The US has been spying on China for years, and other countries for decades, the best of its activity. But it’s losing ground to the world’s most powerful rival. A decade ago, Chinese agents infiltrated the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and executed or jailed American spies. According to a Wall Street Journal report, as many as two dozen assets providing information to the US were executed or imprisoned, some of whom were high-ranking Chinese officials.
China started modernising its economy a decade before India did in the late 1970s. Not only did China start earlier, it also grew at a brisker pace. Compounding, as students of mathematics know, does the rest — India’s total economic output today is where China’s was in 2007, so India is about 16 years behind,
even if, going forward, it grows at the same pace that China grew at.
Of course, such high growth rates may now be elusive, and catching up will require yet more time even if all goes well for India, since China will not remain stagnant.
Reliable information about decision-making in China is in high demand in Washington amid fears Beijing could opt to arm Russian forces waging war in Ukraine or try to seize control of Taiwan by force.
But under President Xi Jinping’s rule, China has become an elusive target for U.S. intelligence agencies, according to five former senior intelligence officials and congressional aides.
Xi’s tightening grip on power, his government’s vast electronic surveillance apparatus, a crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong, and a strict three-year Covid lockdown have all made intelligence gathering exceedingly difficult, former officials said. Some of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the topic.
Moreover, the U.S. has yet to fully recover from a catastrophic setback in which a network of intelligence informants inside China was unmasked and dismantled.
The episode represented one of the most significant intelligence breaches in American history, NBC News previously reported. The Chinese penetrated clandestine communications and used that knowledge to arrest and execute at least 20 CIA informants, according to multiple current and former government officials.
“It was a horrible, devastating loss to the intelligence community,” a former intelligence official said. “Lives were lost.” There was a wider circle of people that intelligence agencies might target. It’s a much more centralized, tight system now,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the matter.
“The risk of being surprised is greater.”
The consolidation of power under Xi combined with three years of a stringent anti-Covid policy “has made getting authoritative information out of the system very difficult,” said Chris Johnson, president of China Strategies Group, a political risk consultancy. “Then, more broadly, the expansion of their surveillance and monitoring capability over the years makes that very, very challenging,” said Johnson, a former senior China analyst at the CIA.
In short, he said, “it’s a b—-.”
