How the West has struggled to keep up with China’s spy threat

The unprecedented gathering was a very deliberate attempt to turn up the volume of warnings about China because of the fear that many companies and organisations were still not listening. The location in Silicon Valley was also carefully chosen – a spotlight on China’s attempts to steal technology, sometimes through cyber-espionage and sometimes through recruiting insiders.

China’s resources for this are on a different scale. A Western intelligence official estimates China has around 600,000 people working on intelligence and security, more than any other state in the world.

Western security services simply cannot investigate every case. According to British intelligence agency MI5, more than 20,000 people in the UK alone have been approached over professional networking sites like LinkedIn by Chinese spies to cultivate a relationship.

“People can be unwitting that they are in fact corresponding with an intelligence officer from another nation – but eventually they find themselves passing information that rips out the future of their own company,” the head of MI5, Ken McCallum told me at the California gathering.

These are “epic” campaigns, Ken McCallum says, which can have serious national security implications, as well as economic consequences.

While the bulk of China’s huge apparatus is focused on domestic surveillance, it also uses its spies to limit criticism of its actions abroad.

Recently, there have been reports of Chinese spies targeting Western politics, with arrests in the UK, Belgium and Germany and an ongoing inquiry in Canada.

There have been reports of Chinese “overseas police stations” in Europe and the US. When it comes to going after Chinese dissidents in the West, security officials say Beijing’s intelligence officers usually act remotely rather than using spies physically on the ground – hiring private investigators or making threatening phone calls.