By Kerry Brown
Xi Jinping has done the unthinkable: targeting China’s powerful intelligence-gathering apparatus.
On January 11, the news trickled out that Ma Jian, a deputy minister at the Chinese State Security apparatus, had been detained over allegations of corruption. Ma’s detention is significant because it marks a clear change in the anti-graft campaign. China’s spy agency is one of the best funded, most politically protected entities in the country. Only the most confident and emboldened dare to take it on. For President Xi Jinping and his colleagues to have allowed such a senior figure to be targeted in this way shows they must think things are going to plan in the great clean-up that has been underway for over 18 months now.
Over a decade ago, when I joined the British Foreign Office, I was solemnly told in a briefing that Chinese leaders took the work of their intelligence services very seriously indeed, and heeded their advice closely. Under Hu Jintao and the pro-stability strategy, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of State Security (MSS), along with all the other various agencies having a covert function, entered a new era of empowerment and influence. Zhou Yongkang, from 2007 on, sat atop this network. It was a well funded, politically supported fiefdom that may have had up to a million people working for it in various forms and guises.
This industrial sized entity, however, has been stymied by the sort of problems that plague similar organizations the world over. Territoriality, poor internal communication, and burgeoning waste of resources (not to mention their siphoning off to corrupt networks) are part of this. In any country, intelligence agencies have a tendency to become political tools for one power group or player over another if they aren’t closely watched. Their greatest asset is access to supposedly precious, privileged information and the ability to convey this directly to leaders without jumping through bureaucratic hoops. It is an old trick, but pasting a “Top Secret” line across a document raises the chances it will be read, no matter what it might contain. Intelligence agencies always have a keen readership.
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