Chinese officials upset with CCP are leaking intel to West, says Australia spy chief

Australia’s international spy chief suggested that Chinese unhappy with the direction the country were increasingly leaking intelligence to foreign spy agencies.

Australian Secret Intelligence Service director-general Paul Symon said Tuesday that authoritarian, single-party states “engineer their own trust deficit” by regarding all relationships as transactional.  

"ASIS benefits from espionage opportunities that emerge from the suppressed dissent within authoritarian states," Symon said in a speech marking the agency’s 70th anniversary.

"When leaders abolish fixed political terms, for example, they become responsible and accountable for everything, including the disillusionment that emerges from within,” he continued, referring to how Chinese leader Xi Jinping abolished term limits in 2018.

“This provides us an edge."

Australia is a member of the Five Eyes, an intelligence sharing bloc with the U.S., U.K, Canada and New Zealand that emerged during the Cold War.

Symon argued that although Western institutions and values were under attack by hostile powers, their centralized systems and crackdown on internal dissent made them “increasingly brittle.”

"Increasingly, officials [and] individuals unhappy with the trajectory of closed societies are willing to speak up and take risks," he said.

"In China, we have an ancient culture but [now] there's an enforced monoculture.

Those disappointed by the isolationist trajectory set by the Chinese Communist Party are motivated not only by self-interest, but its consequences for Chinese society and culture, said the spy chief.

"We don't yet know exactly how that will play out but what we see are more and more signs of officials and individuals interested in a relationship [with us],” Symon said.

"That's not coercion [by us], that is very real concern about their culture, the lack of diversity in their culture and the direction they're heading in."

Symon also addressed other matters in the speech, saying Australia would be hands-off with the Solomon Islands, who plan to enter a security pact with China, but continue sharing relevant information.

Australia remains concerned that China will use the pact to establish permanent military bases nearby.

He also admitted a small ASIS team was on the ground in Kabul to assist with the withdrawal from Afghanistan.