Spying in China Became Extremely Hard

About 15 years ago, the United States had most of its human assets in China rolled up because it did not take new surveillance risks seriously enough. That is the account from former CIA director and career diplomat William J. Burns, who said the agency then worked hard to rebuild that base.

Burns described a changed world for recruiting spies, marked by smart cities, facial recognition, and gait recognition. Smart cities are cities wired with cameras and sensors that track movement. Facial recognition identifies a person from a face, and gait recognition identifies a person from the way he or she walks. Burns said China's Ministry of State Security could "mine big data and discern patterns and movement of" American officers.

That shift matters because the contest with China is broader than the Cold War, in Burns's view. The competition with the Soviet Union was mostly military and ideological, he said. The competition with China runs across every area, including armies, ideas, space, cyberspace, and a revolution in technology.

Rebuilding, Burns said, meant making budgets follow priorities. He named four priorities of China, technology, people, and partnerships. The share of the CIA budget focused on collection, analysis, and operations on China more than tripled during his four years as director. The agency also created its first chief technology officer role and a new mission center aimed at improving cooperation between the CIA and the private sector, because, as Burns put it, "we can't compete effectively in emerging technologies with China unless we do that."

Burns argued that the United States still has the better hand to play, partly because its domestic economic and political system can learn and adapt, and partly because it has allied support that China and Russia lack.