A joint warning from the Five Eyes intelligence community has drawn attention to the way China is seeking to approach people who have access to sensitive information, according to Sky News. The alert focuses on the Chinese Communist Party's so-called United Front strategy and its influence operations abroad.
According to the warning, recruiters post job adverts on professional hiring and networking platforms such as LinkedIn and Indeed. The CVs they receive are then ranked on the basis of how likely the applicant is to have access to sensitive information, before virtual interviews are arranged in which recruiters conceal their identities.
A security expert speaking to Sky News described the approach as a very high-impact, low-cost strategy for the Chinese state, which seeks to influence people in other countries. He said it was encouraging that authorities were issuing these kinds of warnings, because the technique works and relies on reaching people in large numbers.
The expert noted the significance of the timing, pointing out that only last week the head of GCHQ had said relatively little about China, focusing instead on Russia. By contrast, he said, the international alliance — described as the world's most powerful security partnership — was being more open and outward about the threat this week.
Over the past three or four years, the expert added, there has been a gradual awakening internationally to the scale of the challenge presented by the Chinese party state. He pointed to intelligence services doing more, and in the United Kingdom to a number of espionage-related arrests and frequent MI5 warnings to Parliament.
He explained that the core of the United Front strategy is to make as many friends and as few enemies as possible, with platforms like LinkedIn allowing contact on a mass scale. Citing a long-standing intelligence view, he said people are typically drawn into espionage through money, ideology, coercion or ego, and that most approaches work on ego by flattering targets and offering them a platform to gradually reduce their resistance to Beijing's foreign policy aims.
Asked why such concern is directed at China when the UK, European nations and the United States also conduct espionage, the expert rejected what he called a false equivalence. He argued that routine spying between nations is very different from the interference and influence operations seen from the Chinese Communist Party, particularly those carried out through these online platforms, according to Sky News.