China is on the brink of an all-out spy war with the United States as its top spy agency slammed the CIA for branding Beijing as the top challenge facing the United States.
The Ministry of State Security (MSS) argued the CIA had heavily invested in new intelligence-collection efforts both domestically and globally over the past two years.
In a message shared on China’s app WeChat, the MSS said: “CIA has committed substantially more resources toward China-related intelligence collection, operations, and analysis around the world, more than doubling the percentage of its overall budget focused on China over just the last two years.
“CIA is hiring and training more Mandarin speakers, expanding the confrontation against China to every corner of the agency.”
The Chinese spy agency also hit out at the US agency for challenging Beijing’s “justifiable” attempts to push back on increased espionage activities against the Xi Jinping government.
READ MORE: China lashes out at ‘extremely irresponsible’ claim it launched cyberattacks on US
They said: “In recent years, the USA, on the one hand, started intelligence wars, sparing no effort to step up its espionage against China and, on the other hand, ‘brought suit against its victims,’ scandalously smearing China’s justifiable defence and trying to misrepresent the Counterespionage Law of PRC as an ‘evil law.”
The MSS said China will not turn to the law to institute safeguarding measures to respond to the CIA’s decision to “rebuild its intelligence networks” in the country to collect intelligence about Beijing.
The agency added: “Now that CIA has repeatedly vowed to rebuild its intelligence networks in China so as to gather more China-related intelligence, China has no choice but to use legal means to guard against and crack down on espionage activities.”
The statement was a response to an article from CIA Director William Burns, who said the agency is expanding its efforts to address competition with China.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Burns said: “China remains the only US rival with both the intent to reshape the international order and the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do so.”
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