CIA boosts social media campaign to recruit Chinese officials

Natalia Drozdiak, Bloomberg News on May 1, 2025

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WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency released two videos Thursday aimed at recruiting Chinese officials who might be disillusioned by their prospects in government in a bid to get them to share top secrets about China with the U.S.

The effort is part of a broader strategy by CIA Director John Ratcliffe to boost intelligence collection on China, which has become Washington’s biggest competitor and adversary in areas including artificial intelligence and quantum computing. The U.S. also hopes to prevent Chinese military aggression against Taiwan.

The videos show potential recruits how to securely contact the agency. The first depicts a senior Chinese official who finds that despite his efforts to climb up the ranks, his family still lives in fear because of sweeping changes in government, leading him to contact the CIA. The Chinese leadership has embarked on an anti-corruption drive in recent years that has led to the dismissal of a number of senior officials.

“Heaven helps those who help themselves,” one of the videos says. “Your fate is in your control.”

The second video shows a junior official reaching out to the CIA, disillusioned that his hard work only serves the advancement of his superiors and seeing no prospects for personal growth under China’s system.

The U.S. has struggled to gain insights into the workings of the Chinese government, and the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have faced questions about their broader collection capabilities in China. In 2017, The New York Times reported that Beijing had broken up CIA spying operations in the country over several years.

“No adversary in the history of our nation has presented a more formidable challenge or capable strategic competitor than the Chinese Communist Party,” Ratcliffe said in an emailed statement. “Our Agency must continue responding to this threat with urgency, creativity, and grit, and these videos are just one of the ways we are doing this.”

A CIA official, who spoke on customary condition of anonymity, said the agency hopes to encourage Chinese officials to share information about China’s intelligence apparatus, as well as secrets about technology, military and cyber programs, and confidential economic and foreign policy information.

The effort aims to offer Chinese officials an alternative path, the official said.

Last year, the CIA published text-only videos in Mandarin, Farsi and Korean providing instructions on how to contact the agency. Those reached more than 2.9 million people and had about 900,000 views, the official said, adding that the success of that push led the agency to produce the new videos.

The CIA posted the latest batch of videos on its social media profiles, including on X and Telegram. While most U.S. social media platforms are banned in China, citizens often find ways around the firewall to access content.