Sometime in 2011, Gen. Jin Yinan gave what he thought was a closed-door briefing at a corporate conference in China, where he spoke about the dangers of espionage. In September of that year, what appeared to be the official video of his remarks turned up briefly on the Chinese video sharing site tudou.com, before being taken down. Jin gave tantalizing details of eight recent cases in which senior Chinese officials had allegedly spied for foreign governments, several of which had never previously been made public. The highest-ranking official was Kang Rixin, a member of the elite Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership body, the Central Committee, and head of China National Nuclear Corporation, which oversees China's nuclear programs. The official version held that Kang was sentenced to life in prison in November 2010 for bribe-taking. But Jin said the real sentence was espionage:
Kang had sold nuclear secrets to an undisclosed foreign nation, in a case that made the top leadership "extremely nervous."
Concerns about foreign espionage in China seem only to have grown. On Nov. 1 of this year, Xi signed a Counterespionage Law, replacing the 1993 National Security Law. The biggest change appears to be a greater emphasis on rooting out both foreign spies and their Chinese collaborators. When Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Secretary Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama meet in Beijing on Nov. 11 and 12, cyberspying will almost certainly be part of their discussion. But the new law suggests that it's the potential of human spies to wreak havoc that has China really worried.
It's difficult to build an open-source picture of foreign espionage operations in China: as in Kang's case, the Chinese authorities appear to hide espionage cases behind other crimes, to save themselves embarrassment. It's likely that many arrests and trials simply never come to public attention.
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