Young Tech-Savvy Chinese Target of Foreign Spies

Vittorio Hernandez | Apr 29, 2016

beijing cybercafe (Photo : Getty Images)

It seems Beijing’s work to prevent young Chinese from being the unwitting tools of foreign spies should just not target female government employees.

Also the target of recent recruitment efforts were young Chinese, many of whom are techies and frequently online. The South China Morning Post reported that a recent crackdown on espionage recruitment efforts in Guangdong Province found that most of the target of foreign intelligence agents are university students.

Some of the foreign recruitment agents are beautiful women, while others pretend to be head hunters or military enthusiasts. Their common ground is that all could be found on online forums, job websites and social media portals.

Their method of recruitment is first to invite the young Chinese to work for them part-time or write columns with offers of high salaries. Eventually, once hired, the new recruits are encouraged to turn spy for the foreign agents.

But some of the new recruits are quite careless which resulted in the arrest of two migrant workers in Guangzhou for illegally spying by providing state secrets to foreign agents. One is a 26-year-old-woman and the other is a 40-year-old man. The two are accused of stealing state secrets and selling it to foreign agents for 5,000 yuan.

China, though, has to spy a lot to know which of the young Chinese, especially women, are in dangerous liaisons with 600,000 foreigners living in China as of 2010, with 56 percent males, reported Quartz. While dating locals is on the rise, most do not end in marriage because of the irreconcilable political differences between the two.