China is poking fun at U.S. concerns about security with a familiar on-screen intelligence operative.
Chinese state media released a parody of James Bond that mocks the United States’s fears about the Chinese telecom company Huawei, which federal officials have declared a security concern.
The video, titled “0.07: No Time to Die Laughing,” was published by Xinhua News on Tuesday and depicts “James Pond” and “Black Window” meeting with a voice named “M.”
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In the video, Black Window claims that MI6, Britain’s intelligence agency, has made China its top priority. She begins listing off security concerns about the country, most notably that “their National Security Agency is authorized to monitor all phone and internet use in 193 countries.” She then feigns a reaction upon realizing the dossier describes U.S. intelligence operations.
When the agents begin talking to M remotely, the voice tells Pond not to buy a Huawei device. When Pond asks how he knew his desire to purchase such a phone, he realizes that his superiors had been spying on him.
“So why not Huawei?” Pond asks, only to learn about U.S. officials’ concerns about Huawei installing backdoors into its devices. Black Window retorts that there is no evidence of backdoors, dismissing the notion as propaganda promoted by Western intelligence. At the end of the video, M provides them with CIA-certified phones.
The entire video, underscored by a laugh track, includes American pop culture references, with 0.07 saying things such as “Exsqueeze me” and “Yabba dabba doo” as well as pointed political jabs at leaders such as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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The Federal Communications Commission has aggressively opposed Huawei, including it on a March list of five Chinese telecom companies that are “a threat to national security.” U.S. officials have encouraged allies to stop using Huawei technology in their rollouts of 5G networks.
China has made content designed to mock U.S. policy in the past. In May 2020, Xinhua released “Once Upon a Virus,” a video using Lego-like figures to mock the U.S. response to coronavirus in the first two months of the pandemic. The state media outlet also released videos in August sarcastically poking at the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
