Brest is a rainy industrial port, battered by the Atlantic, home to the French navy and its underwater nuclear deterrent. It has also witnessed a remarkable number of marriages in recent years between Chinese students and sailors who work at its naval bases.
“How should we evaluate such relationships? » asked a worried parliamentarian of the head of France’s nuclear submarine forces during a closed-door hearing at the National Assembly in Paris.
“Honeypots,” in which an agent seeks to romantically entangle his target, are a staple of racy spy thrillers. They are also an indicator of how China’s espionage operations have expanded in Europe, culminating last week with a wave of very public arrests.
Three German citizens have been arrested on suspicion of trying to sell sensitive military technology to China. Police also attacked a staff member of a far-right German MP in the European Parliament, accused of secretly working for China. British prosecutors, meanwhile, have charged two men with alleged spying on behalf of Beijing, including a parliamentary researcher.
While Admiral Morio de l’Isle reportedly warned French lawmakers about Brest weddings in 2019, current and former intelligence officers said the latest incidents were more typical of China’s espionage efforts in Europe.
These are particularly examples of, as one official put it, Beijing’s “exquisite initiation” of operations that patiently seek to cultivate political influence and shape European attitudes toward China . This is becoming increasingly important to Beijing, as European policymakers come to view China and its strategic relationship with Russia as a security threat and not simply a source of economic opportunity.
“The Chinese do more [espionage]and Western intelligence is increasingly able to spot it,” said Nigel Inkster, former director of operations for the Secret Intelligence Service, the British foreign intelligence agency, also known as MI6.
“Unlike the United States, Chinese intelligence agencies have [so far] been less active in Europe. But as European attitudes begin to harden [towards China], we can expect to see more. . . influence operations.
China’s Foreign Ministry last week rejected the latest round of espionage accusations – which emerged shortly after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz returned from a three-day trip to China, the country’s biggest trading partner. Germany – calling it “hype”.
“The intention… is very obvious, which aims to discredit and suppress China and undermine the atmosphere of China-EU cooperation,” the ministry spokesperson said.
With President Xi Jinping due to visit Europe next month, Beijing is becoming more sensitive than usual to espionage allegations. “In recent years, a new wave of hype often appears before and after high-level interactions between China and Europe,” the spokesperson added.
But Western intelligence agencies and security analysts have said Chinese spying activities, particularly those carried out by its civilian spy agency, the Ministry of State Security, are real. Even more worrying, there are signs that they may intersect with Russian networks that have penetrated European political extremes.
“China and Russia have common goals that they defend together when it serves their interests. Both seek to undermine the position of Western countries,” the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service warned late last year.
Founded in 1983, China’s MSS is a civilian secret police service that the United States has described as a combination of the FBI and the CIA. Its reach extends across Chinese society, with the agency responsible for counterintelligence as well as political security for the communist regime.
He has also been accused of extensive foreign espionage and influence operations, as well as theft of foreign intelligence and technology.
Unlike its more centralized Western counterparts, the MSS bases some of its espionage operations in competing provincial centers, according to Western officials. The Shanghai office is generally at the forefront of American espionage, while the Zhejiang office tends to focus on Europe.
In recent years, one of the MSS’s top operatives in Europe, Daniel Woo, has pushed Frank Creyelman, a former Belgian senator, to influence discussions in Europe on issues ranging from China’s crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong to persecution Uighurs in Xinjiang.
Woo was also reportedly the Chinese contact for other far-right politicians who have shown close sympathies for Russia, including acting as election observers during mock referendums held by Moscow in occupied Ukraine.
“China and Russia are following the same authoritarian model: sowing doubt about democracy and gaining influence among any groups that challenge existing political divisions, through slow, drip action,” he said. said Dan Lomas, assistant professor of international relations at the University. from Nottingham.
“The goal is to create discord,” he added. “It’s not Russia and China that are creating the problems; they are self-created by democracies. Rather, the approach is to remove the crust of these problems by generating support for extremist groups.”
The scale of Chinese espionage operations in Europe is potentially vast. In 2019, the EU foreign service reportedly warned that there were around 250 known Chinese spies in Brussels, compared to 200 Russian agents.
More recently, the British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee warned late last year that the size of China’s state intelligence apparatus, “almost certainly the largest in the world, with hundreds of thousands of civil intelligence agents”, had created “a challenge for our agencies”. cover”.
“China’s collection of human intelligence is prolific,” he says.
By contrast, Britain’s MI6 and its domestic counterpart M15 together employ around 9,000 people, according to the most recent data available.
Additionally, China conducts sprawling cyber operations that cross international borders. FBI Director Christopher Wray warned in January that China could deploy hackers who would outnumber his own agency’s IT staff “at least 50 to one.”
Intelligence officials and analysts have said one reason Europe is increasingly interested in Chinese espionage is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This has broadened the openness of the agencies, which have shifted their focus from state threats to counterterrorism since 2001. It has also led to greater cooperation between agencies.
“The shock of the invasion led national partners, who do not always cooperate, to cooperate,” a Western official said. “Combining data creates better data sets and allows for more connections.”
China’s economic power and geopolitical weight mean that European policies towards China will remain more nuanced than towards Russia.
“There is still debate about whether China represents a security threat or an economic opportunity,” Lomas said. “This debate will continue as long as China remains an economic power that respects the international rules of the game. »
However, this debate may be changing. Late last year, Italy officially broke away from China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative. Last week, Brussels raided the offices of Nuctech, a Chinese security equipment supplier, under new anti-foreign subsidy powers.
At the same time, as European intelligence agencies collaborate more, Chinese and Russian spy networks may tacitly do the same.
Adam Ni, editor of the China Neican newsletter, said European far-right groups could provide fertile ground. Although many European groups would not work for foreign spies, some might happily cooperate with Moscow and Beijing.
“They want to imitate certain aspects of the Russian and Chinese model,” Ni said. “There is a tendency to. . . agree with them on a growing number of topics.
Filip Jirouš, an intelligence analyst at the Washington-based think tank Jamestown Foundation, agrees and cited specific figures such as Ladislav Zemánek, a far-right Czech academic and politician listed as a contributor to the sponsored Valdai Club by the Kremlin and is subject to sanctions in Ukraine.
Zemánek writes for the Budapest-based China-CEE Institute, which is run by the Beijing-based Institute of European Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The institute’s director and director of China-CEE is Feng Zhongping, a former senior official at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think tank that Western scholars view as a front for the MSS.
As China and Russia, Jirouš recently wrote, “continue to align, individual co-optes will more likely work for both authoritarian states. And as far-right movements become more dominant – and mainstream political parties become more far-right – the risk is that the PRC will grow. [People’s Republic of China] intelligence that influences European policy through networks cultivated by Russia will continue to increase.
Contacted by the Financial Times, CASS representatives said the China-CEE Institute does not engage in political activities, seeks objective and independent academic opinions and complies with Hungarian and European laws.
CASS has no affiliation with the MSS or the social influence activities of China’s “United Front,” they said, and Feng left the CICIR several years ago. They said Zemánek was only an occasional contributor.
Zemánek, interviewed by the FT, said: “The spirit of McCarthyism has been revived, our fundamental rights are under attack. »
He said journalists should “focus on investigating American influence over Europe and their interference in our affairs rather than helping Americans create divisions between countries.”
