China’s counterintelligence officers have “uncovered multiple espionage cases in the aerospace sector,” according to the regime’s spy agency.
“Certain countries regard our nation as a major competitor in the space field and spare no effort to contain and suppress us,” China’s Ministry of State Security agency said Friday on social media, citing the cases as proof of “the despicable acts of certain countries’ intelligence agencies attempting to infiltrate and steal secrets from our aerospace field.”
The post continues a trend of the Chinese spy agency’s emergence as a prominent player in China’s propaganda initiatives. The agency made its latest intervention against a backdrop of growing anxiety about military competition in space and an unfolding series of espionage controversies involving China and NATO allies.
“The militarization and weaponization of space have increased, while progress in establishing international governance rules has been slow, leading to a deteriorating space security environment,” the ministry said, according to state-run Global Times. “Especially with the development of China’s space technology, some countries view China as a major competitor in the space sector and spare no effort to contain and suppress China.”
The agency published the statement just days after the United Kingdom’s top signals intelligence official identified Beijing as “an epoch-defining challenge” for her colleagues.
“Responding to the scale and complexity of this challenge is GCHQ’s top priority and we now devote more resource to China than any other single mission,” GCHQ Director Anne Keast-Butler said in a Tuesday speech at a cyber conference in the United Kingdom. “In cyberspace, we believe that the PRC’s irresponsible actions weaken the security of the internet for all. China has built an advanced set of cyber capabilities and is taking advantage of a growing commercial ecosystem of hacking outfits and data brokers at its disposal.”
The speech dovetailed with an array of indictments in Western countries. British officials unveiled charges against three people accused of working on behalf of Hong Kong-based security services on Monday, leading to a diplomatic dispute that coincided with Keast-Butler’s remarks at the cyber conference.
“China is gravely concerned over the arrest and prosecution of the Chinese citizens,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Tuesday. “For quite some time, the UK has repeatedly hyped up the so-called ‘China spies’ and ‘China’s cyber attacks.’ All these accusations are groundless and unacceptable vilification. China firmly opposes such despicable, politically-driven ploys in the name of legal justice and national security.”
China has a deeply-ingrained reputation for espionage, with Western observers convinced that Chinese hackers have stolen “research and development pertaining to some of America’s most important military technology.” Such “systematic theft of intellectual property,” the FBI maintains, unfolds on a scale that renders Chinese espionage “the greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality.”
Yet China’s focus in those operations appears to be changing from mere theft of information to something more practical in a crisis.
“The PRC’s People’s Liberation Army has invested tremendous resources in building up their cyber program, and they are doing this for one reason: to hold critical infrastructure at risk in a time of global competition,” U.S. National Cyber Director Harry Coker told the cyber conference. “We are determined not to let that happen. The U.S. government has already identified and disrupted the PLA’s efforts to pre-position on our critical infrastructure networks.”
