China’s surprising intelligence operations focus after the “watershed” spy flight.

The American public may have reached a “watershed” moment in awareness and understanding of Chinese surveillance methods, creating an opportunity to understand some of the more surprising ways Beijing carries out its intelligence-gathering operations.

“What was interesting about this whole incident last week was that it was a wake-up call to your average American about how aggressive and extensive China’s spying activities are in this country,” Matt McInnis, Senior Fellow of the Institute for the Study of China’s War Program, he told Fox News Digital.

“There is probably no more aggressive espionage activity in the world than what China has conducted in recent decades.”

The Pentagon announced Thursday that the US government had detected a high-altitude surveillance balloon, first spotted over Montana, where it hovered over Malmstrom Air Force Base. The United States uses the base to store nuclear weapons.

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Senior State and Defense Department officials have labeled the surveillance balloon’s presence in US airspace an “unacceptable” violation of US sovereignty, and the military shot down the balloon as it reached the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday afternoon.

McInnis said he hoped the spy balloon would serve as a “watershed” for the China surveillance conversation in America, “especially for people who are in a position to actually do something of significance.”

The media has extensively covered more traditional intelligence-gathering and espionage methods — cybersecurity, satellites, double agents, honeytraps, and TikTok — but China has taken an approach some call a “mosaic” or “gap,” aiming to acquire as much information as possible, no matter how small it may seem.

Here are some more subtle ways China uses its tools on US citizens and interests.

FINANCIAL

Many of China’s operations focus on money, whether through more insidious uses such as bribes or blackmail, or more gentle methods such as financing and buying institutions and people overseas.

“My memory of these cases is this [money] that seems to be a big motivator,” McInnis said. “And then others, who have family and family ties within China, can serve as sources of potential nationalism or pressure on their families. That was the most common thing.”

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China seeks to use the money to gain influence and access to American institutions, particularly within government or education.

Most famously, China sought to buy Westminster Choir College in 2018, with the Chinese government acting through a for-profit corporation, according to NPR. Some said Beijing’s interest was in operating near Princeton University, which has a reputation as a center of learning for the US intelligence community.

Beijing has also provided funding to some university institutions to open new facilities as part of Confucius Institute networks, including the Brooklyn Campus of Medger Evers College and Columbia University, reported the New York Post.

The Institutes provide classes in Chinese language, history and culture, but the US State Department in 2020 designated the schools as part of China’s propaganda apparatus.

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“The university’s disclosure of funding from foreign sources is in full compliance with federal donation reporting requirements,” a Columbia spokesperson said at the time.

McInnis explained that while most won’t see education funding as espionage, it “provides access to many institutions, organizations, educational businesses, civic organizations that allow China to theoretically better understand how America works.”

“[They learn] how our business community, scientific community, political organizations and the public work so they can develop and refine more influence and disinformation and other operations in the future,” said McInnis.

“I think they understand us better than we understand them,” she added.

LONG-TERM ASSETS

American media extensively covered the revelation of an agent, known as Fang Fang or Christine Fang, who targeted up-and-coming US politicians through fundraising campaigns, networking or even romantic and sexual liaisons to gain access to political power.

But China can and reportedly turns American businessmen and government officials into assets.

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“There are tons of classic stories over the decades about how Chinese security services have set up surveillance operations in hotels or casinos that Americans or others frequent and try to detain them and pressure them to blackmail them, to record the drug use, sexual activity and other things that could happen in these places,” McInnis said, clarifying that he was not personally aware of any cases.

More pressing, according to McInnis, is the fact that it’s “almost impossible for any type of American to travel to China with electronics and be sure they haven’t been compromised,” which he says could provide China with much-needed sensitive information. can be used for “potential espionage and blackmail activities”.

A survey conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found 160 publicly reported Chinese espionage cases against the United States between 2000 and 2020.

Of those CSIS could identify, 26% were “non-Chinese actors,” defined as “usually US people recruited by Chinese officials.” The incidents involved attempts to acquire military technology, commercial technology, or information about US civilian agencies or politicians.

“China seeks to obtain data on technologies early in the R&D cycle, before all relevant data is classified to a higher level and it is more difficult to obtain, certainly before a real system is designed.” weapon,” Rebekah Koffler, president of Doctrine & Strategy Consulting and a former DIA intelligence officer, told Fox News Digital.

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“This approach saves China money by not making the same financial outlays on R&D and speeds up the development and implementation phases,” he explained. “Some Chinese military hardware looks similar to US systems because they are built based on stolen technology and sometimes by design.

“China is the biggest counterintelligence threat to the United States, followed by Russia.”

POLICE

One of the most egregious examples of China’s more aggressive operations involved the alleged establishment of unauthorized “police stations” in US and European cities to monitor its citizens living abroad.

“These operations avoid bilateral police and judicial cooperation and violate the international rule of law and may violate territorial integrity in third countries involved in the establishment of a parallel police mechanism using illegal methods,” says a report by Safeguard Defenders, a human rights observatory, released in September 2022.

The stations’ initial purpose reportedly focused on dealing with citizens overseas, but the report also linked them to efforts to spread Chinese influence and propaganda overseas, The Guardian reported.

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But Beijing’s reach has also extended to US law enforcement, as in the case of veteran FBI electronics technician Kun Shan “Joey” Chun, who became entangled in an undercover operation in 2015 and pleaded guilty that he acted as an unregistered foreign agent and was sentenced to two years in prison, reported the New York Post.

In 2020, NYPD policeman and Army Reservist Baimadajie Angwang was accused of spying on fellow Tibetan-Americans and passing information to a handler at the Chinese consulate in Manhattan.

Fox News Digital asked the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC for comment on the ongoing spying allegations, and the embassy spokesperson responded by forwarding comments made by China’s foreign ministry last week about the surveillance balloon.

Eric Shawn of Fox News contributed to this report.