China-US relations: Xi and his inner circle foil American spy efforts, say intelligence insiders

US officials caught off guard by Beijing’s rapid moves, including to consolidate power in Hong Kong, limit probes into Covid-19 origins and ramp up hacking

CIA officers in China are challenged by a growing surveillance state where cities are populated by tracking cameras and facial recognition software

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President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign has led to greater scrutiny of Chinese officials’ income, making US payments to potential sources far more problematic, two former officials said. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 2:47pm, 11 Nov 2021Updated: 3:53pm, 11 Nov 2021

A lack of top-tier intelligence on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s inner circle is frustrating senior Biden administration officials struggling to get ahead of Beijing’s next steps, according to current and former officials who have reviewed the most sensitive US intelligence reports.

Those officials, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive issues, say China is becoming a harder target and more opaque, just as the demand for insights into Xi’s decision-making is soaring and tensions with the United States are heating up over issues from Taiwan to high technology.

That reality comes after officials in both the Trump and Biden administrations said they were surprised by Beijing’s rapid moves to consolidate control of Hong Kong, project military power across the South China Sea, limit probes into the origins of Covid-19, undercut Chinese companies going public in the US and ramp up hacking against adversaries.

The current and former officials emphasise that America’s spy agencies have long struggled to provide the insights policymakers demand on China. The hurdles facing the US intelligence community are both deep-seated – Beijing did significant damage to American spy networks in China before Xi’s presidency – and basic, including a continuing shortage of Mandarin speakers.

“Our human intelligence has been lagging for decades,” former national security adviser John Bolton said in an interview, when asked about China. “I never feel I have enough intelligence. I’m always willing to hear more. I’m never satisfied. No decision maker should be.”

As the Biden administration seeks to shift more of its foreign policy strategy towards countering China, Central Intelligence Agency director Bill Burns has announced the creation of a China Mission Centre to hone the agency’s focus on “an increasingly adversarial Chinese government”.

Some of the people interviewed by Bloomberg said that such announcements were more symbolic than substantive and needed to be backed up by greater spending and staffing to have credibility.