Spies, Screens and Signals: CIA Takes Recruitment War with China Public

The CIA has pushed its intelligence rivalry with Beijing further into the open, releasing a Chinese-language recruitment video that directly appeals to members of China’s military to share secrets with the United States, not through shadowy intermediaries, but via YouTube.

Published on Thursday, the two-minute clip is part of a broader digital campaign aimed at Chinese and Russian audiences, explaining how to contact the agency securely through the encrypted Tor Browser. It follows a format the CIA has been refining for months: a fictional insider, growing disillusioned with the system he serves, quietly choosing Washington.

This time, the protagonist is a Chinese military officer. The narrative moves between the routine of his official duties and a private sense of alarm at a leadership portrayed as “protecting only their own selfish interests”. The emotional pivot comes at home, where he looks at his wife and daughter and concludes he cannot “allow these madmen to shape my daughter’s future world”.

The script draws deliberately on cultural references, invoking Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to frame espionage as a higher form of victory  before suggesting that China’s leaders are prepared “to send us to the battlefield”.

In the closing sequence, the officer removes a bag from a workplace safe, passes through a military checkpoint and logs onto a computer in a deserted car park to contact the CIA. He calls the act “a way of fighting for my family and my nation”. The video ends with the line: “The fate of the world is in your hands”, followed by instructions on downloading Tor.

The text accompanying the video makes the target audience explicit, asking viewers whether they have access to information about senior Chinese officials or work in fields such as the military, intelligence, diplomacy, economics, science or advanced technology.

Beijing did not immediately respond to the new clip, but it has previously condemned similar US efforts as malicious “smears and attacks” designed to deceive Chinese personnel into “surrender”.

The public nature of the campaign reflects a shift in how intelligence services operate in an era of tightened surveillance and restricted physical access. It also speaks to the history behind it. The CIA’s human network inside China was dismantled between 2010 and 2012, with at least 30 people killed or imprisoned, according to a 2018 investigation by Foreign Policy. That collapse was partly blamed on a compromised communications system.