China’s struggle against spying is “extremely grim", said a spokesman for the country’s rubber-stamp parliament late last month. The techniques used by foreign spooks, he added, were becoming ever harder to detect. To tackle this, the legislature approved a new, more sweeping, version of the country’s counter-espionage law on April 26th. Among foreigners in China, it is causing jitters. In what Chinese officials call their “smokeless war" against spies, risks to the innocent are growing.
Even before the law was passed, anxieties had been rising. The arrest in March of a Japanese businessman in Beijing caused shivers among fellow executives in China. The man, a senior employee of a Japanese drug firm, Astellas Pharma, and a longtime resident of China, has been accused of spying (no other details have been released). Such charges are far from rare. The foreign ministry in Tokyo says he was the 17th Japanese to be seized by China’s counter-espionage police since 2015. But the latest detainee was unusual: a prominent member of the business community from a big company.
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