181212_ China’s spies are taking Britain for a ride

Source : China’s spies are taking Britain for a ride

흥미로운 기사. 심지어 저 모든 게 사실이려니 생각하면 정말 무서운 중국.

중국어를 배우고 싶고, 중국 드라마를 즐겨 보지만 어쩌면...나도 이 중국의 거대한 중화사상 세뇌에 일부 먹혀 들어간 건지도.

예전 주말 학원다닐 때 중국어 가르치는 강사님이 자기가 중국에서 유학을 하고 중국어 전공이긴 하지만 해외 어디를 가던 중국 사람은

영어로 안 물어보고 자국어인 중국어로 먼저 던지고 보는게 제일 싫다고 했던 기억이 떠오른다.

자기네 나라 말이 짱이라는 거겠지 뭐. 무조건 니네 중심으로... 그러면 저런 스파이 짓거리도 가능한 일이야...암요.

The arrest of a Red Princess has sent relations between China and the America into a tailspin. Meng Wanzhou, daughter of the founder of the Chinese telecoms group Huawei and granddaughter of a Communist Party bigwig, is being held in Canada pending extradition to the United States. That’s more than a slap in the face for China’s leaders. The nominally frozen feud over trade between Beijing and Washington is turning into an open contest of wills between a rising insurgent state and the established superpower. No wonder markets are rattled and that generals are adjusting their chinstraps.

Formally, Meng is being investigated, as chief financial officer of Huawei, for alleged involvement in a sanctions-busting attempt to sell US-made equipment to Iran. The deeper reasoning, though, is that western spy chiefs reckon Huawei’s plans to become a market leader in fifth generation (5G) telecoms will hand over the world’s secrets to China and give it the edge over geopolitical rivals.

5G is a breakthrough technology that will help create the so-called internet of things, whereby your phone has its own conversation with your fridge, car and bank, and opens the way for limitless surveillance. In recent weeks, chiefs of the Five Eyes intelligence services — the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — have sounded the alarm. Alex Younger, head of MI6, suggests that Britain needs to decide whether it’s comfortable with Chinese control of these new technologies. Clearly, Huawei is in his sights.

The role of Chinese tech companies as the handmaidens of the state and government-sponsored hacking operations has given the Chinese army a prime role. Indeed Meng’s father, Ren Zhengfei, was in an army IT unit before going on to found Huawei. But there has been a gear shift over the past few years: many more human agents now act as recruiters and influence-peddlers.

The incredible reach of the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has been overlooked in the West; no match, it seems, for Russian assassins. The Chinese never got their due in popular culture. In the 1997 Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies Pierce Brosnan teams up with a beautiful MSS agent to head off an evil plan to stoke a war between Britain and China.

But the MSS has become a real menace. The realisation that even increasingly sophisticated cyberoperations could not satisfy the party’s hunger for western intellectual property led to better training of overseas agents. Journalists and diplomats, only thinly under cover, spread out across the US, Japan and Europe looking to recruit scientists and place moles in the political establishment.

In 2007, the MSS got a new boss, Geng Huichang, its first foreign affairs specialist: the MSS started to look outwards. First, it upped its counter-intelligence work and between 2010 and 2012 succeeded in bagging about 20 CIA sources in China, a dozen of whom were executed. One was shot in the courtyard of a government building. A nervous CIA started to look for a mole and dubbed its investigation “Honey Badger”.

The MSS, having secured itself at home, then went on the offensive. Its cyberteams hacked into the files of the Office of Personnel Management in 2014-15, yielding a treasure trove of personal details about US government workers that could make them targets for blackmail and recruitment. At the same time agents in the field went on a hiring spree: one FBI officer traded sensitive tech information for cash, holidays and prostitutes.

An American student was encouraged to enter an essay contest on US-China relations and then groomed to apply for a position in the US national security establishment. Fortunately he twice failed his State Department entry exams and was rumbled when he applied to join the CIA. The German counter-intelligence service has been picking up on similar cases. Chinese agents have been using fake social media profiles to contact German members of parliament. They are offered money in return for writing apparently harmless reports. They are invited on information trips to China where their phones and laptops are bugged. If they fail to declare the cash to the taxman, they become blackmailable. At least one German MP and a special adviser have fallen into the trap.

China’s mix of electronic and human spookery was revealed when Huawei built the IT system for the new African Union HQ. A flow of data was sent to Shanghai between midnight and 2am every day. And the number of agents on the ground in Ethiopia doubled.

Britain imagines itself less gullible but it has made Huawei as big as it is today. By working with BT, Huawei gained the seal of approval it needed to expand quickly across Europe. If a Chinese reactor is built at Bradwell-on-Sea, Beijing will use it as a calling card to sell reactors across the EU. It is one thing for China to buy a stake in Wentworth golf club, quite another to give its security services a backdoor into critical infrastructure at a time when Beijing is sizing up for the mother of all scraps with the West.

It is time for joined-up thinking on China. When the head of MI6 goes public on China, you know something’s up, but it’s not just the job of the spooks to be wary. Universities should think more carefully about linking up with Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes, parliamentarians should turn down offers of paid-up jollies in China, bids for strategically sensitive businesses should be forensically examined, and we all need to pause for a minute before buying the very cheapest smartphone.