http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/03/world/asia/china-approves-security-law-emphasizing-counterespionage.html 2014-11-02 10:58:22 China Approves Security Law Emphasizing Counterespionage The change, made official on Saturday, targets foreign spies and their domestic collaborators, reflecting top-level concerns about growing political threats from abroad, analysts said. === BEIJING — President The new emphasis, demonstrated in the name change, mirrors concerns at the top of the Communist Party that China faces growing political threats from overseas, analysts said. “In terms of name and content the law comprehensively revises the National Security Law to emphasize anti-espionage work,” Xinhua, the state-run news agency, said Saturday, the day the law was passed. In previous weeks, Xinhua said that the law wasbetter suited to “a new situation, and new tasks, facing the country’s security needs.” Appearing one year after the establishment of a National Security Commission headed by Mr. Xi, the new law is simultaneously more anti-foreign, more Maoist and more modern, analysts said. “This is a new direction taken by the national security apparatus to heighten national security, to highlight the contradictions the state faces today,” Yuan Yi, a professor of politics at National Chengchi University in Taiwan, said in an interview conducted shortly before the law’s passage as drafts of the document were circulating. “I suspect this new law was a concrete result of the founding of the National Security Commission. They looked back at what was missing,” and focused on perceived, growing threats from the outside world, Mr. Yuan said. The second article of the new law states that its new primary goal — counterespionage — will be carried out in concert with the “mass line,” Maoist parlance revived by Mr. Xi that aims to extend the reach of policies with the active cooperation of hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese. “I think it serves as a gesture to reinstate a time-honored effort of previous mass mobilizations; it’s an open call to all people, all walks of life,” Mr. Yuan said. The new law also makes clear that it is legal to freeze or seize the assets of suspected spies or spy organizations operating in the country. Such assets then belong to the state, Xinhua reported. Coming shortly after a major political meeting in Beijing, the Fourth Plenum of the Communist Party, that vowed China would strengthen the “rule of law,” the new law also says human rights will be protected in its prosecution: “Counterespionage work must be carried out in accordance with the law and respect and protect human rights, as well as protect the legal rights of civil society organizations,” it says. “Changing the name of the law from a ‘National Security Law’ to a ‘Counterespionage Law’ inevitably sends a message that the Party is concerned about — and may intend to more closely monitor — the relationships between many of its citizens and the international community with which China is increasingly intertwined,” said Murray Scot Tanner, an analyst at CNA Corporation. Chinese party officials have often warned against the spread of “color revolution,” previously referred to as “peaceful evolution,” from the West. The term refers to democratic movements such as the current “Occupy Central” movement in Hong Kong, which party and state news media have said is a plot fomented by “hostile Western forces.” Mr. Tanner also pointed to an early article in the new law, which he said clearly laid down a chain of command when it comes to counterespionage and national security work by giving the state security organs — and not the police or military security — “pride of place as China’s chief counterintelligence department.” “It implicitly downplays, by name, the role of China’s largest security bureaucracy — the Public Security police force — as well as China’s State Secrets departments and other agencies,” Mr. Tanner wrote in an email. It was, he said, “a rare glimpse at the bureaucratic rivalries among the many government and military agencies that have overlapping responsibilities for security.”