Abstract
In comparison with other major powers, relatively little has been written about the modern capabilities of the Chinese intelligence agencies. The public consciousness of Western audiences is certainly not infused with dramatic episodes equivalent to the United Kingdom’s code-breaking successes against Nazi Germany during the Second World War, or the spy/counterspy narrative which characterised the Cold War. Within China itself, there is such a narrative, but it is situated squarely within the context of the antiJapanese war and in the post-war struggle between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang (KMT), both campaigns in which intelligence played a significant role. This era is amply covered in both academic writings and an increasing array of novels, films and television series which form part of the CCP’s ongoing Patriotic Education Campaign, established in the aftermath of the 1989 June 4 Incident. Far less coverage is devoted to China’s contemporary intelligence capabilities, in particular in terms of successes in collecting against foreign targets. There is nothing remotely comparable to the huge expansion in academic writings on all aspects of intelligence that has developed in the West since the end of the Cold War.
The concept of intelligence is, however, well-entrenched in Chinese culture, and dates back to the time of the Warring States (around 475–221 BCE) during which Sunzi’s Art of War (Sunzi bingfa), which deals at length with the subject of espionage, appeared. The role of espionage has also featured in classical literature, for instance in the Romance of Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi) which offers examples of classic espionage and of deception operations, such as Zhuge Liang’s empty-city strategy. Intelligence undoubtedly played a role in the efforts of successive Chinese dynasties to manage relations with the so-called ‘barbarian’ nomadic tribes which, throughout history, constituted the major source of external threat. But successive Chinese dynasties have always been predominantly inward-looking, and foreign intelligence collection as it has become understood in the West was not a major feature of China’s intelligence culture until fairly recently. Intelligence did play an important part in the Sino–Japanese War, and in the subsequent civil war between Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party and Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT. The communists in particular achieved some key successes, including the acquisition, in 1941, of predictive intelligence on Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and Japan’s military expansion into the Pacific and, during the civil war from 1945 to 1949, they achieved comprehensive penetration of the intelligence organs of a demoralised KMT. But the overwhelming majority of such intelligence was generated from within China, and Chinese capacity to collect useful intelligence overseas was limited.
Read the full article here.