was passed. The arrest of a Japanese businessman in Beijing in March caused an uproar among fellow officials in China. A senior employee of Astellas Pharma, a Japanese pharmaceutical company and longtime resident of China, has been accused of espionage (no other details have been released). Such charges are far from rare. The foreign ministry in Tokyo says he was the 17th Japanese seized by China’s counter-espionage police since 2015. But the latest detainee was unusual: a prominent member of the business community from a large company.
In April, family members of a Chinese journalist, Dong Yuyu (pictured), revealed that he had been arrested last year while meeting a Japanese diplomat in Beijing and accused of espionage. Mr. Dong is well known among foreign diplomats and journalists. He was working as a senior editor at Guangming Daily, one of the country’s official newspapers. He also contributed to Yanhuang Chunqiu, a magazine when it was strongly pro-reform (it was deactivated after a hostile takeover in 2016), as well as the Chinese website of the New York Times. On the same day the amended law on espionage was passed, authorities announced the arrest of Chinese-born Taiwanese publisher Li Yanhe, who was visiting the mainland. He has been accused of “endangering national security”. Books produced by Mr. Li’s firm include works critical of the Communist Party of China.
The recent police raids on the firms’ offices have also irked foreign businessmen. In one such stroke, in March, five Chinese employees of Mintz Group, an American due-diligence firm, were detained in Beijing for reasons that have not been made public. According to the Financial Times, in April police in Shanghai questioned employees at the premises of a US consultancy Ban and took away computers and phones. The reason is again unclear. but in between rising tension Between China and the US, Western businessmen worry that police are looking for pretexts, whether security-related or otherwise, to force muscle.
For police, the new wording of the anti-espionage law provides plenty of excuses to target people they dislike – both Chinese and foreigners. The older version listed “stealing, stealing, buying or illegally imparting state secrets or intelligence information” as a type of espionage. It now also applies to “other documents, data, material or objects relating to national security or interests”. In theory this could mean that obtaining non-classified information on topics ranging from the economy to politics could be regarded as espionage.
In practice this has always been the case. But clarifying it in the law is intended to send a message to the Chinese: they should be extra-cautious about sharing with foreigners what is not available in the country’s highly censored public-facing media. There are also many publications in China that provide a more factual type of news, but they are classified. The party’s main mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, produces a three-weekly digest of commentary from social media, but this too is limited to “internal” circulation among officials.
Since the country first adopted its espionage law in 2014, it has waged a propaganda campaign primarily aimed at ordinary citizens. Missionaries also visit villages, urging vigilance against foreign ghosts. In 2015 the Ministry of State Security established a hotline, 12339, for people to report suspected threats, with substantial rewards offered. That year the government also declared that 15 April would be observed annually as National Safety Education Day. It says it wants “the whole society” to “make it difficult for criminals to take even one step who engage in espionage and sabotage”. It’s definitely making foreigners feel less welcome.
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© 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under license. Original content can be found at www.economist.com
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