The CIA has distributed two Chinese-language videos aimed at enticing officials in the country to leak sensitive information to the US.
It is the latest public-facing effort by American government agents to increase the gathering of information on Beijing.
The two short videos posted to the CIA's social media accounts on Thursday, local time, show fictional scenes involving a senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official and a more junior government worker with access to classified information who become disillusioned with China's system and approach the CIA.
The videos appear designed to tap into possible discontent in the Chinese government and among senior ranks of the CCP following Beijing's purge of top officials and military leaders, including some considered close allies of President Xi Jinping.
"As I rise within the party, I watch those above me being discarded like worn-out shoes, but now I realise that my fate was just as precarious as theirs," the narrator says in Chinese in one of the videos as the camera shows empty seats around a lavish dinner table.
"My family's fate cannot rest in their hands," the man says, before the video shows him contacting the CIA using a tablet computer.
The clip ends with the CIA logo and dark web contact details for the agency.
A CIA official told Reuters that the US was not just interested in counterintelligence, but was also seeking information on advanced science, military and cyber technology, valuable economic data, and China's foreign policy secrets.
China's embassy in Washington DC did not immediately respond to the videos. However, it has previously accused the US of waging a systematic disinformation campaign against China and said any attempts to drive a wedge between the Chinese people and the CCP would fail.
American intelligence agencies said in March that China remained the top military and cyber threat to the US, noting that China had the ability to hit the United States with conventional weapons, compromise US infrastructure through cyber attacks and target its assets in space.
CIA director John Ratcliffe also said that no adversary had ever posed a more formidable challenge to the US than the CCP.
"It is intent on dominating the world economically, militarily, and technologically," he said in a statement.
"Our agency must continue responding to this threat with urgency, creativity, and grit, and these videos are just one of the ways we are doing this."
Mr Ratcliffe also told US broadcaster Fox News that the videos represented a change in tact by the CIA to gather intelligence on adversaries such as China.
"One of the primary roles of the CIA is to collect intelligence for the president and for our policymakers. One of the ways we do that is by recruiting assets that can help us steal secrets," he said.
"This video explains to them how they can contact the CIA through our dark web site and have the ability to improve their safety and wellbeing and that of their family.
"We know that this will be an effective way to attract assets who can provide us with information that will provide a decisive advantage.
"This is just one of many ways that we're adjusting our tradecraft at the CIA."
The move comes after the CIA in October launched a drive to recruit new informants in China, Iran and North Korea by posting instructions online on how to securely contact the agency, following what it said were successful efforts to enlist Russians.
Under the Biden administration, the CIA waged a three-year-long intelligence-gathering operation in a bid to attract spies in Moscow.
That operation included the production of Russian-language videos aimed at showing cooperation with the United States as a source of national pride for Russians who were growing frustrated with the war in Ukraine.
In 2023, the CIA heralded Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin's "armed challenge to the Russian state" as a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" to recruit Russians into leaking information against President Vladimir Putin.
"Disaffection with the war [in Ukraine] will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practised repression," ex-CIA director Bill Burns said at the time.
"That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at the CIA — at our core a human intelligence service. We're not letting it go to waste."
In March, the CIA's intelligence approach around the war changed under the Trump administration, with the intelligence agency cutting knowledge-sharing ties with Ukraine in the wake of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's high-profile clash with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
At the time, then-national security adviser Mike Waltz said the Trump administration had taken a "step back" and was "reviewing all aspects" of its intelligence relationship with Ukraine.
Mr Ratcliffe confirmed the move and said it was possible that both the military aid and intelligence sharing restrictions could "go away", saying the US would "work shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine".
ABC/Reuters
