Last Thursday, Beijing announced the appointment of five new cabinet ministers. The personnel reshuffle came just ahead of the 17th party congress, scheduled to convene on October 15. The all-important gathering will set China’s policy agenda for the next five years. One of the five appointments is the new minister of state security, Geng Huichang. Official Chinese media have provided scant information on Geng, other than that the 56-year-old native of Hebei province had served as a vice minister of state security before the promotion. Hong Kong’s Sing Tao Daily, in a report titled “Under Geng Huichang, the Ministry of State Security Is to Strengthen Intelligence Work on the U.S. and Japan,” describes Geng as “an expert on America and Japan” who once headed the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), a think tank that falls under the jurisdiction of the eighth bureau of the Ministry of State Security. In the same article, Geng is characterized by his colleagues as an academic who is “discreet in conduct and prudent in speech.” In a 2003 op-ed published in the Tribune, former Indian prime minister I.K. Gujral recounted how during a 1993 visit to Beijing he learned that, under the leadership of Professor Geng Huichang, South Asia specialists at CICIR were devoting their energies to the study of Islamic fundamentalism in Asia–a full eight years before the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States. Geng, co-author of an article titled “America’s New Right-Wing Movement,” is also described by observers in Hong Kong as an expert on commercial intelligence who delivered a lecture this past February on ways to protect and obtain commercial secrets. His appointment as China’s intelligence chief is seen as a signal that Beijing is set to step up economic espionage activities in the United States. Geng’s appointment came less than two months after a controversial FBI advertisement appeared in three Chinese-language newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area soliciting assistance in counter-intelligence from the Chinese American community. Mentioning the Chinese Ministry of State Security by name, the ad ran from July 2nd to July 8th:
Beijing expressed indignation over the ad’s “cold war mentality.” Separately, some Chinese Americans in this country found the ad’s message troubling. In response to queries from the Chinese American community, the FBI issued a press release on July 9th stating that it “is not asking members of the Chinese community to spy on one another or to spy on the Chinese government.” Chinese media reported in detail on the content of the original ad and the subsequent clarification by the FBI, and there has been much heated discussion in Chinese cyberspace about the subject. The FBI links Beijing to roughly one-third of all economic espionage cases in the U.S. and has more than doubled the number of agents assigned to counter Chinese spying activities since 2001. The appointment of Geng as China’s new intelligence chief may signal a need for even greater vigilance by the FBI.
