Opinion | Why criticism of a third term for China’s Xi Jinping is rich coming from the US
- Despite its clandestine interventions in China and elsewhere, America remains convinced of its exceptionalism and blind to how others perceive it
- In a similar vein, Western commentary on Xi’s reappointment can sound foolish, given that America set term limits for presidents not that long ago
Maybe the lady intel officer who sought to recruit me for a CIA operation involving Chinese espionage on the US West Coast didn’t look the part – though, then again, perhaps she did. Modest in dress, controlled in comportment, she sat with me in the back of a large steak restaurant in Los Angeles without once raising her voice.
She told me she was proud to be “working for the President of the United States, that’s what we do”, and I believed her. She paid for everything (as she had for two prior dinners) with cash, not credit card, leaving no written record behind. But I left her visibly disappointed – mission unaccomplished: I just couldn’t go CIA-ing while remaining a proper American journalist and that was what I wound up telling her.
This rendezvous took place a half-dozen years ago but popped into mind while I was drinking in Agents of Subversion, an urgently needed book by Yonsei University professor John Delury.
His book is about the CIA’s covert war in China. Did American undercover agents and forces try to influence the Chinese civil war? Yes. Did the US have assets working within Hong Kong after the 1997 handover that helped stir the anti-China hotpot? You bet. Even today? Please, let’s not be naive.
The security services of China are scarcely covert. Their assets and agents are all over the place. In fact, in the late 1990s, a report by the Select Committee on US National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China made extraordinary claims about Chinese espionage, especially systemic technology theft, that the American media replayed to Americans with abandon.
