China’s Houston consulate might have been ordered closed, but don’t expect that decision to have a major impact on Beijing’s espionage campaign on U.S. soil.
China views its U.S. diplomatic presence as a subset of its intelligence presence. This activity is pursued by Ministry of State Security intelligence officers and People’s Liberation Army attaches operating out of Beijing’s embassy and its four remaining consulates in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In turn, the Trump administration will be well aware that China’s espionage effort won’t be significantly restrained by the closure of its Houston station.
This closure, then, is ultimately designed to establish a new consequence foundation to guide China’s perception of what it can get away with when it comes to spying on U.S. soil. China’s intelligence challenge for America, here, is threefold.
The first issue is that Beijing sees its targeting of U.S. intellectual property, government officials, and Chinese American citizens as critical national priorities. Determined to replace the U.S.-led international order with a Beijing-based feudal order, Chinese President Xi Jinping needs to steal as much high-value technology as he can in order to buffer China’s own domestic economy and ensure that any challenge to his rule is quickly stamped out.
This latter factor underlines the particular aggression of Chinese intelligence officers toward Chinese American citizens on U.S. soil. Due to their general opposition to the Chinese Communist Party’s tyranny and their often overt preference for political reform, Xi’s paranoid security services view those individuals as particular threats to the Communist Party regime.
Another challenge is that the U.S. lacks the counterintelligence capability to monitor China’s espionage effort adequately. The Ministry of State Security has significantly improved its tradecraft in recent years, cutting back on its use of platforms such as cellphones, which the U.S. has the advantage in detecting. That means human surveillance teams need to follow Chinese spies physically. This poses a resource problem, in that at least seven people are needed at any one time in order to monitor covertly a trained intelligence officer.
Considering that a significant portion of China’s accredited diplomats are spies, it is simply not possible to keep an eye on all of them at all times. That is to say nothing of the various nonofficial cover spies, both official and occasional, whom China employs. It must be said, however, that China’s intelligence presence on U.S. soil also provides very valuable opportunities for the recruitment of American agents. This recruitment is exceptionally difficult on Chinese soil due to the extensive Soviet-style monitoring of CIA officers.
Finally, there’s the fact that much of China’s spying against the U.S. takes place from the Chinese mainland. Beijing’s industrial-level cyberespionage effort is designed to hoover up as much information of value as possible. And while the regime’s intelligence officers on U.S. soil support these efforts by spotting potential targets, much of the threat arises from the Chinese mainland.
In short, China’s spying on U.S. soil is a problem and one that isn’t going to end anytime soon.
