Book Review: Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer
25th May 2020
The heavily footnoted “primer” is several books in one handy cover. It is a history of the Chinese Communist Party origins of 21st-century Chinese intelligence organs. The history entwines with careful, clear analysis of China’s shifting intelligence objectives during the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945), the civil war, the Cold War (including the Korean War and Taiwan) and Deng Xiaoping’s economic transformation. A major theme: Whether serving as regime-protection units, domestic secret police spying on Chinese citizens or spies targeting foreign entities, the intelligence services’ first loyalty is to the senior CCP leaders.
While it doesn’t appear that anything in this work will come as a surprise to those of us who are paying attention, I am curious as to why this has been embodied into a published book. It is no doubt of value to those whose business it is to detect and counter Chinese intelligence operations, but that is surely a fairly small audience; and while there are certainly a large number of people who would be curious about the details of Chinese intelligence operations, it isn’t clear to me that many are going to be willing to shell out as much money as these guys are asking ($27 for a Kindle edition? Seriously?) to scratch that particular itch. Certainly that price point quiets any curiosity I might have had on the subject.
Perhaps this is yet another instance of Tenure Doesn’t Grow On Trees. It certainly suggests that such books are why God gave us InterLibrary Loan.