China's Modern Intelligence Reforms
Wed, Feb 10
|Webnar: China's Intelligence Reforms
Does the coming decade herald better coordinated and more aggressive internal surveillance and foreign espionage operations by Beijing? We will evaluate Xi Jinping's military and intelligence reforms and what they might mean for the 2020s.


Time & Location
Feb 10, 2021, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM EST
Webnar: China's Intelligence Reforms
About the event
To register: https://www.iwp.edu/events/webinar-communist-chinas-modern-intelligence-reforms/
Since its founding in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party has been highly successful in making mainland China a very hard target for foreign espionage. But hitherto, China’s security and intelligence agencies have often endured a lack of interagency coordination, turf battles, and internal corruption.
Under Mao Zedong, they were attacked and dismantled during the Cultural Revolution, taking decades to recover. During China’s corruption crisis of the 1990s and 2000s, intelligence and counterintelligence operations were hobbled by internal graft, leading to high-level penetrations by the CIA’s China Program.
However, Xi Jinping has systematically attacked these problems since his ascent in 2012. His famous anti-corruption drive was partly intended to blunt alleged American efforts to provide cash for their agents within the Chinese state to secure corrupt promotions. Beijing’s drive to regain “information dominance” (制信息权, zhi xinxi quan) over an increasingly fluid, networked, and technologically sophisticated society appears to…