MCLC: manual on how to spot a spy

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manual on how to spot a spy
Source: Sinosphere, NYT (11/3/14)
Manual on How to Spot a Spy Circulates in an Increasingly Wary China
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW
Julia and Kevin Garratt, center, with their son Simeon and daughter Hannah. The Canadian couple was detained in August on suspicion of collecting Chinese state secrets.Credit Simeon Garratt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Or an American spy. Or a “hostile foreign force.” So says the “China Folk Counterespionage Manual,” a “how to spot a spy” guide circulating on the Internet.
The manual, whose origin is murky, first emerged several years ago and has recently enjoyed a renaissance in popularity on social media sites. It offers Chinese citizens tips on how to detect spies in their midst. It was even cited in Global Times, a state newspaper, in late August following the detention of Kevin and Julia Garratt, a Canadian couple who ran a cafe in Dandong, on the North Korean border, on suspicion of stealing military secrets. In an infographic, the newspaper described them as examples of possible foreign spies masquerading as “ordinary citizens.”
The manual might be something more suited for a James Bond movie if it weren’t for the government’s own new emphasis on rooting out “foreign spies,” demonstrated on Saturday when President Xi Jinping signed an updated national security law, named the Counterespionage Law.
“To be honest, I found it preposterous at first glance,” Yuan Yi, a politics professor at National Chengchi University in Taiwan, said of the manual. “Then the more I read it, I found it contained some truth. Because it offers stories. And because of the specificity of the storytelling. The detail. It’s my hunch — I can’t prove it — that it’s something created by the state.”
So, what are the telltale signs of a foreign spy?
The manual, which devotes much attention to university settings, advises Chinese to be suspicious of “socially active students” whose income suddenly increases, since money is the key tool of spycraft.
Also suspicious are “illogical science majors” who become overly emotional about politics, as is anyone who suggests that the word “people’s” should be removed from the titles of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army or the People’s Republic of China, or that Women’s Day, Labor Day or Children’s Day be struck from the list of state holidays. People who become excitable when a national crisis occurs and argue for extreme positions might be deliberately stirring trouble, it warns.
A popular tactic employed by spies online is to “provoke or lull people on military websites” — sites that are especially popular with amateur enthusiasts — “into revealing what they know,” it says.
“For example, by putting out false information about military units or missiles to see if people correct you. Or sharing photographs of new ships and asking if China will have built its own aircraft carrier within the next 10 years.” Mixing real information with disinformation, it says, is a way to gain followers, and confuse them.
Then too:
Expert spies will use one Internet account and spend months, even years, attracting interest with reasonable arguments. Then slowly they will start to introduce sensitive issues. This is much harder for people to spot.
It warns any Chinese who might be tempted to work for foreign spy agencies:
Foreign spy agencies don’t care if their Chinese spies live or die. They train them very simply. Because Chinese people’s knowledge about espionage is practically zero, this is enough.
Said Mr. Yuan, “There are so many credible things in it and it offers very real scenarios. This is practical stuff.”
“The observations they make that money will be the most frequently used tool — when it comes to espionage, that’s universal,” he said. “Also it’s extensive material with so many elements, such as how to use the Internet. It’s very rich.
“But one has to ask, who produced it? And what was the purpose?”
Partly answering the question himself, Mr. Yuan said it suggested a Chinese government that sees itself as besieged.
“Every time you travel to China you see the state faces heavy pressure,” he said. “Each time there are new security measures.”
With relaxed borders between China and Taiwan making travel between the two places now possible, “there are so many Chinese going to Taiwan and spying,” Mr. Yuan said.
But he questioned how effective these Chinese spies in Taiwan were. “We are learning more about China, especially in Taiwan, than they are,” he said.
The state itself may be at fault, a Global Times article in September implied. Because of the government’s secretive habits and heavy censorship, it said, the general public may not be well informed about the espionage threat.
Screenplays for films about espionage tend not to gain approval from censors, the article said. “Therefore literary creation in this area seems like a forbidden zone, despite continuous information warfare” facing China from the outside world, it said.
And recent cases of espionage have not been made public, forfeiting opportunities to educate citizens, it said in the article headlined: “Be wary of espionage trap surrounding us.”
It all points to what analysts are saying: that China, a year after setting up a National Security Commission under the Communist Party, is putting greater emphasis on counterespionage and may be giving closer scrutiny to foreigners, and Chinese who associate with them, even as interaction between China and the outside world deepens.
Murray Scot Tanner, an analyst at CNA Corporation, a United States-based research group, described a draft version of the Counterespionage Law, which was approved virtually unchanged last Saturday, as “a law of great scope and potential importance.”
In an email shortly before the final law was signed, Mr. Tanner wrote that it would “inevitably send a message to Chinese who work closely with foreigners, and their foreign colleagues who work in China,” possibly creating a chilling effect.
As for the Garratts, three months after their detention as suspected spies, both the Chinese and Canadian authorities remain tight-lipped about their situation. Canadian news media have described them as Christians who were working to bring humanitarian aid into North Korea and spread Christianity.
Here’s a statement last Friday from the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development in Ottawa:
Canadian consular officials are providing assistance to two Canadian citizens who have been placed under investigation in China.
We are monitoring developments closely and remain in contact with local Chinese authorities as well as family members of the Canadians under investigation.
We have, and will continue to, raise this case at senior levels.
To protect the private and personal information of the individual concerned, further details on this case cannot be released.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on November 3, 2014
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