This discussion on i think a selfevidently important topic, and this is a great reason to be discussing this. We are obviously to highlight, promote, discuss this great new book which justte came out on tuesday i believe, the third was the official launch date. And this is about a topic which is incredibly relevant important but as the authors discuss, understudied and under emphasize its i dont want to waste too much time you with a big long intro. Ive only have an interest i can highlight the work of aruna next to me who is been doing really fantastic reporting for the wall street journal on the same topic and the going to quote from one of her stories from april of they should because us upst nicely where a piece with a colleague dustin the first sentence says chinese spies are increasingly recruiting u. S. Intelligence officersg as part of a widening sustained campaign to shake loose government secrets. Current and former u. S. Official said china has also grown older and more successful in traditional spy games including targeting less conventional recruits and then she quotes that infamous statement by chris wray, the fbi, that no country poses a broader, more severe intelligence collection threat than china. Theyre doing it through chinese Intelligence Services, through Stateowned Enterprises, through ostensibly private Companies Come through graduate students and researchers, through a variety of factors are working on behalf of of china. Finally, this is one my favorite quotes by rob joyce. He says russia is the hurricane. It comes in fast and hard. China is Climate Change, long, slow, pervasive. Hope you suspecn the stage here have disagreements both on some of these statements between each other and about this issue of chinese espionage and what we think we know about the status activity and some of the myths. Without further ado im going to turn over to the authors and we will turn to them for 20 to 25 minutes and they will walk us through the book. Then we will take some time for qanda. I will plant the seed now the qanda period is primarily if not solely about actual question so as you are thinkin were thint the comments you want to make i would ask that you email it to us instead of using precious time we want to hear everyones question so be thinking about questions to ask when we get to the qanda period and with that i will turn over. Thank you very much for hosting us today and also to the Jamestown Foundation for believing in the project and carrying it forward. A quick disclaimer since im in a government position, im speaking here in a personal capacity. Ive taken leave to be here. My views are my own and do not represent the commission on china its staff or any of its members so if you are going to quote what i say i hope that developed knowledge it is in the capacity and doesnt represent any of the people whom i work for or an associated. I hate to downplay expectations for the book. Its not a gripping spy thrill thriller. It is meant to be a bit of a reference guide and primary introduction and we made a number of choices that i think were rather conservative and what they chose to include in the standards by which there is a need to demystify the chinese intelligence and not say there is a 5,000 year history or 3,000 dependinwere3,000 depending howo count it. The invoking has a sort of mystical body of operations. Lets start with thing the thine see and know and build out from there. We try t tried to sketch out ine introductory essay what took place in the 1920s to sort of where we are today. The need to demystify there is no better place to start and the idea that its been kicking around for a very long time the approach to intelligence or any host of metaphors for describing a. It got passed around by a little anecdote saying the grain of sand on the beach or the Information Products you want to gather. They would go back and be gone bygone. The United States with partner and pick up all sorts of signals and throw in some centers along the approaches to the beach and go from there. The chinese on the other hand would send a thousand and india and china would know more about it than anyone else. There is a slight problem with that analogy. Most notably the National Security information you dont get to send a thousand. You cant even get a thousand of arrogance onto the public beach in a very easy way because of the security clearance process. So, because it has a catchy story it sort of came around. The chinese intelligence are basically not using tradecraft. They didnt use traditional methods of handling sources or maintaining that relationship tp indicates agencies and the passage of information through the communication and other things. There are certainly distinct differences in style but that isnt really true and never has been. Second with the amateurs that formed the corform the core of e intelligence did its masking the speaker a little bit to this, but in a lot of the cases if you go through the book and loo do t the hard espionage cases, you dont see amateurs leading the way. When the Intelligence Services are there the author point that i think is important about this is that it completed any chinese entity within the chinese intelligence, so when they said the chinese intelligence working in this way, chinese intelligence meant something very different than what it means when you say russian intelligence and the equivalent if you have core agencies and the community and any chinese person connected it does anything like looking at the technology or influence. For this u. S. Intelligence and j. P. Morgan and the hedge fund. It is set up differently but its the wrong way to do it and that speaks to my we talked about the conservative approach might be included. The other downside of this it creates the notion of every chinese person of the potential spy. Whatever you think of the proposition, that isnt a useful way to help you understand what parts of the system. And its not really true. To say the chinese Intelligence Services have more success. That part you can see but to say that that has been slowly the focus i dont think that accurately captures the history. This is traditional where sometimes in the late 19 forties through 1985. That encompasses the pretty long trail of chinese intelligence. Also i make the point that for years will use the chinese Intelligence Services because of the security situation in east asia and a whole variety of things with that potential impact that was a real threat and it wasnt necessarily operational sophistication but that is changing and i thank you could look at the period covering the book with our revolutionary period of intelligence the middle years of the prc not being that great and more recently the emerging sophistication that is on par. I attribute that to two things. The first in 1983 a bunch of survivors or rather a handful of survivors and a lot of Police Officers were told you work for Intelligence Services. And to give them a lot of skills so should we really be surprised that people for foreign intelligence have better luck they can communicate more directly with those cultural references . I dont think its particularly surprising but beginning in the 19 nineties with fairly significant beneficiaries the pla started major publication profit one prospects to bring out the literature to say this is what we did and one of the biographies the author talks about a meeting in the early 19 nineties that you need to write this book because our people dont know their history and what they are a part of so that we understand they have a long and glorious tradition with the Administrative State security professional. The forward to that book that says this book is for you to study and what are the lessons for you in the modern era . The other thing the Administrative State security did essentially institutes a new Training Program to realize that if those that were in Computer Science you dont have that professional skill set and there seems to have been an effort in the 19 nineties or early 2000s to start recruiting people here are the things that you should do. So they spent their time in school and i cant entirely confirm of the internship programs so that if they were going to pass this off as professional Business People that they would look and talk like a professional business person. But those that survive the meetings in their hotel rooms. For those of you that bumped into the younger generations plan ten years ago were 20 years ago. So there has been a big change. And they saw movement into cyberspace i call this the dreadnought moment. And then to pick up signals to have industrial like infrastructure and with Computing Power and to go beyond what a human being could readily uncover. And then it was largely cut off from the existence. Only in the late seventies or early eighties and then to go for late one fairly far behind but what this offered and then to invest and with that either system. Met with contractors and the benefits of the private sector and this is why everyone was yelling about the pla and nobody has figured out and that attribution came much later and then most of the pla work. And this movement is important and then to capture communications and then it is a complicated process. But that you actually had to take a photograph in the Conference Room and know the quality of your picture to recognize the word greatness when you recreated that you can come back in you had it accurately captured. You had to have the skills to create the batteries. And then to have that plan to try to save your battery so they just werent running and using up the energy while in the building and with this big shift the artisan ship and the craftsmanship from those devices with that skill set because the chinese didnt have those same experiences because when they do it domestically they control the environment with technical surveillance countermeasures so what it looks like today is in the Software Code not the delivery device. So yes you can come up with ways to hide it but it is a very different set of skills to teach where we are from this dreadnought moment if you will. It is important to understand the institutions that are involved. And then to reward particular behaviors and you may or may not be as centralized as you tend to think. Want to read some of those cases in the book to be quite effective and quite useful and some boneheaded things why are we not taking this seriously . And why its important to understand that it is the industry. With dozens and dozens of local state security bureaus. So should we really be surprised they are hiring graduates than the state Security Department . With that breath and variety and that organization that is diverse should look all over the map. And it brings up the important point to say there is some sophistication here. But if you did not understand that it may have been Police Officers first. And for those that were first rather than Something Else. They give very much also thank you to the foundation and those that sponsored us to complete this work. When it felt like we were hacking our way through the jungle but here we are. And with that path that led to today. So the years of the Chinese Communist party. In the years of the intelligence failures for the Chinese Communist party they had basically nothing in place. They had assassins and vap protection peoples and spies but not a structure. But the coup detat in april that year was a complete surprise and at the end of the year and with the canton uprising with the intelligence failure because we know virtually nothing about the enemy. So in this context founded as the first professional organization. It got off to a rocky start. But with the concrete useful spiraling which is referred to today as the three heroes of the dragonslayer, as mentioned earlier and one that survive more than a few years and went on to lead ccp intelligence in the early years of the peoples republic. And that which followed with intelligence people and analysts people who do communications and Technical Work and that survives into the present. With those that were founded at that time and that saves a lot of lives and that was a disaster. And to this day one of my distant relatives was the black sheep you cannot find a picture of him. [laughter] and by 1935 by that time really of the operations of the clever individuals and in 1935 the special Services Section was abolished. This was about the time there was a concrete Strong Influence intelligence operational focus was enemies within. You probably heard of the future and incidents where he purged the red Army Everyone opposed to him and this was one of the first the first of the three left deviations. And with those deviations that are acknowledged today and with the Salvation Campaign and of course the cultural revolution and with that gigantic purge of people and actually there was a traitor because he did not report a meeting with an agent. That left a legacy of purges to solve problems and we see that today even though paying declared the age of political campaigns over with and then to serve as the paramount leader. And then to purge the enemies of pain and left those in tact. And ndds different purges clean out the Chinese Communist intelligence with severe temporary effects. That areas during the revolution under control of Chinese Communist in the peoples republic a toxic environment for enemy spies for those who want to spy. And this was a continual drive and nearly impossible to penetrate eastern china with the beginning of the prc regime the notable exception was the ambush 1961 in the army column and then 1600 pages of classified information. But then to bed. One to that so the strong toxicity for counterintelligence texas city and then to infiltrate and spy on toxicity for the prc to recruit foreign spies. And for those that are tourist baseline of surveillance that we discuss and baseline that everybody goes through and indeed there are clear triggers that lead to focusing on an individual with any indication they are suspicious a sensitive unit that has technology if you are tibetan. So it is easier to recruit foreigners and one in china under these conditions i want to do a footnote to point to the two fbi videos people have made fun of many of you have seen or call the game of ponds one ponds there is a dramatized version of the case of company men of the industrial espionage between the two but that in the game of pawns in the case we are looking at a professional operation but in company men the industrial espionage case estate owned enterprise following amateur program to get some industrial secrets. So with that i will say one more word about influence operations because that question always comes up so there is always a mixup by the way in history between the underground and the intelligence people. By 193839. Intelligence had become a core, a core operation, a core business of the party along with propaganda, military work, and organizational ork. And so, in the offices that the pr that the ccp had in National Cities in the beginning of the united front period which were like little embassies, there were people from each of those departments, including each of those intelligence. The people in intelligence then were often in influence operations, red star over china which many of you may have red by edgar snow is an example of an extremely successful influence operation. And who was involved in that, nobody less than, at that time not only trying to influence people to see the benefits of the communist revolution, but she was also passing code books to local agents and one of her chief contacts, indeed, was wu, an agent of the special Services Section. So, with that, ill conclude and lets do some questions. All right. Well, i want to bring this into conversation and broaden it out. First, a couple of followup questions based on, matt, what you and peter have been talking about. Peter, one of the things you mentioned is about bureaucratic politics or bureaucratic rules and behavior. So my first question is broadly looking at chinese intelligence as a system, its obviously operating under a political system controlled by a markist Leninist Party that will give it particular characteristics. Can you talk about what its like to be an Intelligence Service operating under the communist party of china is this whats distinct about how its bureaucratic incentives are than in say, modern democratic systems . I think there are two that i can speak to that come directly out of the research for this, for the this book. The first would be, you know, for example, if youve read the news about whats been taking place in hong kong or the spokesperson for the ministry of affairs or daily. Theyve painted owl of the disturbances as coming from the United States. And we offer attribute this to some sort of paranoia, but its actually kind of an outgrowth of the system. They have a unique grasp of the Political Trends that its theory therefore gives them policy insight to policies at the time. If something goes wrong, it wasnt the theory, it wasnt the science, it wasnt the analysis, somebody must have done something. So, that mentality creates a drive on the part of the Intelligence Services to essentially ask paranoid questions and its not where the difference is is not a question of what is taking place, its a you know, where is the interference happening . Who is interfering and where a