In Review: Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinp5ing. Roger Faligot. Hurst & Co. 528 pages.
Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer. Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil. US Naval Institute Press. 376 pages.
Introduction
Few subjects have travelled from the footnotes of China studies to the main agenda of the world’s defence ministries as quickly as the intelligence apparatus of the People’s Republic. A decade ago the Guoanbu, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), was the domain of a few émigré watchers and counter-intelligence specialists. Today it is the subject of legislative hearings in Washington and Canberra, of indictments in The Hague, and of quiet nerves in New Delhi. The 2020 Galwan clash, the race for critical technologies, the spread of “influence operations”, and the continuous stream of cyber-intrusion advisories have together turned Chinese espionage into a permanent feature of contemporary geopolitics. For an emerging power like India, understanding how Beijing’s intelligence apparatus actually works has become an urgent question of statecraft.
Two books lead the English-language debate, and they are written at opposite temperatures. Roger Faligot’s Chinese Spies is a vast historical work, the culmination of nearly four decades of investigative journalism, tracing the communist espionage apparatus from Zhou Enlai’s clandestine networks in 1920s Shanghai to contemporary rule of Xi Jinping. Its temperamental opposite is Chinese Communist Espionage by Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil, which exhaustively maps the party-state’s agencies, personnel, and operations with the precision of the counter-intelligence analysts the authors once were. One is narrative history; the other is closer to a reference manual.
Read together, they show the extent of Chinese intelligence and the limits of how it is understood. However, this side-by-side reading is not sufficient. The primary contention is that both books answer what Chinese intelligence looks like—Faligot historically and Mattis and Brazil structurally—though neither asks whom the system serves: the Party’s monopoly on power. Under Xi Jinping, the security and intelligence apparatus has become a single-party instrument; its functions span protection of the Party, the acquisition of foreign technology, and coercion abroad—these functions have fused, subordinated to one political authority, as opposed to division among independent agencies. Yet both volumes fail to express that fusion. What both books leave under-theorised is what an Indian reader needs to understand: not just what Chinese intelligence is, but what it now does, and to whom.
Faligot and the Long Shadow of Kang Sheng
For Faligot, the master key is continuity. The central argument of the book is that Chinese intelligence has developed through an unbroken tradition rather than a separate phase. The book begins with Zhou Enlai’s Teke in 1927 through the Diaochabu, to today’s MSS (Guoanbu). For him, this long institutional tradition and ideological continuity explain how China’s intelligence system operates today.
Faligot’s own narrative, however, points to four different phases rather than one continuous story. Starting from Mao, intelligence served the revolutions and internal Party control. From Teke to Kang Sheng’s Social Affairs Department, the services were highly personal, driven by political campaigns and often targeted Party members as much as external adversaries. In this era, the main purpose was to protect the revolution and the faction that controlled the security apparatus, which eventually collapsed during the Cultural Revolution in 1969 when civilian service Diaochabu was absorbed into military intelligence.
Deng Xiaoping altered the role of intelligence. He created the MSS in 1983 by combining the restored Diaochabu with the counter-intelligence functions of the Ministry of Public Security. This transformed intelligence into a professional and organised service whose role extended from protecting Party control and revolution, to supporting China’s modernisation by collecting foreign technology and economic information.
Under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, intelligence agencies increased cyber espionage operations through the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Third Department and created specialised bodies such as the 610 Office. At the same time, the intelligence apparatus became highly fragmented and powerful individuals developed their own sphere of influence. Zhou Yongkang’s security empire was the clearest example of this fragmentation. Xi Jinping’s reforms and centralisation can be understood in response to this fragmentation.
When it comes to reporting, the book is a page-turner. Unlike other institutional accounts, Faligot brings Chinese intelligence operations to life through vivid stories and memorable examples. He describes operations such as Autumn Orchid in Hong Kong, the secretive 610 Office, established to suppress the Falun Gong and other groups labelled the “five poisons”, and the ‘sea-lamprey’ method of economic espionage, in which foreign firms are quietly stripped of valuable technology.
Shortcomings do exist and are unavoidable: the sourcing is often unverified and uneven. The book relies heavily on secondary sources of the West and émigré periodicals, and in these instances, it treats rumours and conjecture as facts. For instance, bribes are said to have been paid to senior figures including Admiral Liu Huaqing and Foreign Minister Qian Qichen on a merely ‘reportedly’ basis (p. 289); the origin of the People’s Armed Police is attributed to an unnamed ‘it is said’ (p. 152); the fate of Slobodan Milošević’s family is relayed on the footing that ‘rumour has it’ (p. 241); and a lurid account of Kang Sheng and Mao’s wives is narrated at length before being conceded as ‘unconfirmed speculation’ (pp. 101–102). Other claims lean on Hong Kong émigré magazines such as Cheng Ming (pp. 452–454).
These are not isolated errors that later editions could easily rectify but the defining feature of the genre itself. Because the archives of intelligence services are largely closed, any history of Chinese intelligence must rely on defectors’ accounts, reports from exiles and informed guesses. While this is an unavoidable limitation of the genre, it also requires treating some of Faligot’s claims with caution. The continuity thesis, as mentioned earlier, does not convincingly hold either. This weakens the analytical aspects of the book. By asserting that everything can be traced back to Kang Sheng, Faligot effectively casts Xi Jinping as just another master of an ordinary traditional secret service. The continuity framing does more than just flatter Xi; it blinds the book to the one development that matters most. The past decade has seen Xi push the centralisation of the secret and intelligence apparatus to the extreme. The establishment of the Central National Security Commission in 2014, and the doctrine of the ‘holistic national security outlook’, unified the previously scattered party, police, and ministry organs into a single, consolidated system of command and control. Loyalist appointment is, of course, no innovation: Kang Sheng was Mao’s personal instrument. He used intelligence services to monitor Party members and remove those considered political enemies. However, under Xi Jinping, the intelligence services have come under tighter Party control. The appointment of Chen Yixin, a close Xi ally, as head of the MSS reflects Xi’s emphasis on political loyalty and centralised control.
The centralisation doctrine pushes the security mandate of intelligence services well beyond the conventional sense. The combination of biometrics, policing, and platform management provides a level of reach to the security state that even Kang Sheng could not have envisioned. While Faligot covers developments such as mole hunts and the creation of the Strategic Support Force, China’s intelligence system has changed significantly since then. Consequently, the book ends by describing an organisation that no longer exists.
Mattis, Brazil, and the Architecture of the Party-State
If Faligot emphasises continuity, Mattis and Brazil emphasise structure. Their primer offers the most complete English-language study of Chinese intelligence to date and, unusually, rests on hundreds of Chinese-language sources and on the authors’ experience as counter-intelligence analysts and China hands. The authors divide the Chinese intelligence apparatus into its main components. They explain the role of the civilian MSS, which is responsible for both foreign and domestic counter-intelligence. Military intelligence was historically divided between the old Second Department for human intelligence and the Third Department for signals and cyber intelligence. They also trace how the Party’s civilian Central Investigation Department was merged into the PLA’s Second Department during the Cultural Revolution before re-emerging as the core of the MSS in 1983, preserving a separate tradition of human intelligence from the military’s signals and cyber functions. A companion online glossary of Chinese intelligence and security terminology, to which the volume is keyed, extends its usefulness as a working reference and signals the seriousness of its Chinese-language foundations.
Their most important contribution goes well beyond description. They demolish the Western stereotype—the ‘thousand grains of sand’, or mosaic theory—which holds that China gathers intelligence chiefly through the diffuse, uncoordinated efforts of patriotic students and travellers collecting fragments. They state plainly that the evidence does not support a ‘grains of sand’ model enlisting tens of thousands of ordinary Chinese, describing PRC technology acquisition instead as a mostly secret, hybrid effort run by professional officers (p. 158). Against this, Mattis and Brazil show a professional service that recruits, runs, and pays agents, which deploys cut-outs and false flags, and practises a tradecraft recognisable to any seasoned case officer. Their case entries bear this out: the former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Kevin Mallory was run by the Shanghai State Security Bureau under the cover of academic exchange (pp. 274–275); Glenn Duffie Shriver was talent-spotted through an essay contest and cultivated over years to place him inside the State Department and CIA (p. 276); and exporters of controlled technology routed shipments through a Singaporean cut-out to disguise their China destination (p. 173). It shifts focus from a blanket suspicion of diaspora communities, illiberal and in any case ineffective, towards the disciplined identification of trained officers and the networks they build.
Some of the book’s limits are simply those of its calendar. Its research effectively closes in 2018–2019, and the years since have been transformative. Since 2019, China’s intelligence system has changed in ways that go beyond organisational reform. As Sheena Greitens (2025) argues, the MSS has gained greater legal authority, political influence, and a more public role under Xi Jinping. The revised Counter-Espionage Law (2023), which broadened the definition of espionage and expanded the MSS’s powers, illustrates this shift. Public campaigns encouraging citizens to report suspected spies further show that intelligence is increasingly being used to strengthen Party control, not just collect information. Recent cyber operations, the use of private contractors, and transnational repression against dissidents abroad also demonstrate that China’s intelligence functions now extend well beyond traditional intelligence agencies. These developments suggest that understanding China’s intelligence system requires looking beyond its formal institutions to the broader political functions they perform.
Under Xi Jinping, missions are increasingly organised through patronage networks rather than formal bureaucratic hierarchies. Even a carefully drawn chart misleads, because the real structure is personal and never sits still. The organisational chart cannot show how a single campaign passes from a ministry bureau to a military unit to a state-owned firm to a nominally private tech company as political priorities shift.
What These Books Offer New Delhi and What They Cannot
What, then, do these books offer Indian readers? Both accounts are written from the Five Eyes counter-intelligence tradition, and examine China, which operates largely outside it. Mattis and Brazil’s India accounts are largely historical. Their accounts of the 1955 Kashmir Princess bombing carefully compare different sources to reconstruct what Chinese leaders knew about the attack. However, India appears only because the aircraft belonged to Air India. They argue that the Dalai Lama’s escape to India, together with CIA support for Tibetan resistance, reinforced Chinese belief that India and the United States would use Tibet to weaken China. In the book, India is presented mainly through the Chinese threat perception rather than the country facing Chinese intelligence activities, highlighting an important gap in the book.
Faligot, however, gives India more attention. He writes that the PLA’s Third Department assigned different regions to different listening stations, with Chengdu responsible for monitoring Tibet and India. But his discussion of Tibet also focuses on how China strengthened domestic control, rather than intelligence activities directed at India or the Tibetan community living in India. He covers Coco Island Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) station monitoring missile tests in the Bay of Bengal, the 2008 intrusions into India’s Ministry of External Affairs and National Security Council, and the surveillance of the Dalai Lama’s exile establishment. But even he includes them as episodes in a global survey, not as an account of Chinese intelligence as India’s problem.
They describe how MSS recruits agents in Washington or Canberra, yet remain largely silent on how Chinese intelligence reaches India. Here, influence is exercised less through recruited officials than through infrastructure. Neither Faligot’s historical account nor the institutional anatomy offered by Mattis and Brazil provides a framework for understanding ports, loans, fibre-optic cables, surveillance platforms, or the Belt and Road Initiative as instruments of intelligence collection and political leverage in India’s immediate neighbourhood. This is the same analytical problem in a different setting: when intelligence functions span ports, companies, financial institutions, and government ministries, they become invisible to a framework organised around agencies.
Chinese-built logistics and communications infrastructure now stretches across the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, including the Gwadar deep-water port on the Arabian Sea, the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka, leased to China for 99 years following Sri Lanka’s debt crisis, and the expanding network of port, digital, and surveillance projects in Bangladesh, the Maldives, and Nepal. Each represents a point of access to Chinese-built networks, maritime routes, and politically dependent elites. This is more than a hypothetical concern. When the survey vessel Yuan Wang 5, regarded by India as a space- and missile-tracking ship, docked at Hambantota in 2022 despite New Delhi’s formal objections, the port temporarily ceased to be simply commercial infrastructure and instead functioned as a strategic collection platform. Mattis and Brazil help readers understand the organisational structure of the MSS, but they cannot explain how a commercial port becomes a listening post. India recognises the challenge of infrastructure turning into an intelligence post, yet understanding how infrastructure itself becomes part of China’s intelligence architecture remains difficult.
Nepal provides perhaps the clearest example of Chinese intrusion. Chinese efforts to facilitate the unification of communist factions, cultivate political and student leaders, and pressure Kathmandu over the American-funded Millennium Challenge Corporation compact have all generated concern in New Delhi. What an Indian analyst requires is not only an organisational chart of the United Front Work Department in Beijing, but a map of its activities in Kathmandu, Colombo, and Malé. The book provides the former and necessarily stops there.
The machinery of transnational repression directed at the Tibetan diaspora offers another example. India hosts the world’s largest Tibetan exile community, making covert surveillance, coercive monitoring of relatives in Tibet, and influence operations targeting exile institutions matters of direct relevance to Indian sovereignty. Yet these issues receive little sustained attention in either volume.
The post-Galwan disputes over data, technology, and narratives, India’s bans on Chinese applications, concerns over cyber-enabled penetration of critical sectors, and serious allegations of covert funding of China-sympathetic media are not separate or purely domestic issues. They represent the external extension of mechanisms of control long employed within China itself. This continuity between internal governance and external influence is precisely what agency-centred intelligence literature struggles to capture.
These books explain the MSS, United Front Work Department, civil-military fusion, and Chinese tradecraft, but they stop short of analysing how those instruments operate in India’s neighbourhood. This points to an important gap in existing studies. In India’s neighbourhood, China’s intelligence objectives are often pursued through infrastructure projects, rather than through intelligence agencies alone. Looking only at organisations such as the MSS misses how these activities work together. Instead, the focus should be on the functions they perform. Viewed this way, ports, political influence, and diaspora surveillance are not separate issues but different tools used to advance the Chinese Communist Party’s strategic objectives. This is the perspective that this essay argues India and its neighbours should adopt.
Towards a Functional Reading
For almost three decades, the study of Chinese intelligence was placed in a blind spot between two disciplines. One shaped by the Anglo-American and Soviet experience of the Cold War that treated China as a peripheral subject, and the other which engaged with Chinese politics and security apparatus as history as has been evident in the works of Frederic Wakeman on Republican-era policing, Michael Schoenhals’ work on Mao-era informant networks, and Michael Dutton’s Policing Chinese Politics, leaving the contemporary phase to a thin policy literature that had not really advanced beyond Nicholas Eftimiades’ Chinese Intelligence Operations. This vacuum was filled by folklore around the ‘thousand grains of sand’ thesis, which viewed imagined Chinese collection as a diffuse mobilisation of ethnic Chinese amateurs rather than the work of professional services. Both the books under review close that gap, and their contribution is best measured against this inheritance. Faligot’s contribution provides the necessary breadth with its most ambitious single-volume narrative attempted to date, even when its uneven sourcing makes it more a point of departure than a settled account. Mattis and Brazil’s contribution runs along the line of method. By systematically exploiting Chinese-language sources, they replaced folklore with documentation by re-describing Chinese intelligence as a professional and institutionally different system and not just a patriotic swarm. Subsequent scholarship, especially Alex Joske’s work on the MSS’s front organisations, has built upon this source-driven approach, confirming that these two books have paved the way for the field in its current direction.
Despite the differences in the temperament and rigour of both books, they share the assumption that this review has tried to question, that is, that the agency is the natural unit of analysis. Faligot arranges a century of history around the genealogy of services; whereas Mattis and Brazil arrange the present around organisations, cases, and leaders. My argument claims that under the Xi Jinping leadership, this institutional lens obscures more than it reveals. Therefore, this review presents the observation by both authors from a different unit of analysis, which is the operation itself; asking of each the function that it serves, the leadership priority it advances, and the political actors that direct and coordinate it. Read through these questions, both books point towards three enduring functions of Chinese intelligence, namely Party rule preservation, foreign technology acquisition, and support for coercive activity abroad, all of which cut across and are not reducible to any single organisation. Faligot narrates the multiplication of actors under Xi without asking what constant purpose the multiplication serves.
The implications touch both practice and scholarship. For practitioners, counter-intelligence against a single agency is organised against the wrong object: disrupting one node leaves the function intact, since the Party can reassign it. This matters most for India, where assessments largely remain PLA-centric while the United Front Work Department and the MSS—the most crucial instruments for political interference and technology transfer—remain largely underexamined. Faligot gives the history of Chinese intelligence’s functions; Mattis and Brazil offer the institutions that execute them. What the field now needs is an account of how the Party orchestrates functions across institutions—a question that this review has tried to frame.
Gaurav Sen is a senior research fellow at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and the author of Peril of the Pacific: Military Balance and Battle for Taiwan (Routledge, 2026).
