China has recently arrested a foreign consultant, who was accused of collecting state secrets in the country and passing them to the United Kingdom’s spying agency.
The arrested person, surnamed Huang in Mandarin or Wong in Cantonese, was in charge of an overseas consulting agency, according to an announcement made by the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) on Monday.
The MSS said the British Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, in 2015 established an “intelligence cooperative relationship” with the person. It did not disclose the person’s nationality, gender or consulting firm name.
It said MI6 provided Huang with professional intelligence training in Britain and other places, as well as special espionage equipment for intelligence cross-linking. It said the person had entered China several times since 2015 to collect China-related intelligence and to seek other personnel who might be of use in the effort.
It said Huang had passed nine pieces of confidential state secrets, five pieces of other state secrets and three intelligence reports to the UK side.
Huang was described by the MSS as a “third-country” person, with neither Chinese nor British nationality. The MSS said that, during the investigation, access was given to consular visits from Huang’s home country in accordance with the law.
The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has not yet commented on the case.
The arrest came after the media reported last September that a researcher at the UK Parliament was arrested under the Official Secrets Act.
In March 2023, two men, one in his 20s and another in his 30s, were arrested in the UK as they were accused of spying for China. One of the duo was a parliamentary researcher involved in international affairs issues and had access to several Conservative members of Parliament (MPs).
‘Chinese faces’
Chinese commentators warned that western countries have in recent years recruited many people with “Chinese faces” to steal state secrets and push forward their subversive activities in China.
On April 26 last year, the standing committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) passed an amendment to strengthen China’s anti-spy law. The amended law took effect on July 1.
The definition of offenders was expanded from people who “join or accept tasks from” an espionage organization to those who “take refuge in” it. The coverage was also widened from “state secrets and intelligence” to “other documents, data, materials and items related to national security and interests.”
US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said last year the amendment could make some ordinary duties of American business people, academics and journalists illegal in the country.
“The UK and the US are using similar ways to spy on China, such as disguising their spies as ‘patriotic overseas Chinese,’ ‘honorary presidents’ and ‘philanthropists,’” a Jiangsu-based commentator says in an article.
“These people have overseas experience and Chinese identity and look like us, but their hearts have changed,” he says. “They are willing to be traitors, and lackeys of the Western countries.”
“We should beware of those who did not have any achievements in the country but suddenly became some so-called ‘young leaders’ after staying overseas for some time,” the Jiangsu commentator says. “The spying activities of the US and Western countries have become very covert, and extended to the economic, financial and media fields.”
Last May, John Leung Shing-wan, a 78-year-old overseas Chinese businessman, was sentenced to life in prison for espionage. Beijing did not disclose more details of this case.
Capvision’s case
Several Chinese commentators said the arrest of Huang made them think of the investigation of the Shanghai-based Capvision Partners.
In May 2023, Capvision was probed by the Chinese government as it helped foreign clients connect with China’s experts, who were then lured to steal state secrets.
“We don’t know how Huang obtained the intelligence, but based on the surname, Huang should be an ethnic Chinese,” a Sichuan-based columnist says in an article on Monday.
He says western spying agencies have faced a lot of problems when collecting China-related intelligence in the past.
“Chinese and Westerners look very different, so the West’s senior agents cannot infiltrate China,” he says. “Even an agent as skillful as James Bond cannot show his talent in China as he is monitored by the public every second.”
“Over the past few years, the West has started giving more importance to their intelligence work in China. Prior to this, they had thought that China would fail to develop its own technologies,” he says. “But now they know they were wrong.”
He says this is why Western spying agencies are now hiring local or overseas Chinese as spies.
He adds that the Chinese authorities’ recent investigation of Shanghai Zunpai Communication Technology Co Ltd, which had allegedly exported China’s self-developed chip technologies, is also an example of how the US and the West were spying on China’s high technology developments.
WiFi6 chips
In late December 2023, the Shanghai police said they had recently arrested 14 people and seized seven servers used to store infringing chip technology.
The operation came after Huawei Technologies reported to the relevant authorities that Zunpai’s founder Zhang Kun had allegedly infringed its chip technology and intellectual property.
Chinese media reported that Zhang, a former engineer at Qualcomm, had worked for Huawei’s HiSilicon before he founded Zunpai in 2021. Zhang then lured HiSilicon’s researchers to join his company with high salaries and option shares. He required them to steal HiSilicon’s chip technology.
“This case is related to the WiFi6 chip technology, an area in which Huawei has about 1,900 patents,” Wang Xinxi, a technology columnist, writes in an article published on December 30. “Huawei also has 482 patents in the WiFi7 chip technology and becomes the world’s top leader in this area.”
He says it’s likely that Zhang has already sold the technology to foreign firms, given that his company has operated for three years.
Read: US envoy worries about China anti-spy law overreach
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