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4 March 2023

China’s Spymasters Can Get More From TikTok Than From Balloons

Tobin Harshaw

The Great Spy Balloon Panic of 2023 may have deflated, but the episode did raise significant questions about America’s preparedness for the next era of superpower rivalry. Bloomberg Opinion’s Niall Ferguson, for example, argued that the Chinese flying object exposed the US “domain awareness gap” and aging military industrial base. Admiral James Stavridis questioned the cost-benefit ratio of using Sidewinder missiles (costing over $400,000 each) to bring down what might turn out to be weather balloons or scientific experiments. The best-selling horror novelist Whitley Strieber warned of the “remarkable, complex and secretive presence" of extraterrestrials. (Then again, Strieber says he was abducted by aliens on Boxing Day in 1985.)

As the hysteria abates, let’s pay attention to the big threat: the global web of Chinese intelligence operations that have largely flown beneath the radar of public awareness. This week I tracked down Alex Joske, an Australian risk analyst and expert on Beijing’s adept influencers — not the TikTok kind. Joske, who lived in China for six years and has studied in Taiwan, is the author of Spies and Lies: How China's Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World, which published in October. Here is a lightly edited transcript of our exchange.

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