The Official Chinese 🇨🇳 Espionage & Cold War Thread
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Ukraine crisis tests Xi Jinping’s pivot to Vladimir Putin
Edward White in Seoul, Nastassia Astrasheuskaya in Moscow and Kathrin Hille in Taipei yesterday
7-8 minutes
Russia’s threats to invade Ukraine are forcing China to strike a balance between President Xi Jinping’s growing support for Vladimir Putin and Beijing’s self-interest in the region’s stability, according to analysts.
The crisis, sparked by Putin’s decision to concentrate 190,000 Russian troops near the Ukraine border, remains volatile. Putin and Joe Biden have accepted “the principle” of a summit to ease tensions over Ukraine following warnings from the US president that Russia could invade within “several days”.
China joined Russia this month in opposing Nato expansion, highlighting a new level of co-operation between Xi and Putin.
But Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, told a European security conference on Saturday that “the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of any country should be respected”.
“We hope that a solution can be found through dialogue and consultation that will really guarantee security and stability in Europe,” he added.
His remarks reflected a change from late January, when he offered support for Russia in its stand-off with the US and Nato over Ukraine, saying Moscow had “reasonable security concerns”.
Wang’s tone departed, too, from his own ministry, which has lambasted Biden for stoking tensions.
Vladimir Putin, left, and Xi Jinping in Beijing this month. China has joined Russia in opposing Nato expansion © Aleksey Druzhinin/Sputnik/Kremlin/Reuters
Beijing, according to one senior international relations academic at a top Chinese university, must “strike a balance” in supporting Moscow while also not damaging its own military and economic ties with Ukraine.
“There is a common misunderstanding among western media — and even some western officials — that China supports a Russian invasion of Ukraine. That is fictitious,” said the academic, who asked not to be named. “Any military conflict, especially large-scale war, will undoubtedly hurt China’s interests there.”
Wang’s attempt to appear neutral, however, will be tested if the west imposes financial sanctions on Russia.
“China’s decision either to adhere to new western sanctions or to help Russia avoid them will shape escalation pathways and determine the magnitude of economic and political isolation that sanctions impose,” Chris Miller, director of the Eurasia programme at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a US think-tank, wrote in a report.
Analysts said China would seek to separate pushback against the US and Nato, on which it openly supports Russia, from its reservations about a potential violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty.
“China’s and Russia’s support for each other is strongest when they are challenging US supremacy because that’s where their interests are most aligned. When it comes to territorial claims, both have been displaying a rather ambivalent stance towards each other’s behaviour,” said Alexander Korolev, an expert on the Russia-China security relationship at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
China’s interests in Ukraine include billions of dollars in construction contracts as well as telecommunication investments via Huawei and its purchase of Ukrainian military equipment.
Beijing has urged Kyiv and Moscow to revive the stalled Minsk agreement as a path to peace while insisting on adhering to its own policy of non-interference.
Experts diverged over whether Beijing, which has been increasingly inward-focused since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, would seek a higher profile diplomatic role in defusing the tensions, or would stand by as Putin edged closer towards an armed conflict.
The possibility that Russia would launch a full invasion of Ukraine has also presented China with a “gift” to increase its leverage over Moscow, strengthen its energy security, test the west’s sanctions regime and take advantage of a splintering Europe, said resource and geopolitical analysts.
“Russia does not give access to its resources very easily, [but] here China has leverage to say ‘we want to own this’, rather than to simply finance or pay for it,” said Gavin Thompson, an Asia energy expert at consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis could also deepen Moscow’s dependence on Beijing, while their success or failure would be instructive to Xi for future conflicts with the US, experts said.
“If they succeed in imposing severe costs on Russia, western sanctions threats against China — which could be used in case of a crisis in Asia — would be more credible,” said Miller. “[But] if China helped Russia mitigate the impact of these sanctions, the US would lose an important tool and its ability to constrain China using economic means would be reduced.”
When Xi and Putin met in Beijing earlier this month, the leaders also agreed to increase Russian gas supplies to China.
Thompson believed that the US might find it “very difficult” to target resources shipped directly from Russia to China.
“I think they feel quite bulletproof when it comes to those deals,” Thompson said of Russia’s energy arrangements with its neighbour. “If you can’t touch it and the pricing and the payment structures are mostly outside the standard global banking system, outside of the US dollar system, you can’t really do very much about it.”
There is little transparency over the arrangement’s terms, but experts believe Sino-Russian energy deals have previously entailed Chinese loans and credit facilities. Typically, China lends in renminbi, which Russia then uses to purchase Chinese goods and services.
“[China has] the opportunity to do great deals . . . I think that is the opportunity to push hard on equity ownership of resources,” Thompson said.
Cao Xin, secretary-general of the International Public Opinion Research Center of the Charhar Institute, a Beijing think-tank, said he believed a Russian invasion remained “highly unlikely” but that Moscow appeared to be exploiting fissures between the US and Europe’s big powers to sow divisions in Nato.
Korolev said conflicting interests in their immediate neighbourhoods had not undermined the partnership between Beijing and Moscow, as the countries had pragmatically navigated related crises such as Russia’s armed intervention in Georgia in 2008 and its aggression in Ukraine in 2014.
“China avoided openly voicing support of Russian actions, but they did not directly oppose or criticise Russia either,” he said.
Additional reporting by Maiqi Ding in Beijing
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/16/chinese-spying-arrests-new-york/
Five people charged with acting as Chinese government agents to spy on and harass U.S. residents critical of Beijing
U.S. Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew G. Olsen announces the end of a program focused on fighting Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft, during a speech at George Mason University in Arlington, Va., on Feb. 23. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have charged five people with acting on behalf of the Chinese secret police to stalk, spy on and harass U.S. residents critical of Beijing, officials announced Wednesday.
The defendants were charged in three separate cases brought by the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York as part of the Justice Department’s new strategy to counter nation-state threats.
A major focus of the strategy is fighting transnational repression by authoritarian governments. Its launch last month coincided with the shutting down of a program known as the China Initiative, following controversy fueled by what officials said was a misperception that the department was targeting ethnic Chinese for prosecution. Justice Department officials stressed that prosecutors remained committed to cracking down on crimes such as espionage and cyberattacks, especially those directed by or benefiting foreign governments.
The five defendants are accused of aiding the Chinese government’s efforts to harass, stalk and surveil Chinese nationals living in Queens and elsewhere in the United States. In one case, a defendant allegedly tried to derail the candidacy of a U.S. military veteran running for Congress who had been a student leader at the 1989 pro-democracy demonstration in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. That demonstration was brutally crushed by the Chinese government.
Opinions from 2019: In Tiananmen Square, a massacre erased
In another case, the defendants are accused of crimes including planning to destroy the artwork of a Chinese national living in Los Angeles who has criticized the Chinese government. In a third case, a former Chinese scholar who helped start a pro-democracy organization in Queens is charged with using his position within New York City’s Chinese community to collect information about prominent activists, dissidents and human rights leaders and provide it to the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), a civilian intelligence and secret police agency responsible for political security.
“Transnational repression harms people in the United States and around the world and threatens the rule of law itself,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew G. Olsen. The department, he said, “will not allow any foreign government” to threaten the safety or impede the freedom of speech of Americans and people who come to live, work and study in the United States.
The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Breon Peace, said the complaints unsealed Wednesday “reveal the outrageous and dangerous lengths” to which the Chinese secret police have gone to “silence, harass, discredit and spy on U.S. residents for simply exercising their freedom of speech.”
All the victims, he said, were targeted “because of their pro-democracy views.”
Three defendants were arrested and were scheduled to appear in court in Brooklyn on Wednesday. The other two remain at large. The Chinese Embassy did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Chinese prosecutor indicted in U.S. 'Fox Hunt' case involving alleged Chinese agents harassing dissidents in the U.S.
Qiming Lin, who is at large, is a Chinese citizen living in China who allegedly works for the MSS.
Beginning last September, Lin is alleged to have hired a private investigator in New York to disrupt the campaign of a Brooklyn resident running for Congress, including by physically attacking the victim. According to public records and open-source information, the candidate was Yan Xiong, who came to the United States as a political refugee several years after the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, then served in the U.S. military and became a naturalized American.
Lin allegedly explained to the private investigator, who had been an informant for the FBI on prior occasions, that he was working with others in China to prevent Yan from being elected, according to the Justice Department. Prosecutors allege that the investigator helped Lin obtain Yan’s address and phone number and asked the investigator to dig up “derogatory information” about him such as evidence of an affair or of stealing funds.
If no such information could be found, Lin wanted the investigator to “manufacture something,” prosecutors alleged, adding that Lin gave as an example an incident last fall in Beijing in which a prominent concert pianist was detained after allegedly being found in the company of a prostitute. Lin encouraged the investigator to “go find a girl. … Or see how he goes for prostitution, take some photos, something of that nature,” prosecutors alleged.
In December, Lin proposed that the investigator attack Yan to prevent him from competing in the June Democratic primary. In a voice message to the investigator, prosecutors alleged, Lin said: “Beat him, beat him until he cannot run for election. Heh, that’s the … last resort. … Car accident, [he] will be completely wrecked, right? … Or on the day of the election, he cannot make it there himself, right?”
Justice Dept. shutters China Initiative, launches new effort to counter nation-state threats
In the second case, Fan “Frank” Liu, Matthew Ziburis and Qiang “Jason” Sun are charged with conspiring to act as agents of the Chinese government and with seeking to harass. Liu and Sun are charged with conspiring to bribe a federal official to obtain the tax returns of a pro-democracy activist in the United States.
According to the complaint, Liu, a Long Island resident, is president of a purported New York City media company, and Ziburis, also of Long Island, is a former correctional officer for the state of Florida and a body guard. Sun allegedly is a China-based employee of a global technology firm.
Prosecutors allege that Liu and Ziburis operated at Sun’s direction to discredit pro-democracy Chinese dissidents living in the United States, including in New York City, California and Indiana, by spying on them and spreading potentially embarrassing information about them. For instance, Liu allegedly paid a private investigator in Queens to bribe an IRS employee to obtain the tax returns of one dissident with the ostensible aim of publicly disclosing the dissident’s potential tax liabilities.
The defendants also allegedly plotted to destroy the artwork of a dissident whose work is critical of the Chinese government. The artist, whose name is not included in the charging documents, had created a sculpture of President Xi Jinping depicted as a coronavirus molecule. The sculpture was “demolished” last year, Peace said, and no one has been charged in that act of vandalism.
Who are the Uyghurs? Chinese crackdown explained.
Posing as an art dealer, Ziburis allegedly covertly planted GPS monitoring devices at the artist’s home and on his car, enabling Sun to monitor the live feeds from China, prosecutors said. The defendants also made plans to install surveillance equipment at the homes and on the cars of two other dissidents, officials said.
In the third case, Shujun Wang of Queens is charged with acting as an agent of the Chinese government and lying about his participation in a transnational repression scheme orchestrated by the MSS. Wang, a former visiting scholar and author, helped found an organization that memorializes two former leaders of the Chinese Communist Party who promoted political and economic reforms and were forced from power.
Since at least 2015, however, Wang has secretly operated at the direction of the MSS, prosecutors allege. Given his stature within the Chinese American community in New York City, he was able to induce activists to confide in him, including sharing their views on democracy in China, as well as planned speeches, writings and demonstrations against the party.
The victims of his efforts included groups that Beijing considers subversive, prosecutors alleged, including Hong Kong pro-democracy activists, advocates of Taiwan independence, and Uyghur and Tibetan activists in the United States and abroad.
In April 2020, one victim about whom Wang allegedly reported information to the Chinese government, a Hong Kong democracy activist, was arrested in Hong Kong and jailed on political charges, prosecutors said. In April 2019, Wang allegedly flew from China to New York carrying a handwritten document with the names and contact information of dozens of other well-known dissidents, including Hong Kong democracy activists who were subsequently arrested in 2019 and 2020.
U.S. Magistrate Judge James Cho set bond at $1 million for Liu, a U.S. citizen who has lived in the United States for nearly four decades. Cho set a $500,000 bond for Ziburis and a $300,000 bond for Wang.
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
Five people charged with acting as Chinese government agents to spy on and harass U.S. residents critical of Beijing
U.S. Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew G. Olsen announces the end of a program focused on fighting Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft, during a speech at George Mason University in Arlington, Va., on Feb. 23. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have charged five people with acting on behalf of the Chinese secret police to stalk, spy on and harass U.S. residents critical of Beijing, officials announced Wednesday.
The defendants were charged in three separate cases brought by the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York as part of the Justice Department’s new strategy to counter nation-state threats.
A major focus of the strategy is fighting transnational repression by authoritarian governments. Its launch last month coincided with the shutting down of a program known as the China Initiative, following controversy fueled by what officials said was a misperception that the department was targeting ethnic Chinese for prosecution. Justice Department officials stressed that prosecutors remained committed to cracking down on crimes such as espionage and cyberattacks, especially those directed by or benefiting foreign governments.
The five defendants are accused of aiding the Chinese government’s efforts to harass, stalk and surveil Chinese nationals living in Queens and elsewhere in the United States. In one case, a defendant allegedly tried to derail the candidacy of a U.S. military veteran running for Congress who had been a student leader at the 1989 pro-democracy demonstration in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. That demonstration was brutally crushed by the Chinese government.
Opinions from 2019: In Tiananmen Square, a massacre erased
In another case, the defendants are accused of crimes including planning to destroy the artwork of a Chinese national living in Los Angeles who has criticized the Chinese government. In a third case, a former Chinese scholar who helped start a pro-democracy organization in Queens is charged with using his position within New York City’s Chinese community to collect information about prominent activists, dissidents and human rights leaders and provide it to the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), a civilian intelligence and secret police agency responsible for political security.
“Transnational repression harms people in the United States and around the world and threatens the rule of law itself,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew G. Olsen. The department, he said, “will not allow any foreign government” to threaten the safety or impede the freedom of speech of Americans and people who come to live, work and study in the United States.
The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Breon Peace, said the complaints unsealed Wednesday “reveal the outrageous and dangerous lengths” to which the Chinese secret police have gone to “silence, harass, discredit and spy on U.S. residents for simply exercising their freedom of speech.”
All the victims, he said, were targeted “because of their pro-democracy views.”
Three defendants were arrested and were scheduled to appear in court in Brooklyn on Wednesday. The other two remain at large. The Chinese Embassy did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Chinese prosecutor indicted in U.S. 'Fox Hunt' case involving alleged Chinese agents harassing dissidents in the U.S.
Qiming Lin, who is at large, is a Chinese citizen living in China who allegedly works for the MSS.
Beginning last September, Lin is alleged to have hired a private investigator in New York to disrupt the campaign of a Brooklyn resident running for Congress, including by physically attacking the victim. According to public records and open-source information, the candidate was Yan Xiong, who came to the United States as a political refugee several years after the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, then served in the U.S. military and became a naturalized American.
Lin allegedly explained to the private investigator, who had been an informant for the FBI on prior occasions, that he was working with others in China to prevent Yan from being elected, according to the Justice Department. Prosecutors allege that the investigator helped Lin obtain Yan’s address and phone number and asked the investigator to dig up “derogatory information” about him such as evidence of an affair or of stealing funds.
If no such information could be found, Lin wanted the investigator to “manufacture something,” prosecutors alleged, adding that Lin gave as an example an incident last fall in Beijing in which a prominent concert pianist was detained after allegedly being found in the company of a prostitute. Lin encouraged the investigator to “go find a girl. … Or see how he goes for prostitution, take some photos, something of that nature,” prosecutors alleged.
In December, Lin proposed that the investigator attack Yan to prevent him from competing in the June Democratic primary. In a voice message to the investigator, prosecutors alleged, Lin said: “Beat him, beat him until he cannot run for election. Heh, that’s the … last resort. … Car accident, [he] will be completely wrecked, right? … Or on the day of the election, he cannot make it there himself, right?”
Justice Dept. shutters China Initiative, launches new effort to counter nation-state threats
In the second case, Fan “Frank” Liu, Matthew Ziburis and Qiang “Jason” Sun are charged with conspiring to act as agents of the Chinese government and with seeking to harass. Liu and Sun are charged with conspiring to bribe a federal official to obtain the tax returns of a pro-democracy activist in the United States.
According to the complaint, Liu, a Long Island resident, is president of a purported New York City media company, and Ziburis, also of Long Island, is a former correctional officer for the state of Florida and a body guard. Sun allegedly is a China-based employee of a global technology firm.
Prosecutors allege that Liu and Ziburis operated at Sun’s direction to discredit pro-democracy Chinese dissidents living in the United States, including in New York City, California and Indiana, by spying on them and spreading potentially embarrassing information about them. For instance, Liu allegedly paid a private investigator in Queens to bribe an IRS employee to obtain the tax returns of one dissident with the ostensible aim of publicly disclosing the dissident’s potential tax liabilities.
The defendants also allegedly plotted to destroy the artwork of a dissident whose work is critical of the Chinese government. The artist, whose name is not included in the charging documents, had created a sculpture of President Xi Jinping depicted as a coronavirus molecule. The sculpture was “demolished” last year, Peace said, and no one has been charged in that act of vandalism.
Who are the Uyghurs? Chinese crackdown explained.
Posing as an art dealer, Ziburis allegedly covertly planted GPS monitoring devices at the artist’s home and on his car, enabling Sun to monitor the live feeds from China, prosecutors said. The defendants also made plans to install surveillance equipment at the homes and on the cars of two other dissidents, officials said.
In the third case, Shujun Wang of Queens is charged with acting as an agent of the Chinese government and lying about his participation in a transnational repression scheme orchestrated by the MSS. Wang, a former visiting scholar and author, helped found an organization that memorializes two former leaders of the Chinese Communist Party who promoted political and economic reforms and were forced from power.
Since at least 2015, however, Wang has secretly operated at the direction of the MSS, prosecutors allege. Given his stature within the Chinese American community in New York City, he was able to induce activists to confide in him, including sharing their views on democracy in China, as well as planned speeches, writings and demonstrations against the party.
The victims of his efforts included groups that Beijing considers subversive, prosecutors alleged, including Hong Kong pro-democracy activists, advocates of Taiwan independence, and Uyghur and Tibetan activists in the United States and abroad.
In April 2020, one victim about whom Wang allegedly reported information to the Chinese government, a Hong Kong democracy activist, was arrested in Hong Kong and jailed on political charges, prosecutors said. In April 2019, Wang allegedly flew from China to New York carrying a handwritten document with the names and contact information of dozens of other well-known dissidents, including Hong Kong democracy activists who were subsequently arrested in 2019 and 2020.
U.S. Magistrate Judge James Cho set bond at $1 million for Liu, a U.S. citizen who has lived in the United States for nearly four decades. Cho set a $500,000 bond for Ziburis and a $300,000 bond for Wang.
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
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