Chinese Intelligence Research Articles

The Dragon's Overwatch: Chinese Private Security Expansion in Latin America and the Caribbean

This scholarly disquisition furnishes a comprehensive exploration of the burgeoning presence of Chinese private security companies (PSCs) across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), delving into the strategic repercussions for regional security architectures and national sovereignty imperatives. Employing a meticulous qualitative methodology encompassing a thorough literature review, policy document analysis, and an examination of Chinese-language sources, the research elucidates the salient drivers catalyzing this phenomenon. These precipitating factors span cultural affinities, economic motivations, geopolitical ambitions, and the exigent security challenges besetting Chinese commercial entities operating within the LAC region. The operational modes of Chinese PSCs are subjected to forensic scrutiny, illuminating their diverse service offerings, geographical permeation across the region, and the obstacles they confront. Furthermore, the inquiry contextualizes the issue within the broader geopolitical milieu, accentuating concerns regarding transparency lacunae, regulatory deficiencies, and potential avenues for Chinese intelligence and military machinations, thereby potentially destabilizing the regional equilibrium. Ultimately, the research culminates in a series of substantive policy prescriptions aimed at mitigating risks, fortifying regional stability, and safeguarding national sovereignty through capacity-building initiatives, constructive engagement with Beijing, enhanced transparency mechanisms, and robust regional cooperation frameworks.

The Sino–Soviet Intelligence War: The KGB Counterintelligence Perspective

Declassified documents of the State Committee for Security (KGB) demonstrate how Soviet intelligence viewed Chinese intelligence, after two communist neighbors split apart ideologically, and their vast border became a theater of war in the late 1960s. First, in response to the massive influx of Chinese immigrants, Soviet counterintelligence made tremendous efforts to uncover false defectors sent by Chinese intelligence, employing unique techniques. These include “in-cell” cultivation (i.e., the placement of KGB agents in the same cell with a detained Chinese suspect), and the interregional secondment (marshrutirovanie) of proven KGB agents of Chinese nationality to be deployed in Chinese settlements. Second, fighting Chinese intelligence required coordinated efforts among KGB counterintelligence, military counterintelligence, and the border guards’ intelligence. Third, the KGB developed a comprehensive operational psychology for handling Chinese targets. Three key recruitment fundamentals—ideology, money, and kompromat—were tailored to the social and cultural characteristics of the Chinese population. While Soviet intelligence utilized all available human resources, attempts to establish illegal intelligence positions in China had limited success in the 1970s. Overall, the fundamental approaches of Soviet intelligence toward China were largely determined by geopolitical and cultural underpinnings and the autocratic nature of both regimes.

TikTok's Conflict of Interest with the US Government: Between Big Data Security and Economics (2017-2023)

State capabilities in securing cyberspace will determine national security in the real world because cyber data is related to conventional information. This condition makes cybersecurity a complex domain because of its virtual nature, but it can impact aspects in real space. This complexity is also because all parties can access cyber, causing conflicts such as competition for big data interests. This study aims to determine the dispute between TikTok and the United States government over the security of its users' data, especially users from the United States. The United States accuses TikTok of misusing US user data for Chinese intelligence. However, TikTok has denied the allegations. The qualitative method used in this research is based on data collection techniques through a literature study with secondary data support. As a result, TikTok requires user data for product and service development purposes. While the United States is more than that, big data users are a national asset determining their global economic position. There is no hard evidence to suggest that TikTok provided the Chinese government with the data of users from the United States. This paper also views the US government's interest as an extension of the local private sector. This view is based on the finding that TikTok's profits and popularity are far above their all-American competitors.

Victors’ history: Chinese retrospectives on the Hugh Redmond case

ABSTRACT In 1954, a Shanghai court sentenced US national Hugh Redmond to life imprisonment on espionage charges. Found guilty of directing an extensive agent network against Chinese political, economic and military intelligence targets, he remained in custody until his alleged suicide in 1970. Since then, Redmond’s life has been the subject of several Western publications, but detail has been scarce about his reporting requirements, collection methods and the security operation that culminated in his arrest. Drawing on Chinese accounts of the case, this paper addresses these gaps. A picture emerges of non-official cover arrangements flawed from the outset at a time when the US demand for Korean War-related intelligence was at its height. Alerted by doctrine and success against another local CIA operation, Shanghai’s security apparatus moved cautiously against Redmond’s network, obtaining evidence that made the guilty verdict of 1954 inevitable. To Chinese intelligence practitioners, the case provides an exemplary example of how counter-espionage work against the US should proceed in the 21st century. In July 2019, CIA would ‘neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence’ of records related to Redmond’s activities in China, and the 50th anniversary of his death in 2020 passed without public official acknowledgement.

Prescription system to calculate precise doses of Chinese herbal medicine to avoid toxic effects

Background and objectivesTraditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a therapeutic system which has been practiced for thousands of years. Although for much of its history the decoction of medicinal herbs was the most common method of consuming the herbal treatments, TCM prescriptions are now primarily prepared using concentrated Chinese herbal extracts (CCHE) in powder or granular form. However, determining the precise dose of each single Chinese herbal constituent within a prescription creates a challenge in clinical practice due to the potential risk of toxicity. To alleviate this, we invented the Chinese Intelligence Prescription System (CIPS) to calculate the exact dose of each single herb within an individual prescription. MethodsIn this study, we applied CIPS in a real-world setting to analyze clinical prescriptions collected and prepared at the TCM Pharmacy of China Medical University Hospital (CMUH). ResultsOur investigation revealed that 3% of all prescriptions filled in a 1-month period contained inexact dosages, suggesting that more than 170,000 prescriptions filled in Taiwan in a given month may contain potentially toxic components. We further analyzed the data to determine the excess dosages and outline the possible associated side effects. ConclusionsIn conclusion, CIPS offers TCM practitioners the ability to prepare exact Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) prescriptions in order to avoid toxic effects, thereby ensuring patient safety.

Chinese Intelligence Prescription System improves prescription accuracy while decreasing labor and drug costs

Background and AimThe traditional method of taking Chinese Medicine involves creating a decoction by cooking medicinal Chinese herbs. However, this method has become less popular, being replaced by the more convenient method of consuming concentrated Chinese herbal extracts, which creates challenges related to the complexity of stacking multiple formulas.MethodsWe developed the Chinese Intelligence Prescription System (CIPS) to simplify the prescription process. In this study, we used data from our institutions pharmacy to calculate the number of reductions, average dispensing time, and resulting cost savings.ResultsThe mean number of prescriptions was reduced from 8.19 ± 3.65 to 7.37 ± 3.34 (p=2.46;times10^{-8}). The reduction in the number of prescriptions directly resulted in decreased dispensing time, reducing it from 1.79 ± 0.25 to 1.63 ± 0.66 min (p=1.88;times10^{-14}). The reduced dispensing time totaled 3.75 h per month per pharmacist, equivalent to an annual labor cost savings of $15,488 NTD per pharmacist. In addition, drug loss was reduced during the prescription process, with a mean savings of $4,517 NTD per year. The combined savings adds up to a not insignificant $20,005 NTD per year per pharmacist. When taking all TCM clinics/hospitals in Taiwan into account, the total annual savings would be $77 million NTD.ConclusionCIPS assists clinicians and pharmacists to formulate precise prescriptions in a clinical setting to simplify the dispensing process while reducing medical resource waste and labor costs.

Grindr? it's a "Blackmailer's goldmine"! The weaponization of queer data publics Amid the US-China trade conflict.

In March 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) identified Grindr, a hookup app that predominantly caters to men who have sex with men, as a "national security threat" and compelled the Chinese conglomerate Kunlun Tech to divest from it entirely. The CFIUS-Grindr ruling is indicative of larger regulatory debates over increasing datafication trends in the dating app industry. Through a political economy approach to communication, this paper examines how this ruling was predominantly constructed by various stakeholders as a public controversy in light of the ongoing US-China trade conflict. This interpretation of the controversy relies on a prejudicial trope that construes queer dating app users as vulnerable targets of potential blackmail schemes operated by Chinese intelligence agencies. Through the Lavender Scare, a historical period referring to state-led investigations into the presence of LGBTQ+ employees in Western federal workforces, this paper historicizes this blackmail trope to highlight how the politicization of queer vulnerabilities amid global hegemonic conflicts is a tactic that predates the US-China trade conflict. It argues that the CFIUS-Grindr ruling weaponizes Grindr's queer data publics as threats against which the US government should protect itself, while failing to fully recognize the urgency for the state to protect the data privacy rights of the LGBTQ+ communities in the digital economy. In light of the CFIUS-Grindr ruling, this paper examines the implications that datafication raises for the LGBTQ+ communities whose sexual lives and identities are increasingly being datafied and exploited by digital media platforms.

Peasant Worker Communist Spy: A Chinese Intelligence Agent Looks Back at His Time in Cambodia

Peasant Worker Communist Spy: A Chinese Intelligence Agent Looks Back at His Time in Cambodia

A correlation study of military psychological stress, optimistic intelligence quotient, and emotion regulation of Chinese naval soldiers

Psychological stress is closely related to the mental and physical health of soldiers. We explored the relationships between stress, optimistic intelligence, and emotion regulation in Chinese Navy personnel (N = 452), who completed the General Information Questionnaire, the Psychological Stress Self-Evaluation Test, the Chinese Adult Optimistic Intelligence Quotient Questionnaire, and the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire in this cross-sectional study. Results show that stress was negatively correlated with perceived happiness and the ability to respond positively to negative events, and positively correlated with emotional regulation, cognitive reappraisal, and expressive suppression. These findings indicate that comprehensive measures using positive psychology techniques should be taken to reduce stress among naval soldiers to enhance their well-being and the military's combat readiness.

Taking the Fight Abroad: The FBI’s Legal Attachés and Chinese Intelligence

During the first several decades of the Cold War, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) faced a formidable challenge: an intelligence threat that did not have a formal U.S. presence that the bu...

The Many Faces of China’s Belt and Road Initiative

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is best known as a massive set of infrastructure projects stretching from Asia to Europe. But more than that, it is a sweeping foreign policy vision that provides China with opportunities for deep engagement with virtually every aspect of state and society in its partner countries. Many developing countries welcome the investments and opportunities for trade linked to the initiative, but some of the projects have sparked local resistance over fears of unfair terms or potential opportunities for Chinese intelligence penetration.

Chinese Open Source Data Collection, Big Data, And Private Enterprise Work For State Intelligence and Security: The Case of Shenzhen Zhenhua

China is collecting vast amounts of open source data to support influence and intelligence operations through private enterprises it then sells to state institutions. Here we present one database collected on 2.4 million individuals around the world from sectors China deems as targets for a variety of purposes ranging from political influence to intellectual property targeting. The data appears used to support Chinese intelligence, military, security, and state operations in information warfare and influence targeting. The data covers a broad array of public and non-public data with classifications and rankings on individuals and institutions designed to assist Chinese analysts. The company also provides big data analytics as well as other functionality to support Chinese military and intelligence analysts. Individuals and institutions in open liberal democracies need greater understanding and privacy rights based upon the asymmetric information warfare being undertaken by the Chinese Communist Party and state security intelligence.

How to become the chosen one in the artificial intelligence market: the evidence from China

This study aims to explore how firms' innovation performance is related to their possibility of receiving public support, and the boundary conditions of this relationship. Specifically, we focus on the firms in the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) market, and study a specific public support, namely, Innofund. The results suggest that a firm's innovation performance has an inverted U-shaped effect on its probability of receiving Innofund. The effect, moreover, is moderated by whether a firm has received social investment, that is, the relationship between innovation performance and the probability of receiving funding is flattened by the receipt of social investment. Besides, a firm's ties to institutional intermediaries further strengthen the moderating effect of social investment. The findings carry implications for future research and technology policy.

Is China's IR Academic Community Becoming More Anti-American?

Is China's IR Academic Community Becoming More Anti-American? Meng Weizhan It is my impression that the majority of American scholars who study China and the majority of Chinese scholars who study the United States are committed to promoting friendly relations between the two countries and to helping their own people understand each other better. Unfortunately, their efforts are often misunderstood. Starting at the end of 2018, a disturbing rumor began to circulate in China's international relations (IR) academic community: several scholars told their peers that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was prohibiting them from visiting the United States. By April 2019, a report in the New York Times confirmed that "the FBI has mounted a counterintelligence operation that aims to bar Chinese academics from the United States if they are suspected of having links to Chinese intelligence agencies. … As many as 30 Chinese professors in the social sciences, heads of academic institutes, and experts who help explain government policies have had their visas to the United States canceled in the past year, or put on administrative review, according to Chinese academics and their American counterparts" (Perlez 2019). According to a report in the Global Times (Fan 2019), more than 280 Chinese scholars have been investigated or harassed by the FBI. These incidents have shocked academic circles in both China and the United States. Perhaps the US government assumes that this is fair treatment for Chinese scholars because many American scholars have complained that they have been banned from entering China due to expressing views that offend the Chinese government. I fully support academic freedom and believe that all governments should be tolerant of any views expressed by scholars. Nevertheless, it is puzzling that the Chinese scholars whose visas have been canceled include some of those best known for their balanced views of the United States and its foreign policy. In order to verify this, we should explore whether the Chinese scholars whose US visas have been canceled have said anything that would harm the interests of the United States. If they have not done so, then they have been treated unjustly. [End Page 139] I will also examine the changes in the perceptions of the US among mainstream IR scholars in China since President Donald Trump took office, focusing in particular on the period after the Sino-US trade war that began in June 2018. Despite the trade war, there is no evidence of a trend toward greater hostility among mainstream IR scholars in Beijing toward the United States. Many doves (wen he pai) with respect to US policies openly and strongly advocate pacifism, oppose nationalism, and call for maintaining friendly relations with the United States. Some well-known hawks (qiang ying pai) have also expressed their views that the Chinese government should seriously reflect upon its own domestic and foreign policy decisions to consider how it may prevent China from becoming isolated. In short, my conclusion, from extensive reading of these scholars' writings and listening to their public remarks, is that an overwhelming majority of Chinese IR scholars do not regard the United States as an enemy at all, and I argue that China should continue to reform its economic system and be more open to better integration with the Western-led international economic system. My assessment is that few among them advocate that the Chinese government should adopt tougher policies toward the United States or promote anti-American sentiment among the general public. China's state media and public opinion are indeed becoming increasingly anti-American, but mainstream IR scholars rarely publish extreme views in newspapers or new media. In this essay, I examine the public views of IR scholars at universities and research institutions in Beijing. The vast majority of Chinese IR scholars and the editorial departments of academic and policy research journals on this subject are based in Beijing, and they are likely to have a direct impact on decision making within the Chinese government. In Beijing, there are only ten universities and institutions with a true academic and policy influence on China's strategies, including policies toward the United States. Four of these are top universities, namely Peking University...

A valuable document revealing the Japanese army's “comfort stations”: Reading the Jinhua Gyerim Association articles and register

The archives of Jinhua 金華 City, Zhejiang 浙江 Province, contain a Japanese Jinhua Gyerim Association articles and register (金華雞林會會則及名簿 Jinhua jilinhui huize ji mingbu). This Korean townsmen association register was created in April 1944 and obtained by Chinese intelligence officers. This short name list with just over 200 people conceals much information on the “comfort women” (慰安婦 wei'anfu) system of sexual slavery established by the Japanese army in the Jinhua region. After confirmation through textual research and on-site investigations, the register contains records of 11 “comfort stations” (慰安所 wei'ansuo) with 8 “comfort station” overseers, 7 managers, and a total of 126 “comfort women.” This accounted for 60% of all Koreans in the Jinhua Gyerim Association 雞林會, and the youngest was only 17 years old. There was a total of 141 people involved in the “comfort stations,” accounting for 67.19% of all Koreans in the Jinhua Gyerim Association, a very startling proportion. This partially reflects the prevalence of the Japanese army's system of sexual slavery, so this Jinhua Gyerim Association articles and register is a valuable historical source that reflects the rule and atrocities of the Japanese invasion.

Huawei Technologies’ Links to Chinese State Security Services

Using a unique dataset of CVs, this paper analyzes the relationship between key Huawei personnel and the Chinese state security services. Based upon an analysis of this dataset, I find there is strong evidence that Huawei personnel act at the direction of Chinese state intelligence, and that there exists a deep and lasting relationship between Huawei, its employees, and the Chinese state. This should raise questions within Western governments worried about Chinese access to domestic information.

‘White on the outside but red on the inside’: Switzerland and Chinese intelligence networks during the Cold War

ABSTRACTUsing previously classified archival records, this article discusses how Chinese diplomatic staff operated a variety of intelligence networks from Switzerland during the Cold War. As the site of China’s first diplomatic mission in central Western Europe and the location of the United Nations’ European headquarters, Switzerland was uniquely suited as China’s intelligence hub in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. Chinese officials established and ran a variety of European and even global intelligence networks out of Switzerland, whose members included Chinese officials; Taiwanese diplomats; Chinese, Taiwanese, and Chinese Indonesian scientists and students; owners and staff of Chinese restaurants; Communists and communist sympathisers; and businessmen.

Emotional Intelligence of Nurses in Tertiary Hospitals in Dali, the People’s Republic of China

Emotional intelligence plays an important role in regulating the emotions induced by fatigue or stress and it is critically required in nurses who work in dynamic hospital environments. Nurses’ emotional intelligence helps them to create a positive work environment in various unfavorable situations in order to provide patients care in a supportive manner. The aim of this study was to assess nurses’ emotional intelligence in tertiary hospitals in Dali, the People’s Republic of China. The participants were 291 nurses working at two tertiary hospitals. Data were collected via the Demographic Data Form and the Chinese Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze demographic and emotional intelligence data. Results showed that, generally, nurses perceived high levels of emotional intelligence. More specifically, nurses perceived high levels of emotional intelligence in themselves and moderate levels of emotional intelligence in others. They also perceived moderate levels for their ability to regulate their own emotions and for their use of emotion to facilitate performance. This study provides essential information regarding nurses’ emotional intelligence. Nurse managers should use this study’s results to develop strategies that assist their nurses’ efforts to improve emotional intelligence.

Lessons Learned from Chinese Intelligence Officer Arrest

Abstract

Tigers, Flies and Crocodiles: Hunting Season for Chinese Intelligence. Chinese Anti-Corruption Campaigns in an Aggressive Foreign Policy

In recent years, there has been a massive increase in Chinese authorities hunting down their own citizens abroad. Although the Chinese government’s anti-corruption campaign has led to numerous suspects returning to China and reporting to the police, it has repeatedly been criticised for providing the basis to eliminate any political and economic opposition. Various institutions, including Chinese intelligence agencies, operating worldwide, carry out these hunts. Their advancements illustrate the global orientation of such organisations, which has developed in line with Beijing’s growing confidence and changing foreign policy.