-
What the Chinese do is a bit like … bees going out from the hive; they just go out and they collect little bits of pollen from all over the place and they bring it back to their hive and they turn it into honey.
*** What they have is a pretty indiscriminate system of masses of students, officials, businessmen, et cetera, *** all of whom bring back little bits, which actually is jolly difficult—it's the grains of sand problem.
***[1]
During this Inquiry, MI5 noted that the ChIS threat had moved on from that analogy: Chinese intelligence officers directly target sensitive information and deploy more sophisticated tradecraft alongside developing those networks that collect lower-level information.
- Nevertheless, a vast swathe of information collected by the ChIS would be considered to be 'open source': something they are able to do by virtue of the resources at their disposal—SIS explained that the ChIS are able to act in an opportunistic manner and gather everything they can without having to prioritise.[2] Most Western intelligence services—usually due to resource constraints—focus primarily on the collection of classified information and much of the information collected by the ChIS would be considered anodyne or innocuous by Western standards. ChIS activities also therefore take them beyond what would be considered the remit of most Western intelligence services (for example, some of the efforts by the United Front Work Department to influence politicians and public perceptions of China could be regarded as traditional diplomacy). The broad remit means that the ChIS engage in activities ***, such as seemingly innocuous relationships with academics, think tanks or those in industry. For example, a US citizen with an affiliation to a Washington DC think tank was approached by the ChIS, who deemed his regular access to contacts in the US think-tank community to be valuable, as he would be able to report—based solely on unclassified information—on US-China relations.[3]
- The sheer size of the ChIS also means that ChIS officers are able to try multiple routes to acquire all, or part of, the information they seek. For example, trying small- and medium-sized enterprises rather than just primary contractors, or using third-party countries. DI told the Committee:
***[4]
In more ways than one, the broad remit of the ChIS poses a significant challenge to Western attempts to counter their activity.
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