How China turns members of its diaspora into spies

UK itself is a particularly interesting case,

In Turkey when they have a new shiny politician, there's a running joke to check if they went to University of Exeter. For some reason, all the lightly islamist politicians of Turkey have been to Exeter at some point in their life.

> In the UK Chinese funded international masters/phd students have to send back to China reports about their fellow students as a condition of their funding.

That's a major claim, do you have a link to an article or source?

I'm shocked this is a thread on HN.

Until recently these threads were flagged and removed from HN, and participants to conversations stating these things were warned of possible future bans.

It looks like the conversation has changed quite dramatically. The geopolitical tone has trickled down to tech and VC.

Firms like a16z are going all in on "American dynamism", which is basically about competition with China.

It's almost every week you hear about China's sixth gen fighters, NGAD, drones, military spending, etc. in the media. Now the various institutional interests want to invest in capabilities to deter this.

But this kind of conversation, even if handled delicately in a way that was super mindful of not being xenophobic, was entirely forboden just a few short years ago.

Talking about Chinese national students as possible spies. Wow. My ban avoidance scar tissue still tingles with this subject matter. I'm wondering out loud if this geopolitical tension and rivalry is kosher to talk about now.

I take it these reports don't stop when they are interns?

> Soon enough anything that is even remotely a security threat [...] will require clearance and in office work.

I think this is one of those things that sucks but may be necessary.

You need to trust the knowledge workers that make up your economy to not send your research to a hostile nation so they can take advantage of your R&D investments.

And you need to know that your critical infrastructure (beyond Internet and trains, think about electricity and running water) isn't vulnerable to being slowly pwned and then shut down all at once in a catastrophic event that coincides with a forcible military reunification of one Asian country with another.

Although the latter problem is less malice and more general incompetence in the cyber security realm. Can't solve that with a security clearance or RTO. Solar Winds anyone?

Long ago I worked at a company that had equipment sold to a US military contractor and we had to send someone onsite to fix it.

You were instructed that anything you had in your vehicle when you got to the gate (in the middle of nowhere) might be confiscated. Show up with the rental car, keys, ID, and necessary equipment only. Nothing but you and your clothing would leave the site, yes it cost a laptop each visit (that we sent ahead). ID, car and keys stayed at the gate.

Blindfolded while onsite until you got to the equipment, someone would take you to the bathroom.

It was a lot, but I suspect some form of “all electronics dropped here” should be the SOP in a lot of places.

It kinda horrifies me when I hear about congressional members upset about not being able to take their phones to some meetings and so on.

How does it work in US, you just look at the guy and then he sends you his IBAN?

Aren’t companies required to establish an employee’s origin by bureaucratic means? IDs, SSNs, notarized copies, work permit, etc? Why are North Korean guys even a problem, it feels like they shouldn’t be able to fake identification numbers and permits, unless something is fundamentally wrong with the country’s accounting.

> in office work

Doesn't this result in more over the shoulder opportunities by insider threat actors (i.e. spies) in conventional open office settings? Unclear how this meshes with outsourcing also.

Hiring and administrative machinery will therefore obviously be the target for an intelligent adversary, which we should presume we are facing.

...some ultra-short story fragment about AI & trust protocols so hoovering up all the resources that Usenet & text-only email make a comeback, as nothing more sophisticated functions any longer.

While I don't like the lack of freedoms in China, the Chinese government has done an amazing job lifting it's people out of poverty. I am not Chinese but I think most people around the world would gladly take that over being poor (most western people do not know how bad and undignified life in poverty can be)

Have you actually ever been to China or spoken with any Chinese people in China? (Not expats, but, say, taxi drivers and businessmen.)

Frankly, they're practically as free as Americans and Europeans. In some respects they're more free. There's far less violent crime and property crime, too, so living in the city feels more free in ways which should be obvious -- women can walk around alone at night and not fear for their own safety. Imagine walking around Memphis at midnight, alone and unarmed, or parts of London... even as a man, it would be very ill-advised.

China's business culture, also, is very explicitly laissez-faire, competition between firms is brutal, and there's less red tape than you'd get in Europe.

They do a lot of things right.

> treating your own people as disposable serfs

How do you mean? How is the average Shanghai banker any more or less of a serf than a banker in Frankfurt or Indianapolis? Democracy?

> I don't buy the explanation that being unfree is somehow intrinsic to East Asian cultures.

You have the obvious examples of Taiwan and (formerly) Hong Kong - actual Chinese political entities, free and democratic and strongly embraced by the people there, and much more prosperous than Communist-controlled China. Also, Japan, South Korea, ...

I should think it were fruit of the same root.

> No freedom of speech or conscience, no political freedoms: just work and be an obedient

There is significantly more politics involved in how the CPP is run than you think and people complain more than you seem to believe. It’s far from an open democracy but it’s not North Korea either.

This is not standard operating procedure worldwide, in part because there aren't that many countries folks are trying to flee to: > America granted him asylum and he settled in New York, becoming the leader of Chinese pro-democracy groups. But in August 2024 he was arrested by the FBI. He admits to having used his position to collect information for the Chinese government and to report on his fellow activists. He did this so that the government would allow him to return to China to see his ailing parents.

Do you have an example of a western government only letting someone come home to visit ailing parents in exchange for spying on their countrymen in a foreign nation?

I’m sure it happens just because there are lots of people. But I’m having a hard time coming up with a western nation that has a significant political dissident diaspora. I’d guess that the war on terror might generate one somewhere?

Its probably more a question of scale that makes China unique.