ANALYSIS: Beijing’s Increasing Espionage Activity Leads to Lasting Mistrust From the West

China is a global leader in surveillance technology. “The Final War: The 100-Year Plot to Defeat America”/Epoch Original Production

 News Analysis

The EU–China summit, held in Beijing on Dec. 7–8, was the first in-person summit between Chinese and European leaders in more than four years. However, European Council President Charles Michel returned to Brussels earlier than planned, in part because he didn’t have a secure phone line to speak with EU leaders without being tapped by China.

It has long been widely known that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been wiretapping foreign politicians and business guests.

On Dec. 6, a Chinese netizen said in a post on X: “A person with inside knowledge told me that the CCP has dedicated teams for intelligence gathering on every foreign dignitary. This includes collecting identical replacements for their personal items, such as clothing and daily use objects, and swapping them to obtain secrets when possible.”

A Sign of Severing Ties With the CCP

“The CCP now dares blatantly engage in eavesdropping at official events. Michel’s early departure signals EU’s rupture in its relations with the CCP,” Tsungnan Lin, a professor at the department of electrical engineering, National Taiwan University, told the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times.

He added that during the Trump administration, the U.S. government designated Huawei as a national security risk, but many European countries thought Trump and the U.S. government were overreacting.

“Nevertheless, over time, European countries have come to realize the threat Huawei poses to their national security, and more and more countries are demanding that Huawei equipment be banned from their 5G networks,” he said.

According to Mr. Lin, the eavesdropping incident during the EU–China summit has made these countries realize that the CCP’s employment of modern technology extends beyond mere consumer goods production, as it harbors the intention of undermining other nations’ security. This, in turn, has resulted in a profound and lasting mistrust from Western countries toward the CCP.

“The West will be more vigilant about the CCP’s intentions to endanger their national security behind Chinese made products, including mobile phones or apps such as TikTok, which is the most harmful one,” Mr. Lin said. “So why are Western countries moving their supply chains out of China? It’s actually a sign that governments, industries and communities in the West have lost patience with the CCP.”

Brazen Surveillance of Foreigners

In mid-June, in the run-up to U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s visit to China, a Voice of America reporter wrote an article saying that she would be traveling with a team to Beijing to cover Mr. Blinken’s visit. For security reasons, she was instructed to bring an alternate iPhone and a spare laptop to use while covering the story inside China.

“Journalists were also cautioned not to leave their laptops in their hotel rooms. In previous visits, members of the U.S. delegation reported that their electronic devices were tampered with after they left their hotel rooms in Beijing,” the article said.

In January 2022, on the eve of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, the Dutch Olympic Committee advised its athletes and delegation to the Olympic Games not to bring their personal cell phones and computers to China to avoid CCP espionage. The committee provided members of the delegation unused devices during their stay in China, to protect their personal data from Chinese surveillance, according to Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant.

The Netherlands is not alone. Olympic athletes from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, have all received warnings from the authorities in their respective countries, advising them not to bring their personal cell phones and laptops with them when they travel to Beijing to participate in the Winter Olympics.

In its travel advisory for China, the U.S. Department of State warned that “security personnel carefully watch foreign visitors.”

“Hotel rooms (including meeting rooms), offices, cars, taxis, telephones, Internet usage, digital payments, and fax machines may be monitored onsite or remotely, and personal possessions in hotel rooms, including computers, may be searched without your consent or knowledge,” the advisory said.

Team USA’s technology advisory suggested that Olympic participants use rental laptops and phones while in China, or wipe all personal data from their own devices before arrival and upon departure. The advisory also recommended using virtual private networks (VPNs).

Electric Vehicles as an Espionage Tool

In addition to wiretapping, Western governments are concerned that the CCP intends to use the technology embedded in electric cars for large-scale intelligence gathering.

LiDAR is a mapping technology that stands out for its ability to map urban environments, peer through essential infrastructure, and generate a reality akin to that found in video games.

LiDAR’s broad application makes it a dual-use technology. In the military, it is used to autonomously navigate unmanned vehicles and drones, and to create highly accurate 3D maps of battlefields.

With the growing demand for electric vehicles and autonomous driving, LiDAR is quickly becoming the industry standard. More and more automakers are using LiDAR as the “eyes” of self-driving cars.

The CCP has placed increasing emphasis on this emerging technology in recent years. In 2020, the CCP listed LiDAR as a strategic emerging industry and further increased government investment in its research and development.

The CCP’s move has raised alarms among U.S. lawmakers. In late November, the U.S.-China Strategic Competition Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Commerce, requesting that all Chinese LiDAR companies be scrutinized and considered for inclusion on the sanctions list.

The U.S. lawmakers said that because the U.S. government currently has no security requirements for the procurement of LiDAR technology, there is a significant risk that Chinese-made LiDARs are already present in U.S. systems and platforms used by the U.S. military and its contractors.

Under the CCP’s national security law, all Chinese LiDAR companies must provide all available data they collect, which means the Chinese regime will have access not only to U.S. maps and infrastructure data, but also to U.S. military systems.

The British government is also concerned that with the influx of Chinese-made electric vehicles into the United Kingdom, the Chinese regime may be able to spy on British citizens and collect large amounts of data.

A senior government source told The Telegraph in August this year: “If [an electric car] is manufactured in a country like China, how certain can you be that it won’t be a vehicle for collecting intel and data? … If you have electric vehicles manufactured by countries who are already using technology to spy, why would they not do the same here?”

In early December, the Biden administration proposed rules that would cut subsidies for vehicles that contain Chinese-made battery components, or are found to be produced by a company with strong ties to the CCP.

“An electric car is basically a computer on four wheels running on the road, so of course it can be used as a tool for espionage, where the CCP collects intelligence through technology,” Mr. Lin explained.

He further commented that the U.S. government and the Western world are coming to realize that if the CCP gets its hands on electric vehicle technology, it will be very dangerous to the national security of the Western free world.

“The Biden administration’s decision to issue new regulations on electric vehicle subsidies and to decouple them from China’s electric vehicle supply chain was in fact motivated by concerns that China’s electric vehicles could become a tool for the CCP to infiltrate the West,” he said.

Xin Ning contributed to this report.