My life as a Chinese spy: A secret agent tells all
A Chinese spy who is now on Australian soil has revealed his incredible story to Four Corners.
www.abc.net.au
China’s secret spy
For the first time ever, an undercover agent for China’s secret police steps out of the shadows to tell all about where he’s been and who he’s been targeting.
阅读中文版
By Echo Hui of ABC Investigations, Elise Potaka and Dylan Welch
Four Corners
Updated 14 May 2024, 9:21pm
Published 13 May 2024, 4:35am
On a bitterly cold winter morning in China last year, a man who’d spent more than a decade working as a spy for the notorious secret police decided to flee his homeland.
“I spent most of the time in the airport’s bathroom, worried that secret police would find out my plan,” he recalls.
The man – who goes by the name Eric – was no stranger to operating undercover.
As an agent for the Political Security Protection Bureau, or 1st Bureau – a secret unit of China’s Ministry of Public Security – he’d been involved in missions to surveil, abduct and silence targets around the world since 2008, including in Australia.
This mission, though – to quit – would be his most dangerous.
Eric
After landing on Australian soil last year, he walked into ASIO headquarters in Canberra and revealed who he was.
Now, the 39-year-old is divulging the secrets he’s been guarding for years, at great risk to himself, to expose what he says is one of the most feared parts of China’s intelligence apparatus.
“It is the darkest department of the Chinese government,” he says.
“The bureau – they’re a bit like the KGB, the Stasi and the Gestapo.”
Passport
After arriving in Australia, Eric contacted the ABC and began to explain his predicament.
His story sounded unbelievable, but he seemed determined.
“The Communist Party shaped me into an enemy who is committed to the fight against it,” he says in one message.
Eric shared hundreds of secret documents, text and voice messages, and bank records that he’d gathered over the years, and after weeks of complex negotiations, he agreed to an interview.
It is the first time anyone from the secret police has spoken publicly.
Sitting in an empty warehouse with a Simpsons T-shirt just visible under his green jacket, Eric is nervous, but he says:
“I believe the public has the right to know this secret world.”
The recruitment
Eric says he was always going to end up turning his back on China.As a 22-year-old university student obsessed with Western democracy, he says he joined the US-founded China Social Democratic Party in 2007.
He was unaware he was under police surveillance.
Eric as a student
After sharing information about the party’s annual meeting on social media, police came knocking at his door.
“They told me, ‘Get dressed and follow us. You know what you’ve done’,” he says.
Eric was taken from his home, interrogated over several days in a small room inside a local police station, and forced to sign a document confessing to his ‘crime’ of opposing the Chinese government.
Threatened with jail time, he was offered a second chance.
Eric
That was the moment Eric’s world as he knew it ended, and his double life as a reluctant spy for China’s covert system of repression began.
For 15 years, Eric would be assigned to a series of secret police handlers who directed him to infiltrate pro-democracy organisations and hunt down dissidents that were now Chinese government targets.
As a dissident himself, Eric had the perfect cover story. In 2016 he was invited to a gathering of activists in India’s Dharamshala, home of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
There, he met with the Dalai Lama.
Dalai Lama
Eric filed a report to his handler detailing the exiled government’s confidential future China policy. It was well received.
The secret police now trusted him to work internationally and he was rewarded with higher stakes missions to help ensnare high-profile opponents living abroad.
One of them was right here in Australia.
The YouTuber
In 2018, Eric was ordered to hunt down Edwin Yin, a YouTuber who has been deeply critical of Chinese President Xi Jinping.Edwin wrote a book alleging Xi has four illegitimate sons and also published a video ridiculing Xi’s daughter.
He fled China for Australia in 2018.
Eric
Eric was tasked with tracking Edwin Yin. Four Corners
Edwin Yin
Edwin lives in Australia. Four Corners: Keana Naughton
Eric’s handlers communicated with him via encrypted social messaging apps including Potato Chat and Ant Messenger.
Four Corners is not naming Eric’s handlers to protect his safety.
Handler
[Edwin] Yin … born in 1982, from Shengzhou, Zhejiang … He fled to Thailand, Singapore and other places, and is now in Australia.
Use Twitter or other channels to get closer to him.
Lure him to South-East Asia.
Eric
Okay, Brother.
When Four Corners met with Edwin to share what it had found, he was living in a campervan, moving from place to place.
Edwin Yin
He already suspected he had been under surveillance by the Chinese state and didn’t feel safe.
“In front of our home, there were different cars, different Chinese faces,” he says.
Edwin tells Four Corners about the extraordinary lengths he believes the Chinese intelligence services have been going to in order to ensnare him.
In 2021, he suffered a broken nose after being assaulted in a Melbourne street by two men he suspects were Chinese agents. A third man who was with them filmed the attack.
Edwin Yin
The year before, his then partner Michelle, an Australian citizen, travelled to China after being told her father was gravely ill.
When she arrived, she realised her parents had been told to lie, and she was forced to meet with intelligence officers who questioned her about Edwin.
“Where he lives, what did he do … his financial information, what kind of people he met,” she says.
Michelle doesn’t want to be identified.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/103841408
When she travelled to China she was pregnant and says the officers started pressuring her to abort the baby. She believes they thought it would give Edwin a pathway to Australian citizenship.
While Edwin claims he is a dissident on the run, China says it is tracking him down because he is a criminal. He was charged with fraud in China and Four Corners has spoken to a man who says he is one of his victims.
But Edwin says he’s being framed by the Chinese government.
The Australian Federal Police is aware of Edwin’s case.
Eric says he began collecting intelligence on Edwin but didn’t pursue him further. He told his handler he felt Edwin was “too cunning” and was unlikely to travel overseas.
He says Edwin’s case shows the growth of the Chinese Communist Party’s global reach.
“So, their overseas operations have become relatively more active.”
Following Eric’s revelations, Four Corners learned of an AFP raid in Sydney last year that disrupted a Chinese intelligence agency undertaking surveillance on people.
Edwin’s name was one of the names listed on the AFP search warrant as a victim of the spying operation.
The cartoonist
Before Eric was tasked with spying on Edwin, he worked for the Chinese police in operations across South-East Asia.In 2016, he was based in Cambodia and ordered to target political cartoonist Wang Liming, also known as Rebel Pepper.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/103836334
Rebel Pepper’s satirical drawings take aim at China’s human rights record and its political elite, including President Xi Jinping.
His work variously depicts Xi as a dumpling, a tyrant, and Winnie the Pooh – and the Chinese Communist Party as a tentacled monster.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/103836322
Eric was given an apartment in Phnom Penh and a cover story, working as a planning supervisor for the Prince Real Estate Group.
The company is a subsidiary of multi-billion-dollar conglomerate the Prince Holding Group, which has connections to Cambodia’s leadership.
Cambodia and Laos have close ties with the Chinese government and there have been allegations in the past that it can operate freely in both countries.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/103841442
At the time, Rebel Pepper was living in Japan, so Eric was ordered to lure him to Cambodia where he could be arrested by and returned to China to face trial.
