Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Ratcliffe is leading an initiative to recruit spies for counterintelligence missions against China.
The CIA recently released two videos aimed at attracting disillusioned Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials and Chinese youth involved in government.
The CIA’s counterintelligence efforts underscore the growing rift between the US and China.
Director Ratcliffe described the recruitment initiative as an innovative development within the CIA.
“This is just one of many ways that we’re adjusting our tradecraft at the CIA,” said Ratcliffe.
The CIA’s recruitment videos encourage Chinese government officials and politically-inclined youth dissatisfied with the CCP’s liberty-restrictions to contact the CIA and begin cooperating with the US against China.
“It’s all too common for someone to suddenly vanish without a trace. What I fear most is that my family’s fate is tied to my own. I must prepare an escape route,” says a fearful CCP official in one of the CIA’s videos.
In the youth-oriented video, the CIA references China’s economic struggles and the CCP’s freedom restrictions to encourage frustrated Chinese individuals to cooperate with the CIA.
While credible polls tracking Chinese citizens’ overall satisfaction with the CCP government are scarce, the mass exodus of Chinese emigrants suggests rampant disenchantment with the CCP.
According to Pew Research, China has suffered a net loss in migration since 1950 as hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens leave the country every year.
Simultaneously, the US has increasingly applied economic and diplomatic pressure on the CCP.
President Donald Trump recently unleashed a series of tariffs to counter what he alleges are the CCP’s unfair trade practices.
President Trump recently announced he was raising tariffs on imports from China to 125% “effective immediately.”
Trump and many Republicans have argued that China engages in deceptive trade practices to unfairly attract trade to their shores, harming the US economy and national security.
Even during former President Joe Biden’s administration, official US government reports alleged the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was subsidizing Chinese companies to deflate prices and drive out competition artificially.
