As students flooded back into Beijing's top universities in early September, a propaganda blitz around campuses, as reported by Bloomberg, signaled an ominous addition to their syllabus: a crash course on how to catch spies. At the government-run Tsinghua University, as Bloomberg reported, videos were beamed onto faculty screens instructing teachers and students to become a "defense line" against foreign forces, while the Beijing University of Technology threw a national-security-themed garden party, according to Bloomberg, citing the nation's spy agency.
Students at Beihang University, as per Bloomberg, were even asked to play an interactive training game, called Who's The Spy? "In what special way will the college students around you reinvigorate national security?" the Ministry of State Security wrote on its new WeChat account, as reported by Bloomberg.
As Bloomberg reported, President Xi Jinping throws up a forcefield of security controls to repel perceived foreign threats to Communist Party rule. Beijing's message to the public, according to Bloomberg, is that spooks are everywhere - not just universities. Police in Henan province, as Bloomberg cited, have urged citizens to quiz neighbors they mistrust on pop culture to ascertain their patriotism, while Shandong province state media, as reported by Bloomberg, published posters with the tagline "spies might be all around you."
The push comes after Xi chaired a National Security Council meeting in May, as reported by Bloomberg, that stressed the importance of "extreme-case scenario" thinking - a phrase the ruling party had previously reserved for describing natural disaster preparedness. China has since passed a new anti-spy law, accused consulting firms of working for overseas intelligence agencies, and warned that foreign forces are infiltrating the energy sector, as Bloomberg has reported.
China is locked in an ideological battle with the US that's weighing on its economy, just as the Asian giant enters a slowdown that risks stoking another wave of social unrest, as highlighted by Bloomberg.
Since the Communist Party unified its intelligence arms to found the Ministry of State Security in the 1980s, as reported by Bloomberg, the organization has stayed out of public sight. It's the sole cabinet-level ministry without an official website and, until recently, its only public platforms were hotlines for reporting activities endangering national security, as Bloomberg noted.
This changed last month when the ministry joined China's social media app WeChat, according to Bloomberg. Since then, it's posted almost every day on its efforts to secure national security, down to telling primary school students what photos they shouldn't post, as reported by Bloomberg.
