China’s top security agency mocks CIA Chinese spy recruitment drive as ‘farcical’

Name: New CIA videos seek to lure Chinese officials to leak secrets to US
Uploaded: 2025-06-25T09:10:47.000Z
Duration: 3 min 25 s
Description: New CIA videos seek to lure Chinese officials to leak secrets to US

US spy agency’s ‘clumsy’ effort to recruit Chinese informants is budget-driven stunt in face of Trump cuts, Ministry of State Security says

Reading Time:2 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

In an online article posted on Wednesday, China’s Ministry of State Security claimed the CIA has doubled down on hyping the “China threat” with recruitment videos that were “riddled with clumsy rhetoric and slanderous claims”. Photo: Reuters

Yuanyue Dangin Beijing

Published: 5:10pm, 25 Jun 2025Updated: 7:03pm, 25 Jun 2025

China’s top intelligence agency says a recent CIA campaign aimed at recruiting informants from China while hyping up the “China threat” is a sign the US spy agency is desperately looking for ways to survive Washington’s budget cuts.

“As resources shrink, the CIA has doubled down on hyping the ‘China threat’ as its lifeline, peddling fear to Congress and taxpayers to carve out a larger slice of the budget pie,” the Ministry of State Security (MSS) said in an article published on Wednesday on its official WeChat account.

The post, published in both Chinese and English, referred to a US Central Intelligence Agency effort to recruitChinese spies as “yet another farcical performance”.

03:25

New CIA videos seek to lure Chinese officials to leak secrets to US

This is the first time that the MSS, which has become increasingly active on social media, has responded to the CIA advertisements, made via two Chinese-language videos posted on social media last month.

The videos were intended to exploit possible dissatisfaction among Chinese officials with the ruling Communist Party leadership and encourage them to leak secrets to the United States.

A public recruitment drive, launched by the CIA last October, posted instructions online on how to safely contact the spy agency in the hope of attracting informants from China, Iran and North Korea.

Beijing has condemned the drive, with Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian labelling it last month as “a serious violation of China’s national interests and a blatant political provocation”.