China’s Ministry of State Security is recruiting young spies
The only problem is They’re not telling them they’re spies
Welcome to China Uncensored, I’m Chris Chappell.
This episode is sponsored by PC-Doctor Toolbox.
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If you’re a China Uncensored viewer, you probably know there’s not much
difference in China between private companies and companies owned by the government.
Almost all companies in China must have a branch of the Chinese Communist Party.
Here’s one at Bytedance. That’s the Chinese company that owns TikTok.
And by law, Chinese companies have to cooperate with state intelligence agencies.
That means any data that companies have access to, the Chinese regime also has access to.
That’s true for so-called “private companies” as well as state-owned enterprises.
But there’s another kind of company in China that has an even cozier relationship with the Chinese
Communist Party: government front companies. These companies are set up to look like regular
companies but are actually created by and for the Chinese Communist Party. They’re for
things like paying bribes, laundering money,and spying. You know, everyday government business.
Take Hainan Xiandun Technology Development Corporation .
It looks like a tech company, but it’s actually tasked with hacking
foreign governments, schools, and companies. The company was set up on Hainan island,
the southernmost province of China. Now, it’s well known that the Chinese
Communist Party recruits students and academics to spy in other countries.
But what makes this company unique is that it seems to have been luring
graduate jobseekers into digital espionage. Without telling them what they were doing.
“Job adverts from the company were posted on university websites for translators
without further explanation of the nature of the work.”
The Financial Times contacted 140 of its recruits.
One said “a recruiter had asked him to go beyond conventional translation duties by researching the
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.” He was asked to find things like resumes of
its board of directors, info about the building’s architecture and
details of their research contracts. Which is especially interesting because
this lab does a lot of research for the US Defense Department. Hmmmm.
So this is a totally normal test for a translation job, right?
But hey, at least the job pays well.
“The company … paid monthly salaries of twelve hundred to three thousand
dollars — solid middle-class wages for Chinese tech workers fresh out of college — with bonuses
as high as fifteen thousand dollars.” Fifteen thousand dollar bonuses—not bad!
Especially with China’s job market tanking right now.
I’m sure it looked like a pretty good gig. There were a *few* red flags about the company though,
like the fact that it doesn’t have a website.And that its address was the
ground floor of a university library. Also, the company’s job postings were
almost identical to multiple other technology companies in Hainan
According to Intrusion Truth, a blog that exposes Chinese hackers,
Hainan Xiandun is part of a network of Chinese front companies used for state-sponsored hacking.
Intrusion Truth has made a sport of unmasking Chinese front companies,
and they’ve found quite a few.
They call this network of front companies in Hainan, Advanced Persistent Threat or APT 40.
And they say APT40 is run by the Hainan Department of the Chinese Ministry of State Security or MSS.
According to an expert on Chinese intelligence operations,
these state-sponsored hacking companies that hire unsuspecting grads are unique to China.
“’It adds another layer of cover for the MSS, both from their citizens
but also from foreign governments. It also provides a steady flow of cheap labor that
doesn’t require security clearances.’” And it’s not just translators. The Chinese
Communist Party is also reaching into the private sector to hire hackers as well.
“While the ministry [of state security] projects an image of remorseless loyalty to
the Communist Party in Beijing, its hacking operations can act like local franchises.”
So like McDonalds, but for hacking. I wonder if their ice cream machines work.
More after the break.
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So Hainan Xiandun, a fake technology company on the Chinese island of Hainan, was
recruiting translators from Chinese universities. What it didn’t tell applicants, at least up front,
was that they were being hired for espionage. Once they got to the application process,
though,they were tested on sensitive documents obtained from the US government.
One applicant told the Financial Times that at this point it became very clear that “this was not
a translation company” and decided to not to continue his application.
We don’t know if or when applicants were told what the company really did.
But if they were hired and not told what they would be doing, this could have huge consequences.
If they are flagged as having worked with MSS, they may not be able to ever live or work abroad.
Imagine studying English for years, and then never being able to go to America
because you applied for a job that tricked you into spying.
Of course, the Chinese Communist Party claims this “recruitment drive never happened.”
The spokesperson also accused the Financial Times of being “a mouthpiece for the US
and the UK intelligence agencies." Right. That’s the problem here.
So how widespread is this problem?
Last year, the US government indicted four Chinese nationals who were connected to Hainan Xiandun.
Three of them were officers of the Hainan State Security Department, the local branch of the MSS.
The indictment charged them with hacking companies around
the world for intellectual property and business secrets.
No one was arrested, because they were all in China. But the US government’s
actions fully exposed Hainan Xiandun as a front company for the APT 40 hacking group.
According to cybersecurity company Mandiant, APT 40 also tried to
interfere in Cambodia’s 2018 election. This included hacking Cambodian government
entities that oversaw elections, as well as opposition figures.
I’m sure it was just a coincidence that Hainan Xiandun was hiring
Cambodian translators right before the election.
The US government says that Hainan Xiandun has been disbanded.
But it’s not clear what that means. The South China Morning Post called
the company several times after the indictment, and “each time someone hung up. There was also no
immediate response to emailed questions.” But even if Hainan Xiandun is gone, the MSS
still has a lot of other front companies they can use to do their dirty work.
At least one of the APT 40 companies was still posting jobs ads even after the FBI indictment.
As of March, Hainan Tengyuan was still posting job ads for English translators.
Look, I know that times are tough out there for Chinese graduates. But if you start getting
sensitive US government documents to translate, maybe think twice about taking that job.
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I’m Chris Chappell. Thanks for watching China Uncensored.