CIA Increases Recruitment Efforts in China with New Videos

The CIA has launched a new Mandarin-language social media campaign aimed at recruiting dissatisfied Chinese government officials to share confidential information, reflecting a broader strategy to boost intelligence collection on China. The dramatized videos, modeled after previous efforts targeting Russian officials, portray fictional Chinese officials disillusioned with the Communist Party and seeking a safer future for their families by contacting the CIA through secure channels. CIA Director John Ratcliffe emphasized that China now represents the most formidable challenge to the U.S., citing Beijing's ambitions for global dominance in economic, military, and technological arenas. The agency believes its outreach is effectively bypassing Chinese censorship and is part of a wider initiative to recruit informants in adversarial countries. This modern approach to espionage aims to address the challenges posed by universal technical surveillance and to increase the CIA’s access to sensitive information from within the Chinese government.