Even if Beijing’s leadership denies this, experts have been warning for years about China’s various attempts to destabilize Western democracies. The recent arrests in Germany add weight to the warnings.
The Foreign Ministry press conference in Beijing is one of the few opportunities for journalists to ask questions of the Chinese state and party leadership. Wang Wenbin, one of the speakers, strongly rejects the espionage allegations. Something is being exaggerated that doesn’t exist.
The spokesman accused Germany of wanting to manipulate political narratives with the recent events. The goal is clear, to disrupt the atmosphere of cooperation between China and Europe.
For observers, this is an expected reaction: “China basically always denies everything when it comes to such allegations,” says Mareike Ohlberg, who researches China’s influence on democracies in the Asia program of the US German Marshall Fund in Berlin. She can’t necessarily judge the statements in individual cases, “but as a fundamental denial it is of course absurd. We know that China spies and does it relatively systematically.”
Espionage on different levels
With the expansion of the power and control of the Communist Party under state and party leader Xi Jinping, China’s secret services and surveillance authorities have also become increasingly powerful in recent years. Among other things, they are increasingly using technology such as facial recognition and artificial intelligence.
But they don’t just monitor government critics and minorities like the Uyghurs in their own country. Secret services and security authorities around the world have been pointing out Chinese influence and espionage abroad for years.
In countries such as the USA, Australia and Canada, people are already much more alarmed about the threat. There are many different forms, says Ohlberg. “Partly it’s influence and espionage at the political level, trying to get a foot in the door with political decision-makers and then get information about it.”
But of course there is also industrial espionage. “There is espionage, where the aim is to obtain knowledge that may have military use. There is the attempt to take action against people – usually of Chinese origin – who are perceived as dissidents or critics by gathering information about them.”
Bring unrest into democracies
On Monday, two men and a woman were arrested in Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia. They are said to have obtained information about military technology in order to pass it on to Chinese intelligence.
An employee of AfD MEP Maximilian Krah was also arrested in Saxony on Tuesday. He is also said to have spied for China.
The fact that the People’s Republic is trying to influence parties like the AfD is no surprise, says political scientist Ralph Weber from the University of Basel Deutschlandfunk. In addition to collecting information, the state and party leadership has a general interest in causing unrest and strife in democracies: “That’s good for the one-party state because you want to show that there is disorder in liberal democracies and not them function.” China, on the other hand, wants to convey: “We are a different model and our authoritarian model works.”
In addition, there would be the opportunity to introduce agenda items into the democratic process in order to influence public opinion about China, said Weber.
Current cases just the “tip of the iceberg”?
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the Military Counterintelligence Service and the Federal Intelligence Service are increasingly warning about Chinese espionage attempts in Germany. Mareike Ohlberg assumes that the cases that have now become known are just the tip of the iceberg “and that there are a few more cases that have not yet been discovered or that have not yet been publicly communicated – probably both.” At least in terms of extent, the experiments are relatively systematic.