Jonah Victor
Introduction
China has been a “hard target” for the Intelligence Community (IC) since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Escalating demand for assessments of China since the 2010s has spurred the IC to expand its analytical and collection efforts. Last year, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines identified China as the IC’s “unparalleled priority.”1 CIA Director William Burns asserted this year that his agency has more than doubled its budget for Chinarelated intelligence collection, analysis, and operations during his tenure, extending work on China to “every corner of the CIA.”2 Even as the IC buckles down on China work, warning signs are emerging that the world is changing in ways that could disrupt business as usual. Washington’s ability to anticipate developments in the US-China relationship and assess risks and threats to national security is likely to get harder.
Amid heightened tensions with Washington, Beijing has redoubled efforts to stiffen controls on information to prevent access by its potential adversaries. PRC authorities are mounting increasingly conspicuous counterintelligence activities, issuing public warnings of infiltration attempts by foreign spies and restricting the use of US technology, like iPhones and Teslas, due to purported surveillance threats.3 While heightened counterintelligence will concern operational elements of the IC, intelligence analysts are likely to be most aware of the mounting problems they face in accessing opensource information. Open source, while usually easier and cheaper to obtain than other intelligence sources, has gotten harder to gather when it comes to China.
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