Off the coast of the southern Chinese island of Hainan stands a 350-foot-tall statue of the Bodhisattva Guanyin. Facing the sea, Guanyin gazes serenely out upon the contested waters of the South China Sea. In her hand she holds a string of pearls, traditional iconography for the deity symbolizing mercy. The Guanyin of Nanshan is the crown jewel of a temple complex that attracts influential Buddhist leaders from across the region each year. Over one hundred monks from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau attended the official unveiling ceremony in 2005, as did the King of Nepal.
The catch? The Shanghai State Security Bureau (SSSB), a bureau of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Ministry of State Security (MSS), erected the Bodhisattva and her temples. Dreamt up by a former military missile guidance engineer in the 1990s, she is the visual anchor of a decades-long influence operation involving the preaching of pro-Beijing Buddhism across the region, an extensive network of temple informants, and tens of millions of dollars’ worth of tithes that flow back to the MSS each year. In the end, she has little to do with enlightenment and everything to do with influence.
Welcome to Spies and Lies by Alex Joske. Written in 2022, the book, the first of its kind, is a catalogue of some of the largest covert influence operations conducted by MSS operators since the 1980s. Famous Western businessmen, politicians, think tanks, and scholars pepper its pages as so many dupes strung along by a dizzying array of MSS intelligence officers appearing in one place as a liberal journalist under this name and in another as a cold-blooded communist official under that name. At its core, Spies and Lies makes a simple, if somewhat one-sided, argument: the MSS has conducted influence operations against the West for decades with great success. Interestingly, this is thanks in large part to well-meaning but often ignorant Western elites under whose very noses the operations were run.
What is the book’s application? While the Western national security community has become alert to the China threat in recent years, Spies and Lies illuminates the true scale and depth of planning that the CCP conducts in the information environment. Given the degraded status of information warfare capabilities in the United States, such an understanding is critical for effective policymaking. [1] Readers looking for a first take on the CCP information operations playbook, seasoned information-operations-oriented readers, and open-source analysts looking for concrete organizational leads to follow up on will all benefit from this book.
The author is a twenty-something Chinese Australian who spent six years growing up in Beijing as a teenager and is touted in the biography page as, “the youngest ever analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.” [2] Perhaps anticipating the eyebrows such a background might raise, especially considering the age factor, the book has endorsements from journalistic and political heavyweights. For instance, former Chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP Mike Gallagher makes the front cover, while veteran Australian reporters Clive Hamilton and Nick McKenzie feature on the back cover. In the references, dozens of “interviews with a former intelligence officer,” most of whom are American, anchor important claims; and known China hands like Peter Mattis recur frequently. Importantly, alongside English sources are dozens of Chinese language websites and documents. The author is well-placed to defend his claims and has even earned the standing to testify to Congress on these issues, which he did alongside Mattis and others in March 2023. [3]
Nevertheless, it bears noting that Joske does not interview many of the prominent Western individuals he accuses of aiding the MSS. Some are deceased, like Bob Hawke, but others, like globe-trotting billionaire Nicolas Berggruen, are not. Perhaps they did not respond to Joske’s requests, perhaps the proof is in the pudding — John Thornton, dubbed “the middleman” in Spies and Lies, has gone on to join the board of directors of the Chinese computer giant Lenovo since the book’s publication. [4-5] Either way, direct interviews with them do not appear in the book.
The central thrust of the book is the idea that the MSS conducts influence operations against the West and has been very successful. Factually, this breaks down into a novel organizational claim and then various case studies that make up the chapters of the book. Regarding the former component, Joske makes an important point. The majority of CCP influence operations occur through what the party terms ‘United Front Work,’ yet this is consistently carried out by the MSS and not the United Front Work Department.
Why does this matter? United Front Work, one of the CCP’s ‘three magic weapons,’ alongside struggle and party building, is the conceptual framework the party uses to rationalize the various alliances of convenience it must make to achieve its goals within and beyond China. In other words, United Front Work is how the party operationalizes non-party organizations, ethnic groups, intellectuals, and other intermediaries to achieve its ends. So, while the party does have a ‘United Front Work Department,’ the United Front Work is more aptly thought of as the description of a policy system or process; at every level of the CCP system – from provinicial, to municipal, to village, and to corporate – there is most likely a United Front Work Department operation alongside the standard party committee. Again, however, Joske intervenes with Spies and Lies to make the case that it is CCP intelligence officers actually operationalizing the various fronts of United Front Work, and that therefore making sense of CCP influence operations requires reckoning with the MSS itself. In other words, wherever there are points of contact between the CCP and broader domestic and international society, there are also likely MSS intelligence officers practicing their trade.
Joske underscores this point with an impressive accounting of both various United Front influence operations managed by MSS officers going back to the 1980s and the influential Westerners they duped along the way. MSS agents appear dutifully working for years in the offices of senators; local mayors are ensnared in honey pots with MSS double agents studying abroad; and globetrotting businessmen claim unique access to the inside baseball of CCP politics when, in reality, their undercover MSS handlers are giving them chicken feed. While the case studies are too numerous to recount here, the principal front organizations exposed as influence operations include the China Reform Forum, the China International Cultural Exchange Center (CICEC), and the Chinese Institute of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR, which the MSS knows as the 11th Bureau). In each case the MSS used these fronts as cover to influence Western elites and recruit and communicate with agents. Billionaire philanthropist George Soros, former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, employees of the RAND Corporation, and many other politicians, scholars, and businessmen appear as unwitting but enthusiastic participants in these operations.
In the end Joske finds that, above the rest, the MSS-concocted narrative of China’s peaceful rise is both the most damning indictment of Western post-Cold War naivety and the clearest example of CCP influence prowess. The peaceful rise narrative, first uttered by party veteran Zheng Bijian at an MSS front event attended happily by many influential DC insiders in 2003, became the framework that many Western policymakers used to justify bringing a bloodied and repressive Marxist-Leninist party into the center of global politics and economics. The MSS, Joske contends, was successful beyond its wildest dreams in this endeavor.
Naturally, in such contexts, the book tends to overstate the case. Yes, Joske can confidently prove that such-and-such think tanker was in fact this MSS officer so-and-so using a fake name, and that the MSS was actively pushing certain narratives and trying to get certain people to advocate certain things, which they did. But ascribing grandiose effects to certain information operations inevitably leaves out consideration of other more tectonic forces that shape the global balance of power. These factors – such as macroeconomic trends, the political interests of large societal groups, and the risk calculus of Western intelligence and national security agencies – are left entirely unexamined. In this regard, Spies and Lies ismore journalistic than academic.
Policymakers and scholars of various fields will nonetheless find Spies and Lies mandatory reading. Joske has provided a gold mine of leads for open-source research and has given a helpful framework within which to conduct such research. National security, political science, Asian studies, and intelligence scholars and policymakers will all benefit from reading this book, even if the lattermost group finds that Joske is a frequently imprecise user of the term ‘spy.’ Lastly, though the book has coincided with a wave of increased attention on CCP information operations, many of the organizations and individuals Joske lists are still active and innovating. [6] The threat from the agents of the dragon is not yet over.
Kevin Lentz ’24 was a member of the AHS chapter at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned an M.A. in Global Policy Studies and Asian Studies.
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Notes:
[1] Mark Pomerleau, “Why is the United States losing the information war?” C4ISRnet, October 5, 2020, https://www.c4isrnet.com/information-warfare/2020/10/05/why-is-the-united-states-losing-the-information-war/.
[2] Alex Joske, Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World (Melbourne, Australia: Hardie Grant Books, 2022), 203.
[3] Alex Joske, “Testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission,” United States Congress, March 23, 2023, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2023-03/Alex_Joske_Testimony.pdf.
[4] Russell Flannery, “Ex-Goldman Chief John Thornton Joins Board of China Computer Maker Lenovo,” Forbes, August 18, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/russellflannery/2023/08/18/ex-goldman-chief-john-thornton-joins-board-of-china-computer-maker-lenovo/?sh=7a2813535436.
[5] Joske, Spies and Lies, 155.
[6] “How the People’s Republic of China Seeks to Reshape the Global Information Environment,” United States Department of State, September 28, 2023, https://www.state.gov/gec-special-report-how-the-peoples-republic-of-china-seeks-to-reshape-the-global-information-environment/.
Image: “Nanshan Guanyin Park, Hainan Island, near Sanya” by Gary Todd, retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bodhisattva_Guanyin_Statue,_Nanshan_Guanyin_Park_(10098565196).jpg. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
