Review | China’s spies: the West’s biggest challenge today and their history, from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping
- Cyber warfare, economic espionage, cultural infiltration – the Chinese intelligence services are the 21st century’s KGB, French journalist Roger Faligot writes
- He tells the story of Chinese spying, from Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in 1920s Shanghai, through a 75-year ‘reign of terror’, to Xi Jinping’s ‘Chinese Dream’
Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping, by Roger Faligot (translation by Natasha Lehrer), Hurst Publishing, 4 stars
French investigative journalist Roger Faligot has been writing about Chinese spying and intelligence for more than 30 years.
His encyclopedic knowledge of the history of communist China’s intelligence services is on full display in Chinese Spies, originally published in France in 2008 (and later updated in 2015) and now in an English translation by Natasha Lehrer.
Faligot sees the ministry as the 21st-century successor to the Soviet KGB – it is both the sword and shield of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its intelligence tentacles are worldwide. Faligot traces its roots to early 1920s Shanghai, where Chinese communists organised under the auspices of the Moscow-led Comintern, created by Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin to foment world revolution. China was an early target.