China | The smokeless war

A battle against spies in China is spooking locals and foreigners

A revised law gives the police plenty of excuses to target people they dislike

In this photo provided by the Dong family, Dong Yuyu poses for a photo in Beijing in June 2019. A veteran Chinese journalist who worked at a ruling Communist Party-affiliated newspaper and was a Harvard University fellow faces espionage charges after he was detained while meeting with a Japanese diplomat in a restaurant, his family said Monday, April . (Dong Family via AP)

May 4th 2023

China’s struggle against spying is “extremely grim”, said a spokesman for the country’s rubber-stamp parliament late last month. The techniques used by foreign spooks, he added, were becoming ever harder to detect. To tackle this, the legislature approved a new, more sweeping, version of the country’s counter-espionage law on April 26th. Among foreigners in China, it is causing jitters. In what Chinese officials call their “smokeless war” against spies, risks to the innocent are growing.

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “The smokeless war”