IRIA News

The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has announced a new group that will exclusively focus on China and the strategic challenges posed by Beijing.

The China Mission Center is meant to utilize more resources in order to keep a close observation on the country and positioning its sources around the world to collect information and analyze China’s activities.

The Director of Central Intelligence Agency William J. Burns said that the group will focus on the ‘adversarial’ Chinese government, referring to it as ‘the most important threat’ to the United States.

In a statement on October 7, 2021, the CIA announced that China Mission Center was formed “to address the global challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China that cuts across all of the agency’s mission areas”.

The CIA described China as the “most prominent rival,” but emphasized the point that “the threat is from the Chinese government, not the people”. Burns also emphasized that the CIA will continue to focus sharply on other significant challenges such as Russia, Iran, North Korea, and the terrorism threat.

CIA Director also stated that amid the challenges posed by emerging technologies, economic security, climate change, and health challenges, China Mission Center shall address the global issues in all spectrums that are critical to U.S. competitiveness.

During his confirmation hearing in February, Director Burns identified China as his top priority and the challenges of changing technology as an important focus area behind the rise of China as a threat to the United States.

The new mission center also comes with the creation of a new post, Chief Technology Officer, which reaffirms the CIA’s priority to deal with the rising security threat of China’s technological advancement.

No such unit focusing explicitly on China had previously been set up. The creation of such a unit indicates the severity of the threat from China to the U.S. national interest. A senior CIA official compared this move to the agency’s tight focus on Russia during the Cold War and its concentration on counter-terrorism following the 9/11 attacks.

The Biden administration has maintained the hardline policies against China that were put in place by the predecessor, while repeatedly stressed on the point that the U.S. does not want conflict with Beijing. President Joe Biden’s statement at the United Nations General Assembly in September stated that the U.S. does not seek a “New Cold War” with China. However, China has accused the U.S. of employing a “Cold War mentality,” essentially alleging that Washington is vying to turn Beijing into a boogeyman.

However, former CIA Director John Brennan told Politico, “If there is any country that deserves its own mission center, it is China, which has global ambitions and presents the greatest challenge to U.S. interests and to international order”.

The special group is just one of fewer than a dozen focused mission centers operated by the CIA. The focused group will hold weekly, director-level meetings to forge the agency’s strategy towards China.

“For too long, China’s lack of adherence to global trading norms has undercut the prosperity of Americans and others around the world,” U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said on Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. “To be successful, we must be direct and honest about the challenges we face and the grave risk from leaving them unaddressed.”

Leon Panetta, who served as CIA director and Defense secretary during the Obama administration, said that Burns had briefed him last week for roughly half an hour about the new center. “It is essential that we really need much better and dedicated intelligence on what China is up to,” he told Politico.

“China remains a hard target for intelligence penetration, and for that reason creating that center to establish a real focus on China makes perfect sense”, Panetta said.

The formation of the China Mission Center comes just a day after national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, in Switzerland, following up on a phone call that happened last month between President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Sullivan and Yang made little to no tangible progress during their talks, and the most prominent agreement between the two envoys was to have Biden and Xi participate in a virtual summit by the end of the year.

According to a readout of the conversation from the White House, Sullivan raised several points of concern with Yang on behalf of the U.S. leadership. This included the Chinese government’s actions related to human rights and its policies on the South China Sea and Taiwan.

During the Press Conference on October 8, 2021, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian described the U.S. move as a “typical symptom of the Cold War mentality”, and urged the U.S. agency to “view China’s development and China-U.S. relations in an objective and rational light”. Zhao Lijian also asked the U.S. to “stop doing things detrimental to mutual trust and cooperation between China and the U.S., and China’s sovereignty, security and development interests.”

The new CIA unit also follows the establishment of the “China Initiative” at the Justice Department, during Donald Trump’s administration, the “China Initiative” was an effort to increase China-related prosecutions in the fields of economic espionage. That project, however, drew a lot of criticism from civil rights groups, who claimed it has led to racial profiling of Asian-Americans and Asian immigrants. The civil rights groups urged the Biden administration to drop the initiative.