China Accuses CIA of Launching All-Out Spy War

China's spy agency has accused the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of launching an all-out spy war.

"CIA has committed substantially more resources toward China-related intelligence collection, operations, and analysis around the world, more than doubling the percentage of its overall budget focused on China over just the last two years. CIA is hiring and training more Mandarin speakers, expanding the confrontation against China to every corner of the agency," the Ministry of State Security (MSS) said in a post on China's do-everything app WeChat on February 18.

The allegations by the MSS were in response to CIA Director William Burns' recent article in Foreign Affairs magazine titled 'Spycraft and Statecraft', in which he said the agency is increasing its efforts to address geopolitical competition with China. The agency now regards China as its top challenge.

"China remains the only U.S. rival with both the intent to reshape the international order and the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do so," Burns wrote in the article published on January 30.

In 2021, Burns announced the establishment of the China Mission Center, which would "address the global challenge posed by the People's Republic of China that cuts across all of the Agency's mission areas," the CIA said.

The MSS said on WeChat that besides increasing espionage activity against China, the U.S. has also smeared Beijing for justifiable defense through a counterespionage law.

"In recent years, the USA, on the one hand, started intelligence wars, sparing no effort to step up its espionage against China and, on the other hand, 'brought suit against its victims,' scandalously smearing China's justifiable defense and trying to misrepresent the Counterespionage Law of PRC as an 'evil law,'" the MSS said in the WeChat post on February 18.

MSS added that China will need legal means to guard against spying by the U.S.

"Now that CIA has repeatedly vowed to rebuild its intelligence networks in China so as to gather more China-related intelligence, China has no choice but to use legal means to guard against and crack down on espionage activities," the MSS said.

Li Wei, an expert on national security at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, a think tank affiliated with the MSS, told the Chinese state media outlet Global Times on February 18 that the U.S. is using all its means to maintain hegemony in the international order.

"This highlighted the extreme measures the US is willing to take to maintain its hegemony in intelligence utilization and application," Li said.

Newsweek contacted the U.S. State Department for comment.

Chinese state media have said that the MSS published the WeChat post in Chinese and English to help spread the message about China's response to Burn's article domestically.

"This is not the first time that the Ministry of State Security published articles in bilingual form to raise awareness among our domestic population about the importance of safeguarding national security and countering espionage," Global Times reported on February 18.

The MSS said that while the U.S. and China were trying to stabilize under the 'San Francisco vision', the CIA led by Burns has increased its spying efforts.

The San Francisco vision, as described by the Chinese state media, emerged after Chinese leader Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden met at the Filoli Estate in California last year for a summit.

"While China and the United States are actively implementing the San Francisco Vision, William Burns, the director of the CIA, in a recent article on Foreign Affairs titled 'Spycraft and Statecraft', said that the CIA has committed substantially more resources toward China-related intelligence collection, operations and analysis around the world," the MSS said.