Chinamaxxing
Welcome to Memetic Warfare.
This week, we’ll look at some China-centric events. The first is a bit of humblebragging. I’m sure that many of you noticed that the Five Eyes states put on the umpteenth advisory on Chinese virtual espionage on Linkedin. The New Zealand government also confirmed that a few recruitment operations almost took place succesfully:
What’s notable about this one is that it’s a joint, international advisory. China has historically been sensitive to this when it comes to cyber attribution.
Now time for the humblebragging: long-time readers will know that Memetic Warfare is THE place to read about virtual espionage operations targeting the US, Taiwan and abroad, well before they’re covered by mainstream media, in some cases up to a year in advance.
That aside, what’s interesting here to me is how China responded to the event. The Chinese MFA statement put out shortly after uses, I suppose unsurprisingly, the exact same talking points used to counter cyber attribution.
The statement trots out tropes such as the “China (insert field here) threat”, previously used as the “China Cyber Threat” theory in MPS-related publications - see more below.
Other phrases and narratives, such as the “Five Eyes” being in fact the real threat and so on are of course also the same in past MPS and CVERC publications. Even the “thief” sentence is recycled.
I guess it’s just a matter of time until we see similar advisories or reporting from a Chinese cutout or perhaps the MSS itself?
That time is the writing of this blog post. As I was writing this, it seems that Chinese state media already began to lay the groundwork already. On June 7th, the Global Times put out a short piece covering a new MSS statement.
The statement is straightforward, accusing foreign intelligence agencies of using “part-time photography work and paid research assignments” to recruit people in China. The photography is a nice touch, but the paid research assignment is of course the same tactic that China has repeatedly been caught using.
There’s a lot of focus on technical data as part of this to infer performance of weapons systems. The MSS’ advisory as well is detailed, telling citizens to avoid paid gigs and those that request the use of specific equipment, as well as photographing sensitive sites. I liked the use of the phrase “jigsaw-style” intelligence gathering as well:
This is an early and low-effort article, but I imagine that we’ll see more coming out from various Chinese groups as they have time to adapt.
Moving on from that, I wanted to point out NetAskari’s post showing that “BlackTigerAlliance” has posted personal information on the executives of Integrity Tech, a US-sanctioned Chinese cyber company.
Wow, it sure is something how executives and operators from Kaspersky and other Chinese companies just keep getting exposed shortly before or after they’re sanctioned. Life sure is full of coincidences!
The final section today will also be the lengthiest. I wanted to review the indictment against Thomas Weir Pauken II, a US citizen who worked as a journalist for Chinese state outlets and allegedly acted as an asset for the MSS. His indictment was published a while back, and there are some interesting points to review.
Check out the summary below, it’s pretty straightforward.
He was apparently detained in Januaryh 2025 and presumably flipped.
Beyond “Cathy”, Pauken allegedly worked for two others who tried to get him to join the State Department, apparently to no avail.
Pauken was busy selling reports to other Chinese groups, and they even apparently tried to get him to find a contractor to run cyber operations for them.
The attempted flip here is more obvious:
We see Pauken use the typical line in Chinese recruitment: geopolitical consulting.
There are some shenanigans straight out of Curb Your Enthusiasm:
It was also interesting to see that Cathy proposed that he set up a nonprofit to launder payments:
The gendered pronoun redactments made me laugh:
In short, this is an ongoing case and it’s going to be interesting. If Pauken does flip and names names, the fallout would be big for China, and they’d be even further incentivized to double down on a counter campaign - just like they did for cyber.
That’s it for this week, thanks for reading.