China’s Counterintelligence People’s War Is Patriotic & Pragmatic
The Chinese people are rallying in support of their country after the CIA announced earlier in October that it created a China Mission Center exclusively dedicated to spying on the People’s Republic.
CNN published an anti-Chinese hit piece in mid-October titled “China’s propaganda machine is intensifying its ‘people’s war’ to catch American spies”. It attempts to misportray China’s counterintelligence people’s war as a paranoid witch hunt. In reality, however, this grassroots movement is patriotic and pragmatic. The Chinese people are rallying in support of their country after the CIA announced earlier in October that it created a China Mission Center exclusively dedicated to spying on the People’s Republic.
That news coincided with a New York Times report titled “Captured, Killed, or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants”, which claimed that countries such as China have successfully dismantled American spy rings over the past few years. This confirms that China’s counterintelligence people’s war has been active for some time already since the government partially relies on patriotic citizens to tip them off about suspicious persons, among the other tactics that they employ to root out traitors.
US intelligence agencies are hostile to China. They not only aim to obtain its national security secrets, but also to meddle in its internal affairs. There have been credible claims over the years that these spy services were involved in stirring up trouble in the Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region (SAR) and even the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). No doubt exists about the involvement of American spies in waging their country’s hybrid war on China, which includes a crucial information warfare component in recent years.
These objective observations discredit CNN’s weaponized narrative that China’s counterintelligence people’s war is a paranoid witch hunt. Truth be told, it’s actually the US that’s become consumed by paranoid witch hunts. This is evidenced by its debunked Russiagate conspiracy theory that ridiculously alleged that former US President Donald Trump was his Russian counterpart’s puppet, who was supposedly single-handedly responsible for manipulating tens of millions of Americans into voting for the Republican through propaganda.
The American establishment’s paranoia runs even deeper than that, however, which suggests that it’s become pathological at this point. The former US leader was obsessed with rooting out what he claimed were countless Chinese spy operations on his country’s territory, even imagining that they involved the several hundred thousand Chinese students studying at its universities. This was really just a racist canard intended to provoke Sinophobic sentiments for manipulating the American people into supporting his hybrid war on China.
Russia and China aren’t the only countries that the US convinced itself have spies in every corner of its land. Iran is another target of such absurd claims. Earlier this summer, the Department of Justice seized a few dozen websites that it said were secretly linked to the Islamic Republic. The American establishment is beyond fearful of the effect that alternative interpretations of relevant events both international and domestic can have on shaping its people’s views of their government. It’s this concern that’s at the root of its pathological paranoia.
The American elite have counterproductively dismantled their country’s previously appealing (though always misleading) soft power throughout the course of these paranoid witch hunts. Those who believe in the US’ conspiracy theories about those three states’ spy operations no longer have much faith in their country’s democratic processes since they wrongly think that foreign states can manipulate them at will. Critics, meanwhile, rightly suspect that the elite are manipulating these false fears to entrench their own power.
