{"id":10689,"date":"2013-11-13T06:00:01","date_gmt":"2013-11-12T19:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=10689"},"modified":"2013-11-14T11:05:37","modified_gmt":"2013-11-14T00:05:37","slug":"spying-beyond-the-facade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/spying-beyond-the-facade\/","title":{"rendered":"Spying beyond the fa\u00e7ade"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Chinese<\/a><\/p>\n

The almost-eternal profession of covert intelligence collection and analysis (a.k.a. spying) has been much in the news of late, with the US National Security Agency and Australia\u2019s own Signals Directorate sharing headlines across the region and indeed the globe. But it\u2019s not just Australia and the United States that have had their covert activities brought to public attention. China\u2019s covert operatives (in this case HUMINT rather than SIGINT) have also been the subject of some unsought attention through the publication of a recent detailed study<\/a> (PDF) of the General Political Department (GPD) of the PRC\u2019s People\u2019s Liberation Army (PLA) by the Project 2049 Institute in Virginia.<\/p>\n

Authors Mark Stokes and Russell Hsiao used primarily open-source material to detail the history and current activities of the political wing of the PRC military. \u2018Political warfare\u2019 has been an intrinsic part of Chinese military strategy under both the Guomindang and the Communist Party of China. It was long domestically oriented, but of late, with the growing global engagement of China, the activities of the GPD\u2019s Liaison Department (LD) have become increasingly international. Stokes and Hsiao see political warfare as \u2018active measures to promote the rise of China within a new international order and defend against perceived threats to state security,\u2019 with these functions augmenting traditional state diplomacy and formal military-to-military relations.<\/p>\n

The LD can certainly be considered to be an integral element of the Chinese intelligence community. But its functions are broader as it develops links with global elites and aims at influencing the policies and behaviour of countries, institutions and groups beyond China. It engages in a broad range of activities including propaganda, liaison, influence peddling, information gathering and perception management. And LD members are sometimes posted to Chinese embassies. In brief, its tasks involve much greater calculated manipulation than does usual soft power.<\/p>\n

To pursue its tasks, the LD has created a range of front organisations, the most prominent of which for international activities is the China Association for International Friendly Contact<\/a> (CAIFC). The CAIFC, defines itself on its website as \u2018a social organisation devoted to fostering international and regional people-to-people friendly exchanges,\u2019 which completely obscures its connections with the People\u2019s Liberation Army and the Central Military Commission. It organises visits and activities to which elite members of international society are invited. For example, the <\/b>First China Philanthropy Forum<\/a> in November 2012 was attended by Bill Gates, Tony Blair, and Western Australian Governor Malcolm McCusker, along with \u201840 other consultants and directors of the CAIFC\u2019. John Howard also attended, and was feted by Cheng Siwei<\/a> (\u6210\u601d\u5371), chairman of the China Foundation for International Strategic Studies<\/a>, an organisation which is likewise intimately tied to the PLA. \u00a0Just this month the CAIFC reportedly invited Aung San Suu Kyi to visit China, an invitation which has been denied by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, suggesting perhaps some difference between the PLA and the foreign ministry.<\/p>\n

The current CAIFC President is former PRC foreign minister Li Zhaoxing, who melds the CAIFC activities with more formal foreign affairs organisations such as the recently-established China Public Diplomacy Association, which he also heads. Together with Kevin Rudd, Li opened the inaugural Australia\u2013China Forum in Canberra<\/a> in November 2011. One of the long-term CAIFC vice presidents is Deng Rong, daughter of Deng Xiaoping, but it\u2019s the other vice presidents who have now become the centres of attention.<\/p>\n

In their CAIFC roles, the PLA\u2019s major operatives within the organisation necessarily adopt alternate identities. The Stokes and Hsiao study illuminates the types of identities behind which the activities of the Liaison Department are pursued. Key operatives include Xing Yunming (\u90a2\u8fd0\u660e), the executive vice president of the CAIFC, noted on their website as a bureaucrat who had served in Nanjing and the Ministry of Civil Affairs. But the study reveals that Major General Xing has also been the Director of the Liaison Department of the General Political Department of the PLA<\/a> since 2007. Xing hosted Tony Blair on his visit to China in June this year. In 2012, Andrew Forrest of the Fortescue Metals Group, Christopher Barnard of the Macquarie Group and Owen Hegarty of OZ Minerals were also photographed with Xing<\/a>, while Forrest met again with Deng Rong<\/a> earlier this year. John Garnaut has highlighted<\/a> the efforts by CAIFC to target Australian business leaders.<\/p>\n

Also of interest is Li Xiaohua <\/i><\/b>(\u674e\u6653\u534e), listed on the CAIFC website alongside Deng Rong as a vice president of the association, and described as an economist who has worked with the Guangdong Economic and Trade Commission and the State Planning Commission. We now find that Mr Li is also a Major General in the PLA and a deputy director of the GPD Liaison Department. MAJGEN Li also regularly meets and fetes senior visitors from around the region in his CAIFC capacity.<\/p>\n

Another CAIFC VP is Chen Zuming <\/i><\/b>(\u9648\u7956\u660e), a Russian language specialist who previously served in the Shandong foreign trade department. He\u2019s known in the PLA as MAJGEN Chen Zuming, and led the Liaison Department prior to Xing Yunming. He appears to concentrate on links with Russian and Eastern European countries. Lastly, Xin Qi (\u8f9b\u65d7), yet another VP, is an academic who has been involved in cultural and publishing endeavours. PRC military websites however record him as MAJGEN Xin Qi, a deputy director of the Liaison Department.<\/p>\n

This intense engagement by senior members of the PLA in CAIFC activities clearly shows the degree to which \u00a0it is a covert arm of the PLA, engaged in intelligence and propaganda work.<\/p>\n

While this expos\u00e9 of a PLA front organisation isn\u2019t going to garner the acres of headlines nor induce the reactions which we saw with the NSA and ASD revelations, it does provide a little insight into the workings of a nation with which Australia is increasingly engaged. In the murky world of covert operations, a little insight is the most that we can hope for.<\/p>\n

Geoff Wade researches China\u2013Southeast Asia relations. He developed the China\u2013ASEAN and China\u2013India Projects at the Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong and subsequently worked with the Southeast Asia\u2013China Cluster of the Asia Research Institute, Singapore. Image courtesy of Flickr user Ashley Wang<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The almost-eternal profession of covert intelligence collection and analysis (a.k.a. spying) has been much in the news of late, with the US National Security Agency and Australia\u2019s own Signals Directorate sharing headlines across the region …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":175,"featured_media":10691,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[52,170,577],"class_list":["post-10689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-china","tag-intelligence","tag-peoples-liberation-army"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSpying beyond the fa\u00e7ade | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/spying-beyond-the-facade\/\" \/>\n<meta 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