CIA Launches Chinese Social Media Campaign Urging Officials to Leak Secrets

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has launched a social media campaign to persuade Chinese officials to turn against their authoritarian regime and leak secret information to the United States.

The CIA’s first video was offered with the caption, “Reasons for cooperation: creating a better future.”

Another reason for cooperation depicted in the videos is the looming possibility that any given Chinese official could be ruthlessly purged by the Communist Party at any moment. A man who “diligently worked his way to the top throughout his life” suddenly discovers that his high status is “insufficient to protect his family in these turbulent and unsettling times,” as the CIA video’s YouTube description puts it.

“My purpose remains the same. Only my path has changed. No matter what my fate may bring, my family will know a good life,” the character in the video mused.

The CIA did not really need to fictionalize that scenario, since China’s highest-ranking uniformed military officer just vanished into thin air.

“The party raised us to believe that our dedication to the path they lead us on would bring prosperity to us all. But the gains of our collective efforts are indulged by a select few. So, I must forge my own path,” another fictionalized Chinese official said in videos, before pulling out his cell phone and giving the CIA a call.

The UK Guardian said the CIA videos are pitched at the two great anxieties of lower- and middle-level Chinese government officials: “getting stuck in a lowly job assisting an increasingly wealthy corrupt official, or becoming victim to the endless purges that have targeted millions of party members at all levels since Xi Jinping came to power.”

The CIA also played to the rising anxiety among Xi’s subjects that their export-based economy was seriously wounded by the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic and could be finished off by President Donald Trump’s tariffs. As the narrator in one of the videos puts it: “Our leaders’ failure to fulfil repeated promises of prosperity has become a well-known secret.”

The outreach to potential Chinese sources is part of CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s goal of developing more human intelligence within the paranoid People’s Republic of China.

“No adversary in the history of our nation has presented a more formidable challenge or a more capable strategic competitor than the Chinese Communist Party. It is intent on dominating the world economically, militarily, and technologically, and it is aggressively trying to outcompete America in every corner of the globe,” Ratcliffe told CIA officers in April.

American media organizations would rather not dwell on it, but U.S. intelligence networks in China were absolutely devastated during the Obama administration. Chinese state security killed at least a dozen CIA sources between 2010 and 2012, shooting one of them right in front of his colleagues to send a message about disloyalty.

U.S. intelligence in China suffered another devastating blow during another of Obama’s debacles, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) hack in 2015.

President Barack Obama, his top officials, and his media worked furiously to cover up the full extent of the damage from the hack of U.S. personnel records, but it was nothing short of cataclysmic and it clearly helped China identify American assets. The CIA was forced to pull agents out of China because the OPM hack exposed personal information about numerous State Department employees, making it easy for the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) to build a database of possible intelligence agents working for U.S. diplomatic facilities.

The Biden administration caused a diplomatic spat when its CIA director, William Burns, claimed in late 2023 that he was making “progress” toward rebuilding a “strong human intelligence capability” in China.

The Chinese government denounced Burns’ unusually blunt remarks and then set about scrubbing the vast Beijing bureaucracy to find the agents and operatives Burns claimed he was recruiting.

There is little evidence that the Biden administration actually did much to rebuild human intelligence networks in China, since it had a clear public preference for cyber intelligence operations. Ratcliffe seemed unimpressed by the Biden team’s accomplishments when he took over the CIA for the second Trump administration.

“I think our collection against China is a hard target. In the prior administration, it was lacking in several areas. I would say primarily in human collection and also with regard to the processing of open source information relating to China,” Ratcliffe told the House Intelligence Committee in March.

CIA officials said they have good reason to believe their social media campaign, which extends to platforms that can be more easily accessed in China than X, will be effective. Posting their videos on X is not a waste of time – the platform is officially banned in China, but many middle- and upper-level officials are allowed to use it for propaganda purposes.

A similar CIA social media campaign to recruit Russian informants over the past two years was successful enough to enrage the Kremlin and prompt the Russian equivalent of the CIA, the SVR, to counter with its own recruiting videos.

The CIA produced a YouTube video last year that gave instructions in Mandarin for getting in touch with the agency over the dark web. The video accumulated over 900,000 views, encouraging the CIA to create the recruiting campaign rolled out this week.

“If it weren’t working, we wouldn’t be making more videos,” a CIA official told Reuters on Thursday.

There is actually one other reason to make the videos: because they drive dictator Xi Jinping crazy. Anxious leaders make mistakes and turn against subordinates they cannot truly afford to lose. Xi has never been reluctant to toss his underlings in jail, as the CIA videos point out.

Dissident Chinese property tycoon Desmond Shum said the CIA’s new campaign was the most “aggressive public move” against China he could remember, and the boldness of the campaign could make Xi nervous.

“This kind of public outreach is exactly the sort of provocation that enrages the CCP — and Xi Jinping personally. His obsession with lifelong rule stems from a singular goal: to secure the Party’s unshakable control over China,” Shum told Al Jazeera News on Friday.