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By Didi Kirsten Tatlow
Senior Correspondent, International Affairs
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When an American journalist pleaded guilty in June to acting as an agent for the Chinese government, it was just the latest in a string of cases highlighting Beijing’s global intelligence activities—and part of a broader pattern of Chinese espionage-related arrests and convictions.
U.S. prosecutors said Thomas Pauken II worked for Chinese state media, including Xinhua, but was paid at least $100,000 to act as an intermediary for the Chinese government. “By his own admission, not only did Thomas Pauken attempt to infiltrate U.S. political circles at the direction of China’s Ministry of State Security, but he gathered intelligence on his American targets and reported it back to his Chinese intelligence handlers,” said Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division. Pauken’s guilty plea is just one of a growing number of cases.
A month earlier, Eileen Wang, mayor of Arcadia, California, agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for China. Per the Justice Department, Wang—who was elected to the city council in November 2022 and became mayor in February 2026—worked at the direction and control of Chinese government officials from late 2020 through 2022, promoting Beijing’s interests in the U.S. through a website aimed at the Chinese American community.
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The Chinese Communist Party is “flooding the zone” with spies as it seeks political and economic advantage over a West that it perceives as weakening, experts told Newsweek. Report after report has emerged of suspected spy activity from Norway to Germany, plus other liberal democracies such as South Korea.
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“We’re talking about a vast espionage machine by China,” said I-Chung Lai, president of Taiwan’s The Prospect Foundation think tank. “What China does is they send a lot of people, collect every piece of information they can have and assemble it back together in their headquarters,” he said.
In Norway, Chinese citizens were arrested in May in two separate cases of suspected spy-related activity. In one, a woman allegedly attempted to import a 22-ton satellite receiver to an island that conducts sensitive rocket launches, according to Norway’s counterintelligence authority. Lai said that he was not privy to details but thought that case could be the work of a professional linked to China’s People’s Liberation Army. “To import that equipment you need to know how to assemble it, use it, and that basically means that that woman would...probably would be a trained PLA soldier,” he said.
May also saw a married German couple arrested on suspicion of working for an unnamed Chinese intelligence agency that was seeking sensitive science and technology of “military use,” German prosecutors said. The same month, two Chinese nationals were convicted in South Korea after photographing Korean-U.S. military bases and civilian airports—the first conviction of foreign nationals under the Asian nation’s general espionage provision.
So why the surge in cases? China believes the U.S. and other democracies are struggling with declining domestic cohesion, especially as President Donald Trump’s leadership drives wedges in the traditional Western alliance, giving Beijing opportunities for greater influence.
Other factors include worries over China’s own sluggish economy and efforts to restrict its access to top technology internationally, Lai said. China believes its contest with the U.S. will be settled through scientific and technological power, and CCP leaders including President Xi Jinping have said so publicly. “Definitely China is increasing its espionage operations, precisely and particularly as the economy is going down, and they cannot have the technology as conveniently as they had it before,” Lai said.
Others agree. “Chinese security agencies have been tasked with increasingly heavy requirements under Xi Jinping’s more assertive foreign policy,” Matthew Brazil, a nonresident fellow at The Jamestown Foundation in Washington, D.C. and co-author of Chinese Communist Espionage, An Intelligence Primer, told Newsweek. “Because the Chinese are intensifying their efforts, naturally there are going to be more cases uncovered.”
The push is global. “China has resources. China has interests all over the world…. If you’re a global superpower, you need global coverage,” said a third expert with direct experience of intelligence in China, granted anonymity to speak freely.
China’s embassy in Washington, D.C. did not respond to a request for comment.
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Discovering Spies
Getting a sense of where to look for probable overseas espionage is not difficult, said Lai: read China’s Government Work Report from the legislative and consultative meetings held every March in Beijing. “Usually in the work report they will come out with the objectives for the next year or what they have accomplished last year,” he said, “then probably you can back-trace the work and espionage connected with those objectives.”
China’s agents can sometimes seem lax, making mistakes like carrying cellphones filled with incriminating messages. But it is simply the result of the large and varying nature of China’s intelligence apparatus, Lai said. “First of all, it’s a vast machine, and…it’s difficult to say that they have a central coordinating mechanism, but the vast machine comes out of different agencies,” he said. Non-traditional collectors such as students are an important part of the system. “When it comes to the small fish, sometimes they have good training and sometimes they don’t,” Brazil said.
While it is unclear how big China’s intelligence agencies are, Brazil said he had seen figures of 100,000 people just for the Ministry of State Security, or MSS—the country’s main civilian intelligence agency.
“The Ministry of Public Security is probably much larger,” he said. “Then the military agencies: the Information Support Force, which does communications intelligence and electronic warfare, the Cyberspace Force which does fixed station and strategic facilities, and Aerospace Force, which does overhead photography. These military intelligence units are specialized.” The United Front Work Department, the Propaganda Department and the Foreign Ministry also conduct espionage.
And the MSS figure could be much higher: In a new study, German analyst Jürgen Kremb at Taiwan’s Soochow University assessed there are up to 800,000 members across all of China’s provinces.
China prefers people to transfer information rather than signals as it is afraid of giving away a location via communications cyberhacking and detection techniques mastered by the U.S., Lai said. This is likely why its spies continue to pop up in obvious locations like military bases or airports, as in the South Korea case. The two men had a radio but it was not active, according to South Korean media reports.
Yet the same technologies China excels in could be a chink in its armor. The growing use of AI is creating “extreme nakedness,” said the former intelligence officer, who is from a Western nation. “Keeping an agent or intelligence officer safe—or even alive—is going to be many times harder than in the past. Because it’s not just facial recognition, it’s gait recognition, lots of other ways, and the AI will presumably pull it all together pretty rapidly.”
In a July 8 post shared to X, FBI Director Kash Patel wrote, “113 active spies from foreign countries arrested. Counter intelligence arrest have jumped 53%.” An accompanying video stated that these arrests mean “tech stays home and our defense secrets stay locked down.” It went on to say that the FBI “forced 62 removals of Chinese spies in 2026 alone,” which “completely shattered Beijing’s deep cover operations.”
Speaking after Pauken’s case, Rozhavsky said it shows “the lengths to which the Chinese Communist Party will go to undermine our democratic institutions and degrade our political freedoms,” but “demonstrates the FBI’s resolve to defend the homeland from threats to our national security.”
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