Responding to the Trump administration’s closing of China’s consulate in Houston, Beijing is almost certain to close a U.S. consulate. But when it comes to intelligence activity, the Houston closure will be more harmful to China than any Chinese closure is to the United States.
Alongside its embassy in Beijing, the U.S. has five consulates in China. These are located in the cities of Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenyang, and Wuhan. But what value do the consulates have for intelligence collection purposes?
Well, due to their locations, I’d assume that three of these consulates might offer technical intelligence value in securing access ports to Chinese telecommunication networks. Sitting next to the East China Sea, Shanghai is located within the People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theater Command and a center of Chinese finance. Guangzhou is next to the South China Sea hot zone of U.S.-China tensions and within the PLA’s Southern Theater Command. It’s also just outside Hong Kong and is thus a good place to figure out what the Chinese are up to in the former British colony. Located in the apparent birthplace of the coronavirus pandemic, the Wuhan consulate has supported U.S. government insight into the origins of and China’s response to the pandemic.
Still, the benefits accrued by these consulates won’t be greater than those China has accrued from its consulates in America.
The first issue is counterintelligence. Where the FBI is heavily stretched in its ability to monitor intelligence officers and agents, China’s vast domestic security apparatus has no such issue. Like the Soviet-era KGB, Beijing’s Ministry of State Security intelligence service has responsibility both for foreign intelligence and domestic counterintelligence. And like the KGB, it has almost limitless resources. If the Chinese want to put a 10-person surveillance team on one U.S. diplomat or CIA officer? No problem. 20? You got it. 30? Not an issue. Even if the Ministry of State Security needs more bodies, it can simply reach out to the Ministry of Public Security. The FBI simply cannot match these efforts. And that distinction matters.
After all, if Chinese spies can (and do) evade FBI surveillance, they can use their consulates as diplomatic veils for what are ultimately just intelligence stations. The Chinese intelligence community is experienced and competent these days. Its officers are not idiots. Chinese officers know the U.S. has a comparative advantage in technical surveillance. In turn, when out in the field on operations, they will actively mitigate their digital footprints. The Chinese also employ the old game of rotating officers through operations so as to lead FBI surveillance teams on dummy runs. This strategy enabled China to stretch the FBI’s Houston field office and pursue its objectives — namely, intimidating Chinese expatriates, stealing U.S. intellectual property, and infiltrating American academic and corporate institutions.
The same opportunity does not apply to U.S. intelligence officers in China. Yes, officers from the CIA and the National Security Agency can and do sometimes lose their Chinese surveillance tales. But in the face of Chinese surveillance, doing so successfully requires a lot of skill and guile, mastery of timing, and a generous portion of luck.
In short, by closing the Houston consulate, the U.S. has limited Chinese action by cutting off that action at its source. This will allow FBI agents to be reassigned to support counterintelligence monitoring at other Chinese embassies. Closing a U.S. consulate in China, Beijing won’t do much to degrade American intelligence gathering.
