Beijing accuses the United Kingdom of recruiting a couple of Chinese officials as spies

According to Chinese authorities, Wang, who worked for the Chinese government, was first contacted by British intelligence in 2015, while he was studying in the United Kingdom. There, Beijing maintains, MI6 began paying him for tutoring and tours for understand “your personality, weaknesses, interests and demands”. Once the analysis of Wang’s character was completed, he was offered well-paid jobs in consultancies related to central state agencies. Some time after accepting the job, they introduced themselves as the Intelligence Service and convinced him to return to China with the aim of gather information.

According to the Chinese agency, MI6 ordered Wang to convince Zhou to help him. The complaint by the MSE comes three weeks after Rishi Sunak’s Government accused three individuals from Hong Kong of being spies.

The Ministry of State Security (MSE) was founded in 1983, but has transformed over the years. In the beginning he worked under the premise of a secret agency. Today, it is part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s action plan to respond to the rising geopolitical tensions that endanger Chinese national security. The MSE directs and participates in counterintelligence operations, foreign espionage and cyberespionage. In August 2023, debuted on social networks with an official account on WeChat so that “all members of society” can join the fight against foreign infiltration, as clarified by the cnn.

The MSE has ‘reinvented’ itself by carrying out propaganda campaigns in which they educate the population, creating a culture of catching foreign spies in exchange for monetary rewards for whistleblowing. On April 15, China’s designated day for ‘national security education,’ the agency released a video telling citizens that “foreign spies are everywhere,” reports the cnn. They claim that they are “cunning and deceitful” and that spies could be part of their lives and they would not realize it.

The paranoia of spies within the country has transcended generations, so the influencers have been encouraged to create and post videos teaching their followers how to identify a spy, on the Douyin social network, which is the Chinese version of Tik Tok. The article of the cnn It says that in the comment sections, users contribute by sharing their experiences of reporting or encountering those who are believed to be spies.

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A constant threat

In September 2023, Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, accused Chinese Prime Minister Li Qiang, at the G20 summit in India, of interfere with British democracyan action that he described as “unacceptable”. Once the conference concluded, Sunak shared with the audience that he was going to expose the Chinese spy network in Westminster (the palace where parliament meets). Consequently, a parliamentary investigator was arrested on suspicion of spying under Chinese orders. As a result of the event, the ‘National Security Law’ was updated specifying that the “threat is constantly evolving” and the United Kingdom “has to be a step ahead.”

The document reports that ‘espionage’ is addressed with three crimes: obtaining or disclosing protected information; obtaining or disclosing trade secrets; and aid to a foreign intelligence service. The law also updates and introduces crimes related to sabotage, foreign interference and influences, financial assets, so-called ‘prohibited’ places and investigative powers, among others. It stipulates that the ‘Official Secrets Act’, established in 1989, remains intact and under this law it constitutes a crime “for officials of the Crown or suppliers of the British government disclose information without authorization, to international relations“, among others.

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