10

THE 610 OFFICE AND THE FIVE POISONS

On the night of 24–25  April 1999, hundreds of coaches from all over China converged on Tiananmen Square, where the police were on high alert as the tenth anniversary of the student massacre approached. Demonstrators from Beijing, carrying small plastic bags, joined the flood of protesters. By early morning, there were 10–15,000 men and women of all ages sitting on the ground on the western side of the square, encircling Zhongnanhai—not only the seat of the government, but also the residence of the ruling elite.

As far as President Jiang Zemin was concerned, there was no doubt: these peaceful demonstrators, from Falun Gong, were besieging both the state and the CCP.  It was like a return to the events of 1989. And this protest felt like a “personal message”: the president had begun his career in Changchun, Manchuria, in automobile production. Changchun was also where, in 1992, a former army musician and son of two intellectuals called Li Hongzhi had set up Falun Gong, of which he was the guru.1 Li was by now in exile in the United States, and it was surprising that he had succeeded in organizing such a huge gathering from such a distance.

The demonstration had already been going on for five hours, without a sound; there was no chanting of slogans. Absolute silence reigned, while the growing mass of protesters, seated in the lotus position, now extended for 2 kilometres. They were simply asking for the release of some of the movement’s leaders, who had been arrested several days earlier in Tianjin.

A reporter I met in Beijing while conducting my own research was also there that day. He explains why the Chinese leadership was in such a state of alarm at this development: “It was really disturbing. The protesters seemed to be in some kind of state of enlightenment. Their eyes were empty, their gestures jerky. It was as though they came from a different time, five centuries ago. It was not surprising that the CCP panicked. They were like ghosts from a distant past; or, to put it more simply, they were the generation that had been sacrificed by the Cultural Revolution. They saw younger people making money in present-day China, while they, whether former Red Guards, or the Red Guards’ victims, were taking refuge in an ascetic philosophy.”

Shortly before the demonstration, a physicist from the Academy of Social Sciences, He Zuoxiu, had published a vitriolic article entitled “Why young people should not practice Qigong”, the traditional holistic and meditative practice adopted by Falun Gong. In his attack on the organization, he drew a parallel with the Boxer Rebellion, which had ultimately led to the fall of Empress Ci Xi after the siege of the foreign legations in 1900, thus bringing to an end the reign of the last dynasty, the Manchu Qing. Falun Gong, according to He, were threatening to destroy China at the close of the twentieth century, just as martial arts practitioners had done at its beginning. Paradoxically, it was He’s article that had provoked the protest in Tianjin where the Falun Gong loyalists had been arrested, leading in turn led to this demonstration on 25  April.

Other scholars compare Falun Gong with the Taiping insurgency movement of the 1850s against the Qing. The Hakka leader Hong Xiuquan has been described as a precursor of Li Hongzhi, the Falun Gong guru. For the Hong Kong academic Maria Hsia Chang, it is possible to detect a direct descendance from the fourteenth-century White Lotus, one of the most important ancient movements under the Ming and Qing dynasties.2

Jiang Zemin believed absolutely that Chinese emperors since time immemorial had feared such movements—and that such movements might equally overthrow a “Red Emperor”. In 1989, during the student protests in Tiananmen, many Qigong associations, whose own ideals were also symbolized by the Goddess of Democracy, had offered their support to the students. When the president left the compound through the northern exit, he was driven to the edge of the small alleyway neighbourhoods called hutongs, towards streets where the Falun Gong followers were patiently lined up. Meanwhile, You Xigui, Jiang’s former bodyguard from Shanghai, put his entire service on high alert.3

Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, more pragmatic and less ideological than Jiang, was refusing to make a drama out of the situation. He had already been down into the street to talk with the Falun Gong followers, and that evening, he tried to convince the Politburo to be lenient and allow a space for the movement to exist, insisting that “If people join Falun Gong, it is because they have been excluded from economic growth, and that’s our fault!”4 When the former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten later questioned him about the events of 25  April, Zhu told him that it was impossible to contain the movement. Patten’s response in his memoir was to wonder, “Where were the security services and the police?”5

Luo Gan triggers the manhunt

Eventually, after a ten-hour sit-in, the Falun Gong followers left, as peacefully as they had arrived.

Jiang Zemin, however, was not going to let them get away with it. Unlike Zhu Rongji, he advocated harsh measures, because he imagined, and proclaimed, that Falun Gong’s aim was to undermine authority in the same way as the Solidarity trade union in Poland had done in the 1980s, to the horror of Deng Xiaoping. Now the relationship between the two old friends, Zhu and Jiang, both former mayors of Shanghai, began to deteriorate. The president also took to task another member of the Politburo, Luo Gan, China’s top policeman, demanding to know how it had come to this: why hadn’t the Guoanbu warned them about Falun Gong, and where had the Gonganbu been? “How could it be that in one night the Falun Gong just appeared? Did they come from under the ground?” This was perhaps an allusion to Dixia Cheng, the underground city of Beijing, whose corridors still lay in wait for leaders to flee the capital in case of insurrection.6

There was a perfidious implication to Jiang Zemin’s remarks. Might this event have been deliberately set up by the secret services, the better to repress the movement afterwards? The question arose because it had been discovered that the physicist He Zuoxiu, who had originally sparked things off with his anti-Falun Gong article, was none other than Luo Gan’s brother-in-law.7 Luo was the head of the party’s political-legal commission (Zhengfawei), which coordinated the actions of the security services and had representatives from all the important services: this included the new Guoanbu minister, Xu Yongyue, as well as his predecessor, now Gonganbu minister, Jia Chunwang.

We have, of course, already met Luo Gan, the Kang Sheng of the 1990s, after the Tiananmen student massacre. But now that he is ten years older and wiser, it is time to detail his career path. Born in 1935 in the Year of the Pig in Shandong, Luo Gan was the son of one of the ten Red Army marshals—Luo Ronghuan, a hero of the Long March who had been responsible for its security, before becoming PLA chief of staff in 1949 at the founding of the PRC; he was also at one point commissar for another, more famous marshal, Lin Biao.

His son, though, did not do things strictly in the correct order. Luo Gan had climbed to the upper echelons of industrial technology and trade unions, which had enabled him to travel. He spoke French, English and German, which he had learned at the Karl Marx University of Leipzig.8 It was during the Tiananmen protests in 1989 that his career took a dramatic turn. As labour minister under Prime Minister Li Peng, he helped Li carry out the severe crackdown in Beijing. When Jiang Zemin took control of the party, Li Peng and his “tough guy” faction imposed Luo Gan on the Politburo, and in 1998, Luo Gan took control of the political-legal commission, replacing Ren Xianjin, whose deputy he had been.

This commission was not all-powerful solely because of its control over the security services, but also because it controlled the offices of prosecutors and courts, and the labour re-education camps, the laojiao. Before 1989, several reformers—including the master spy at the time, Qiao Shi—had wanted to abolish it, for it was a powerful brake on any inclination towards the separation of powers and therefore the possibility of a democratic leadership. But in 1989, Luo Gan committed himself fully to repressing the student uprising. He is widely held to have been responsible for a fake video that circulated showing students throwing Molotov cocktails at a tank—we now know this was actually footage of two tanks’ regiments battling it out during the crackdown.

Luo Gan was an unconditional supporter of the established order and of harsh measures and, at every meeting of the political-legal committee, he enjoined the police cadres and secret agents of the special services to protect national security a little more. Yan Da!—Strike harder!—was his favoured slogan: hit both criminals and dissidents hard. As far as he was concerned, they were one and the same.

After the Falun Gong protest in April 1999, Jiang Zemin’s anger would not be soothed. It must be said that he had a fair amount on his plate that spring. In March, his trip to Europe had turned sour when pro-Tibetan demonstrators had heckled him in Switzerland. In May came the NATO air forces’ destruction of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. When it came to Falun Gong, the Chinese leadership wanted results. Luo Gan was given “100 days and 100 men”—special investigators, handpicked to clear up Falun Gong. Across the country, the Gonganbu was tasked with registering suspected members of the movement.

In June, Luo delivered his report. These were its main conclusions:

– The 25  April demonstration had been organized after the clandestine visit to Beijing by the Falun Gong guru Li Hongzhi, who had arrived on 22  April under an assumed identity. He left for Hong Kong on 24  April, just before the mass demonstration around Zhongnanhai.

– From Hong Kong, Li had made twenty-nine phone calls to Falun Gong’s secret headquarters in Beijing to issue instructions.

– The Beijing leaders of the movement had been identified and arrested; among them was Li Chang, director of computer services at the Gonganbu in Beijing. At the organizers’ trial, which began in late 1999, he was sentenced to eighteeen years in a labour camp.

– Falun Gong claimed to have 70 million members, but the security services estimated the number at only 3 million. The cult had spread to forty countries.

– Li Hongzhi had huge financial means, especially through the sale of meditation books and tapes used by his followers, as well as funds whose provenance was unknown.

– Residing in the United States, there was no doubt that he enjoyed the support of the CIA, especially in terms of his wide range of technical resources—radio, television, a weekly newspaper published in several languages, The Epoch Times, and above all his extremely well-designed website, which was used not only for propaganda purposes, but also for conveying internal information about China and the actions of its leaders.9

– It was vital to ban Falun Gong over the whole of the PRC’s territory.

– It was also vital to set up a special intelligence service to monitor it and ensure effective propaganda against the movement as it sought support from Western countries, just as the Dalai Lama and Tibetan independence movement were doing.

Luo Gan’s investigation also caused great concern when it revealed that various well-known figures had joined Falun Gong. Among them was Qian Xuesen, the father of Chinese missiles and the atomic bomb, who had been tempted back to the PRC by the intelligence services in the 1950s while working at an American research laboratory. Later on, Qian had sunk into a delusional mysticism, proposing to supply the western provinces of China with drinking water by detonating an atomic bomb under the ground in Tibet. Some time later, Qian was made to put his name to a call for the banning of Falun Gong.

Even some parts of the PLA were implicated. Luo’s investigation revealed that Li Hongzhi, after founding the movement in 1992, had managed to lecture in various officers’ messes and other closed groups within the 2nd Artillery, the most sensitive sector of the PLA.  This was the Strategic Nuclear Weapons Corps, which had intercontinental and other missiles pointed at Japan and Taiwan. This revelation was even more delicate given that one of the main officers in charge of the 2nd Artillery was General Luo Dongjin, deputy political commissioner—and Luo Gan’s own brother.

The 2nd Artillery was also affected by another incident at this time, carefully concealed by the authorities. It took place on 26  April 1999—the day after the Falun Gong demonstration—between 5.30am and 10.30pm. The central military command of the PLA in the Canton region found itself totally paralyzed following an attack by a computer virus. Communications were disrupted between this command centre—which oversees the South China Sea fleet as well as the units of the infamous 2nd Artillery—and the eighty-plus bases that it controls. While PLA computer scientists were struggling to fix the system, the leadership was torn between several hypotheses: was this a ramping up of Falun Gong aggression? Was the CIA behind it? Taiwan? Or all three?10

In the aftermath of the cyber-attack, orders were given for all PLA soldiers who were Falun Gong adherents to come forward, sign a declaration renouncing their faith, and hand over any sacred objects or philosophy books written by Li Hongzhi. Military security, led by General Zhang Zhenhua, focused particularly on the situation in the special forces units and the People’s Armed Police (PAP), whose officers practiced martial arts (wushu) including Qigong gymnastics (“work of the breath”), which was at the heart of Falun Gong recruitment.

The problem was that these elite units of the PLA and the police numbered no fewer than 200,000 men. This was the fundamental challenge for the Chinese leadership: Falun Gong recruited ordinary Chinese citizens by word of mouth, many of whom practised Qigong, or Taijiquan, as part of their lifestyle. Former president Yang Shangkun, for example, practised Qigong with a master who also happened to be the Chinese doctor of French fashion designer Pierre Cardin. It was impossible to outlaw an age-old practice that was an integral part of Chinese daily life.

This was why Luo Gan’s men proposed engaging in a programme of targeted monitoring and infiltration. This would include operations around the world in countries where there was a large Chinese community, such as Australia and France. The security services coordinated operations to begin in Beijing, then spread throughout all the regions of China, before sending representatives to embassies abroad. Comrade Luo’s new 610 Office was about to become Falun Gong’s designated nemesis.

The 610 Office divides up the globe

On 10  June 1999, the 610 Office (liu-yi-ling), charged with leading the crusade against the Falun Gong movement, was born. Its name is derived from this founding date. As a crisis coordinating body, it soon attained the status of a fully-fledged ministry, under the aegis of Luo’s political-legal commission. Its small band of 100 elite investigators spawned 1 million policemen, from Beijing to deepest China, who were brought together to work for the 610. Its administration was put into the hands of Liu Jing, a deputy Gonganbu minister. In terms of logistics, he relied mainly on the Gonganbu’s 26th Bureau, headed by Zhang Yue. Through Zhang’s intervention, regional 610 Offices—charged with tracking, arresting and interrogating followers of the movement—were established within each regional Gonganbu office, in conjunction with its 5th Bureau—the one responsible for overseeing the Chinese gulag, the laogai.

The largest offices were set up in Beijing, headed by Zhang Xianlin; Shanghai, headed by Li Genlin; and Tianjin, headed by Zhao Yuezeng. All the satellite offices, including those in the most remote provinces, had to report back on their campaign against Falun Gong. This campaign was supported by a major propaganda drive, at the instigation of the deputy prime minister, another high-up overseeing the 610 Office. The propaganda included regular broadcasts on the state television channel CCTV and the publication of books detailing Li Hongzhi’s supposed corruption and Falun Gong’s responsibility for the apparent suicides of many of its followers. The most widely circulated of these books, by Ji Shi, was entitled Li Hongzhi and his “Falun Gong”: Deceiving the Public and Ruining Lives.11

This text, which reflected the authorities’ point of view, claimed that “Li Hongzhi’s illegal organization, the Falun Dafa Research Society, was the highest body within Falun Gong, of which Li Hongzhi was the chairman. It had 39 general education offices and 28,000 practice locations across the country. Two million people joined Falun Gong.”

Many of its members were sent to laogai camps, and an intense human rights struggle began. Falun Gong has several strange and complex aspects, with its fusion of Buddhism, Taoism and belief in the imminent arrival of aliens who will come to Earth and trigger the ultimate destruction of communism. The vast majority of its members are Chinese who dream of having more freedom. The nonviolence they displayed garnered them great sympathy abroad, especially in the English-speaking world, as a persecuted minority religion. Within its own media, the movement detailed the suffering, torture, abuse and harassment of its members, claiming, for example, that systematic organ harvesting and execution of Falun Gong prisoners was taking place.12

The 610 Office, which Falun Gong calls the “Chinese Gestapo”, was monitoring the movement in Canada, Ireland, the United States and Australia, where several MPs spoke out in defence of the organization. In dozens of countries, its members were demonstrating daily in front of the Chinese embassies.

Because the movement was being guided by Li Hongzhi from the United States and had global ramifications, the 610 Office had for months been placing investigators in all Chinese embassies, which was creating tensions with the Guoanbu representatives already posted there for foreign intelligence, as well as those responsible for keeping an eye on Tibetans and separatist Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Each believed their sector and their mission was the most important. Intelligence service officials dealing with security for the forthcoming Beijing Olympics believed that the links between al-Qaeda and certain Uyghurs posed a greater danger than non-violent Tibetans and Falun Gong devotees. These tensions continued into the Hu Jintao era. In Moscow in 2006, where a handful of Falun Gong devotees demonstrated with placards around the clock, the Guoanbu station chief Cheng Guoping complained that he was wasting a huge amount of time on the movement, when he should have been focusing on coordinated anti-NATO actions with allies from the Russian FSB and SVR.

Taking matters into its own hands, Luo Gan’s political-legal commission in Beijing demanded—in view of upcoming major events such as the 2008 Olympics and the Shanghai World Expo in 2010—that the heads of all embassy services come together to support both permanent and roaming representatives of the 610 Office, and that they coordinate with each other in order to collaborate, sometimes at regional level. This meant representatives of the CCP, the Guoanbu station chiefs, the Central Committee’s International Liaison Department (Lianluobu), the CCP Research Bureau (which had a disciplinary role within embassies), education advisors, police attachés and even military attachés. The political and legal departments of the embassies were also charged with studying the legal provisions in each country, to see if local laws against cults could be invoked to permit a ban on Falun Gong, which, from the outside, might resemble Scientology or other similar cults.

This was obviously a serious tactical error on the part of Luo Gan. By forcing these officials to come out of the woodwork, drawing attention to themselves and their close surveillance not only of Tibetans, Uyghurs and democratic dissidents but also of (often Western) Falun Gong adherents, he opened the way for the host countries’ counterintelligence services to identify the structure of the Chineses networks. The Gonganbu police attaché in Paris regularly attempted to persuade both the French interior ministry and the head of Interpol in Lyon to allow the police to monitor Falun Gong followers as “criminal elements” and to share the results of their investigations with the Chinese. This was obviously out of the question. Similarly, it had recently been noted that Zhang Jinxing, the former press attaché at the Chinese embassy in Paris, had returned to the French capital, this time under cover of being a doorman, which was hardly a promotion. His true mission was to monitor Parisian Falun Gong devotees, under the guidance of the influential Song Jingwu, who represented the CCP’s political services as minister counsellor, number two in the embassy.

With all of this activity emerging, European security agencies learned that the Chinese had set in motion a programme to list all members of martial arts associations practicing Taijiquan and Qigong gymnastics and so on, fearing that Western followers of the movement were entering China as tourists. Chinese people in the diaspora were joining Qigong clubs to investigate Falun Gong members, as well as setting up clubs from scratch to lure in members in Madrid, Brussels, Dublin, Berlin, London and Paris, and then manipulate them.

In western France, for example, the counterintelligence investigations focused on several clubs, in particular a Taijiquan circle, established four years after the birth of Falun Gong by a former NCO of the PLA, who had since acquired French nationality by marriage. The club organized pro-Beijing visits to China, which angered some members. The purpose was to prevent fans of Chinese meditative and martial arts from succumbing to Falun Gong’s call. But this tactic was a double-edged sword. On multiple occasions, members of the Chinese security services themselves became fascinated by the principles of the movement, and became moles for it. Many operatives who joined Falun Gong for operational purposes ended up defecting.

Han, the “Chinese Schindler”

I met Ward Elcock, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (1994–2004), at a 2002 symposium in Montreal on the judicial impact of the 9/11 attacks. His words on that occasion came back to me while I was writing this book: “In Canada, the Chinese intelligence services are becoming more active and aggressive. And that requires a new form of organization.” He recounted to me a whole series of technical operations mounted by the Chinese.13

As far back as 1999, his predecessor as the head of CSIS, Charles Svoboda, had described how the PLA’s special services were setting up intelligence cells in Canada with the help of Chinese mafia members, and embedding sleeper agents within the diaspora communities in Toronto and Vancouver. The CSIS has grown since Svoboda’s day. In the 2000s, its counterintelligence section on China had eighty officials—a huge number that the German and French services could only dream of, although they too have expanded in size and expertise.

But what Elcock didn’t tell me, of course, was that a few months previously his service had picked up a Chinese man in Toronto called Han Guangsheng, who turned out to be the first 610 Office policeman to throw in his lot with Falun Gong. According to the movement’s website, he was a kind of “Chinese Schindler”. After fourteen years of loyal service with the Gonganbu, Han had been catapulted to the leadership of the Shenyang City Judicial Bureau in Liaoning (Manchuria). In this capacity, he was responsible for running five laogai camps in the north-east, for five years. He witnessed the shocking treatment of the 500 Falun Gong adherents who were interned there during this period, including the rape of a 15-year-old follower by prison guards. He banned abuse in the camps under his command. Even more remarkably, he allowed 150 prisoners to escape without trying to recapture them, and drafted a memorandum against the use of torture practised in a further camp for which he was not responsible; he claimed torture was forbidden under the Chinese constitution. Methods used included caning and electric shocks, popularized during the Kang Sheng era.

In September 2001, while on a visit to Toronto, Han Guangsheng defected. He was not the only one to do so; some time later, another senior cadre in the Shanghai judicial services followed his lead, seeking asylum in France. Perhaps France simply did not have a budget comparable to that of the Americans—or perhaps it didn’t wish to antagonize Beijing? Either way, the France of Jacques Chirac, a “great friend of the Chinese”, was certainly not a wise choice for seeking asylum from the PRC, whatever its reputation as the birthplace of universal human rights.

The 610 Office moles confess

On the whole, Australia tended to be a better bet. This was where Chinese services lost another defector on 26  February 2005, when Hao Fengjun, a 32-year-old security officer, arrived in the country via Hong Kong with a 256-megabyte MP3 USB stick, filled with information about the Chinese secret services. Two days later, he sent in his visa application. For months, Hao awaited a summons from the Australian counterintelligence services, the Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO). He was not just anyone: he had been one of the top people at the Tianjin 610 Office. Surprised at the radio silence from the Australian services, he decided to go public. At the end of July 2005, ASIO finally invited him in for questioning.

Upon examination, his USB stick made it possible to identify many, but not all, secret agents; some code-names remained impenetrable. In addition, some of the data Hao supplied was hypersensitive, indicating that Chinese moles had infiltrated the very heart of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Could this explain officials’ slowness to get in touch with Hao? Perhaps Australian diplomats had been reluctant to grant him refugee status because of the influence of these moles; or perhaps they had been concerned that such a move might harm the relationship between Prime Minister John Howard and the new Chinese leader, Hu Jintao?

In any case, the situation was far from straightforward. On top of Hao’s defection to Australia, the Chinese ambassador Fu Yi lost face a second time. In early summer 2005, one of her diplomats at the consulate on Sydney’s Dunblane Street, 37-year-old Chen Yonglin, defected. He applied for asylum and suggested that Han Guangsheng, whose asylum request to France had failed and whom he had met, do the same in Canada. But still no luck—both countries turned down their applications, in spite of public support for both men.

“It was totally incomprehensible,” said David McKnight, an Australian intelligence historian who welcomed me to his charming bungalow near Bondi Beach a year after this extraordinary episode. “There was a strong anti-communist tradition here during the Cold War. I know what I’m talking about: once upon a time I belonged to the Australian Communist Party, before I switched sides. And today, we refuse to give political asylum to a communist dissident because we want to trade with China. Which is more important to us than the defence of human rights! That’s why I published a furious article—‘When money talks, left and right change sides’—about the Chen Yonglin case, to awaken people’s conscience. I wanted to remind people that in 1954, when the KGB spy Vladimir Petrov defected to Australia, the Menzies government took the opportunity to educate the public about totalitarianism in the USSR.  Today, when Chen Yonglin seeks asylum from a conservative government, he is denied it and told to return to China. Chen must be very disconcerted to see that we are going along with the Chinese government and telling citizens who want democracy to keep their mouths shut. This article might have earned me the congratulations of an old Taiwanese man who used to be associated with the World Anti-Communist League, the WACL, but certainly not of the young traders doing business on the Shanghai Stock Exchange!”14

Although he was denied political asylum, Chen Yonglin was interviewed by ASIO in mid-July 2005, a fortnight before his comrade Hao. But after his debriefing, the counterintelligence service made clear its disagreement with his statements about the existence of thousands of Chinese secret agents in Australia alone. (Hao later clarified this: there were thousands of sources working for the Guoanbu in the Chinese diaspora.) Over time, however, the ASIO did begin to acknowledge the danger, expanding its Chinese section at the beginning of 2007 (as it happens, while I was in Australia), and recruiting dozens of Mandarin and Cantonese speakers.15 Even so, I sensed clear embarrassment on the part of an ASIO spokesperson and an ASIO representative for Asia in charge of their national security council, the Office of National Assessment, whom I had asked for a briefing on the role of Chinese services in the country. Australian diplomats had no desire to quarrel with Beijing.

Meanwhile, Chen was under the protection of pro-democracy activists and Falun Gong followers; the movement was well established in Australia, and Chen became a follower. He was also debriefed by the CIA, which took his revelations rather more seriously than ASIO.  Three months later, he testified:

During my work at the Chinese consulate in Sydney, Wang Xiaoqiang and Yuan Ying, two deputy directors of the Central 610 Office, came to inspect our work rooting out the Falun Gong at the Chinese embassies in Australia and New Zealand. At the end of 2003, Yuan Ying told us about the situation of Falun Gong in China. He said that there were about 60,000 Falun Gong practitioners, of whom half were in labour camps and prisons while the other half were being closely monitored. Wang Xiaoqiang, another official from the 610 Office, came to the consulate in 2002. At the time, he said that the battle against Falun Gong was not going very well. Every day, hundreds of followers came to protest in Tiananmen Square, where of course the police were waiting to arrest them. Wang said he could not understand the Falun Gong followers. They were always non-violent. When arresting police officers asked them to get onto the buses, they almost always did. In fact, the government felt that it was losing face simply because so many demonstrators were coming to Tiananmen. Protesting in Tiananmen is a very sensitive business.16

Chen’s information, like Hao’s, was very precise. He explained that the consulate had recorded a list of 800 Falun Gong followers in the wake of a 2001 CCP directive to “Fight Falun Gong actively in all areas and gain the support and sympathy of the public”.

In practice, the consulate officers would request an interview with someone applying for a visa or a visa extension for China. If it turned out they were Falun Gong practitioners—and their guru Li Hongzhi insisted that they must never lie!—their passport information would be taken and entered on the global blacklist drawn up by the two security ministries, Gonganbu and Guoanbu. Needless to say, these Chinese people would no longer be permitted to return to the land of their ancestors. It was more difficult for Chinese counterintelligence when it came to foreign followers of the movement, who travelled as tourists, a little like the “surveyors” who engaged in amateur espionage in 1960s China for Australian intelligence.17

When Chen Yonglin was asked why he had waited so long before defecting, he first explained it by saying that, since his father had been killed by the local authorities in his village after having written the calligraphy for a petition, he had hesitated to participate in the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989. He had been studying at Beijing Diplomatic College. “But I must confess that I am not of a very brave nature,” he admitted. However, he was working as a stringer and translator for an NBC television crew, which allowed him to see the full drama of the student massacre. After he graduated, he had joined the Waijiaobu, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and worked at the Chinese embassy in Fiji from 1994 to 1998. Three years later, he was posted to the consulate in Sydney. He began to notice how secret agents acted against Falun Gong followers, and before switching sides he erased the consulate’s digital files on some 800 Falun Gong members.

Several of the counterintelligence officials I interviewed for this book believe that the revelations of these two defectors, Hao Fengjun and Chen Yonglin, were genuine, and revealed a number of methods used by the Chinese services. Were they to admit that the two men had been Chinese agents, Beijing’s reputation would have suffered significant damage.

The details given by Hao Fengjun had been so precise because he had been part of the 610 Office itself, having been plucked from the staff of the Guoanbu’s regional office. The Guoanbu’s director in Tianjin had been relieved of his duties in February 2005—in my opinion for having let Hao abscond—and replaced by a new head, Zhong Wei.

Thanks to Hao, it was revealed how hundreds of agents working for the 610 Office had been sent to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. In 2004, a different source had revealed that a couple of American Falun Gong practitioners in California were in fact 610 agents, operating under cover of a travel agency specializing in tourism to China. Though these networks were under the supervision of the Guoanbu, every day the 610 Office received information from the embassies and intelligence posts about the movements, lectures and media appearances of Falun Gong followers. And every day a summary classified juemi—top secret—was handed to the Chinese secretariat, president, State Council and CCP Politburo.18

The turn towards France and Germany

If the Chinese services thought they would be able to limit the number of defectors fleeing to English-speaking countries, they were to be disappointed. In autumn 2005, in Chinese embassies throughout Western Europe, there was deep concern that Falun Gong followers as well as other dissidents were either planning a campaign to boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics, or thinking up protests to embarrass the authorities, for example during the Olympic torch’s relay from Greece to Beijing, via various European cities.

In 2006, Liu Jing, head of the 610 Office, was given a mammoth task: to crush Falun Gong ahead of the 2008 Olympics. The Chinese were particularly worried that it would trigger a protest movement comparable to the Rose and Orange Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine: “The Chinese came here to study the situation in the two former Soviet republics very closely, and they came to the same conclusions as the services of the Russian Federation,” explained Iliya Sarsembaev, a specialist in the Russian services and their relationship with the Chinese. “Just like with Falun Gong, it was believed that the CIA was very active in fostering the emergence and development of these movements.”19

For Liu Jing, it was vital to stop the haemorrhaging of defectors and to prevent links being forged between Falun Gong and other dissidents. The pressure increased in mid-October, when the Falun Gong newspaper The Epoch Times unexpectedly held a forum in Paris, where the two defectors Hao Fengjun and Chen Yonglin spoke. The event received little coverage in the media, but was closely followed by both Chinese diplomats and French intelligence. Even more surprisingly, in May 2006 a conference on Chinese dissent was held in Berlin. This was the first time there had been such an event since Tiananmen in 1989. Nearly 200 dissidents-in-exile attended the low-key five-day conference on 17–22  May, at the invitation of the Chinese Democratic Front, headed by Fei Liangyong. Diplomats from the Chinese embassy tried to get information on the conference participants out of the various German police services, but to no avail.

Zhongnanhai must have been seriously worried, for this meeting, largely funded by the Taiwanese, was the first time that traditional post-Tiananmen dissidents had joined forces with Falun Gong members. In Europe, Falun Gong seemed to be split into two tendencies: those who wished to coexist with the Chinese authorities, and those of a more political bent who were openly calling on CCP militants to split from the party, renounce their membership and overthrow the Beijing government. It seemed like a long time since devotees of Qigong had protested simply for the right to exercise their practice—now the movement was attacking the CCP head on. A controversial book popular with activists, The Nine Commentaries, delivered a radical reading of the party’s history since its creation in 1921, and explained how it might be made to collapse. It turned out that cracking down on the Falun Gong movement had only served to radicalize it.

Also present at the Berlin Congress were Germany-based Uyghur Muslim delegates from Xinjiang, and Tibetan supporters of the Dalai Lama. In France, liaison officers from the Chinese police, in contact with the security services, besieged the headquarters of the intelligence services, wanting to obtain information on the Uyghurs, who were now organizing politically in exile. Simultaneously, the Chinese were trying to figure out the role of the new representative of the Dalai Lama in Paris, Jampal Chosang. It was claimed that he was being rather more active than his predecessor, trying to form a pro-Tibet parliamentary lobby and calling on athletes to demonstrate for human rights during the Olympics.

If the Guoanbu men stationed in Germany had thought they were done with the Uyghurs, they were wrong. At the end of November 2006, in Munich, the General Assembly of the World Uygur Congress (WUC) took place among Chinese Muslims from Xinjiang, as much the victims of Chinese brutality and repression as Falun Gong disciples or Tibetans. On this occasion, German counterintelligence took the opportunity to update its records of pseudo-diplomats within the Chinese consulate at Munich, which was headed by Yang Huiqun and some “deep-water fish” acting under cover of working in business and the restaurant trade.

German intercepts revealed that the Chinese services were closely monitoring Dr  Hamit Hemrayev, director of the WUC “research bureau”, which is considered a kind of Uyghur secret service and counterintelligence bureau. The reason for this surveillance, according to a Chinese diplomat who had recently defected, was the fear in Beijing of an alliance between the WUC and Falun Gong, which was by then well established in Germany.20

Meanwhile, another defection took place in February 2007: a teaching assistant at the University of Science and Technology of Macau, Wang Lian, fled to Australia where, still under Falun Gong’s protective wing, he claimed that he had been recruited by the Guoanbu to monitor Falun Gong followers in Hong Kong, where the movement was somewhat tolerated because of the special constitutional status of the former British colony. This muddied the waters even further, at the very moment when Ernst Uhrlau, director of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), was warning his European colleagues about the risks of propaganda by unreliable defectors.

In March 2007, an embassy diplomat in Ottawa defected and revealed how the Chinese services were operating in this part of the world. Most damagingly, she made public internal documents from Liu Jing, Luo Gan and others that contained recommendations on the most effective means to battle against the “five poisons” threatening China: the Falun Gong “cult”, Tibetan separatists, Islamists among Xinjiang Uyghur Muslims, democracy activists in Hong Kong, and independence activists in Taiwan.

History will tell if the avalanche of defections and Falun Gong’s rise played a major role in the evolution of twenty-first-century China. An early analysis by Australian researcher Richard Bullivant detailed the conditions in which Chen Yonglin eventually obtained a visa and protection, after having been subjected to intimidation by the Chinese embassy. Most importantly, he showed that the Chinese were particularly effective at infiltrating the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs. In a senatorial investigation, an earlier defector, Wang Jiangping—an ASIO counterintelligence advisor in the fight against the Guoanbu—had sent a written report in which he explained that he “would not recommend that any defector provide information to that Department.”21

Concluding his report, Bullivant, who based his analysis on specific documents, adds: “The Chinese Intelligence Services plan that, through perceptions management operations, influence operations in the media, universities recruiting consultants, intelligence officials, politicians and diplomats, Australia will slowly but steadily develop, in the words of Chinese strategists, as ‘a second France’.”22

In other words, Bullivant confirms what other experts have told me and what is revealed by the multiple defections explored in this book: Australia and France are the two countries where the heads of the Chinese secret services believe it is easiest to infiltrate and manipulate both institutions and people.

Embassies like no others

During the Cold War, two principal intelligence residences were housed in the Soviet embassy, the KGB and the GRU (military intelligence). In contrast to the Chinese, there was duplication within each service, with a multiplicity of networks and points of contact. Another difference between the two was that 20  per  cent of Soviet diplomats were involved in intelligence, whereas the figure for Chinese diplomats was at least 40, if not, 60  per  cent.

I once asked a Chinese diplomat about this. He seemed not to understand the question. Spying? “What nonsense! This is just American propaganda feeding a stupid belief.” Intelligence, however, was something else entirely. The Chinese word Qingbao also means “open information”: the Chinese government must be properly informed about what is happening in foreign countries in order to make decisions.

The Chinese embassy in Paris on Rue Washington, where the consular services are located, is the home of representatives of large organizations—mainly those answerable to the party, security bodies that answer to the State Council, and those that feed information to the PLA.  There are other satellite organizations located in regional consulates as well as in delegations to international organizations such as UNESCO, also headquartered in Paris.

Conventional diplomatic intelligence reports to the Foreign Affairs Information Bureau (Waijiaobu), represented by a deputy chief of mission. Political intelligence is largely handled by the International Liaison Department of the CCP Central Committee, whose 8th Bureau is responsible for Western Europe. Its Beijing head, Gu Honglin, makes frequent visits to France, Italy (he speaks Italian and was lately a consul in Florence), Belgium, Germany and Portugal, to hold discussions with representatives of centre-left parties, Social Democrats, Greens, and others. We are a long way from the Kang Sheng era, when the ILD’s only concern was setting up Maoist splinter parties. Today its diplomatic agents travel around different countries, opening exhibitions about China and introducing cultural events of all kinds that are an opportunity to spread the word of “friendship between peoples” and to discover new talents, within Chinese diaspora communities and beyond.

***

In this world of political intelligence, changes of personnel are frequent: co-option of ILD members by the Guoanbu and vice versa; exchange of cover between journalists and diplomats; military intelligence spies and businessmen dealing with economic surveillance; and so on. For the heads of security analysts in the Chinese embassy’s host countries, it can be quite dizzying, and occasionally leads to quasi-theological arguments about the existence and precise role of certain special services.

Two basic questions divide American counterintelligence and its European counterparts: what is the exact role of the representative of the CCP’s investigative department (formerly the Diaochabu, today the Zhongban diaoyanshi), and should this representative be seen as part of the more global Guoanbu? And why is military intelligence (Qingbaobu) also undertaken by agents from the PLA (General Political Department) Liaison Department (Zongzheng Lianluo bu), who are sometimes under cover as cultural attachés—as is the case in Washington—or who take part in clandestine missions, for example under cover of working for private telecoms companies in Europe?23

Within the PRC’s London embassy—first established in 1877 as the Chinese Legation—there is the same covert organization of the Chinese secret services under diplomatic cover. This will no doubt have been restructured after the embassy’s 2018 move from Portland Place to a new address on the site of the old Royal Mint, near the Tower of London. It is worth recalling that when the CCP set up its first intelligence service in the 1930s, it was not only with the help of the Soviet services (the NKVD and the GRU). As well as exploiting the age-old roots of imperial Chinese espionage, the first red spies also drew inspiration from the two intelligence communities they fought in the concessions of Shanghai: the French and the British.

Today, the military attaché’s roles are multiple. They make contact with foreign counterparts and with the army general staff, in order to establish the battle order of the armed forces and its projects and technical innovations, specifically regarding weapons, communications, strategy and battle plans. They must also maintain relationships with retired soldiers who are invited to Beijing and elsewhere in China to chair conferences or take part in symposia organized by various institutes linked to the PLA2. This is what is known as “contact intelligence”.

Since the Chinese deny that the Guoanbu has agents in the embassy, liaison with the host country’s intelligence services is organized through the defence attaché or the police attaché (Gonganbu). We may as well take France as an example, since we know it is a key target for Chinese infiltration. This arrangement pretending that the Guoanbu does not exist explains why in 1984—the year after the Boursicot affair—Colonel Wang Naicheng, stationed in Paris, was the one to organize a Chinese visit to meet with Raymond Nart and several of his deputies at the DST—in other words, with the very counterintelligence men who had arrested their agent. Wang’s successor in Paris, Colonel Han Kaihe (who was later posted to London in 1994) knew France well, since he had lived there for ten years with his wife, also an officer. His mission had been to make contact with researchers, academics and intelligence agents known for their committed opposition to Soviet communism, in order to obtain information about the ideological transformations brought about by Mikhail Gorbachev. Colonel Han sounded out various politicians, police officers and journalists, including the far-right journalist Pierre de Villemarest, whose book on the GRU was published in Chinese in 1990.24

Similarly, General He Shide was in regular contact—as was the ambassador and General Xiong Guangkai, former PLA2 leader—with an ex-head of the DGSE, who were now bugging his phone. The French service was dismayed by his loquacity, no doubt a consequence of his naivety rather than malevolence.25

In Paris, another intelligence agency had been set up in the wake of the Tiananmen uprising in 1989, within the Chinese embassy’s education section, whose offices were at 9 rue Glacière. The best known of its agents, Bai Zhangde, employed as a driver and second secretary, narrowly managed to avoid being expelled from France in 1990 because of his harassment of exiled student democrats. He left the country for a while before returning to Paris, this time as embassy advisor and head of the same service, for which he travelled all over the country, to Brest, Lyon, Marseille and Strasbourg, building relationships with politicians and educational leaders. Tellingly, technological surveillance, under the management of Wang Shaoqi, is housed on the same floor in the main Rue Washington embassy building as the police attachés and political intelligence specialists.

***

These structures evolve constantly, gaining personnel and refining their research techniques, particularly when it comes to exploiting the internet, which is not as restricted in Western countries like France as it is in China. The main problem, as several Chinese specialists have explained to me, is the coordination of information.

In the 1990s, Western counterintelligence identified an ambassador’s wife working as an intelligence coordinator in France and the Benelux countries, whose role was more important than that of her husband. She was particularly active in operations directed against the Taiwan Representative Office (TECRO, the Taiwan nationalists’ quasi-embassy). After her return to Beijing, she was given the responsibility of supervising the training of younger agents, particularly in language skills, before they were sent on mission. This was a field in which she excelled, having once worked as an interpreter for Deng Xiaoping.

As we saw with the 1989 Tiananmen movement, after which refugee dissidents in France came under close surveillance, several Chinese press correspondents were believed to be high-flying undercover Guoanbu officers. Of course, the Xinhua News Agency, which moved to its current office in Clichy-la-Garenne, just outside Paris, in 1988, and which I visited shortly after this move at the invitation of one of its directors, was doing the same work it always had. In Chevilly-la-Rue, buildings bristling with antennae and satellite dishes have attracted the attention of the French media. Echoing investigations conducted by the internal security directorate (the DGSI), the weekly magazine L’Obs revealed that Chinese teams involved in electronic warfare were engaged in intercepting communications (SIGINT). According to an investigation by journalist Vincent Jauvert, a secret centre of satellite eavesdropping in France was almost certainly reporting to the 8th Bureau of the PLA3.26

France is not alone. As we have seen in this chapter, and as we will continue to see in the next, Australia is another example of the several countries all over the world dealing with the issue. There, we find the same type of installation that engineers from GCHQ expected to see deployed after the Chinese moved in 2019 to their new embassy at Royal Mint Court by the Tower of London, the largest Chinese diplomatic representation in the world.