MSS (Ministry of State Security of the People’s Republic of China)

Origins and structure

According to Peter Mattis’s analysis in the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief (2011), the MSS was created in 1983 by merging the CCP Central Committee’s Investigation Department with the intelligence and counterintelligence units of the Ministry of Public Security. It began as a central ministry with a handful of provincial departments; by 1998 it covered every province and provincial-level municipality.¹

The US Department of Justice describes the MSS as China’s intelligence and security service, responsible for counterintelligence, foreign intelligence and political security. US and UK documents also name regional departments, including those in Jiangsu and Hainan provinces.^2,4

Legal basis

The Counterespionage Law of 1 November 2014, as amended on 26 April 2023, provides that counterespionage work is under the centralised leadership of the CCP Central Committee (Art. 2) and that the state security organs are the competent organs in this field; they work together with, among others, the public security and secrecy protection organs and the military (Art. 6). The organs and their staff must act strictly in accordance with the law and must not exceed their powers (Art. 11).³

Article 4 of the same law defines espionage broadly: it covers, among other things, joining an espionage organisation, stealing or passing on state secrets or other material related to national security, and attacks on the networks of state bodies and on critical infrastructure.³

The National Intelligence Law of 27 June 2017 (amended 27 April 2018) classes the intelligence institutions of the state security organs, the public security organs and military intelligence as “national intelligence work institutions” (Art. 5) and obliges organisations and citizens to support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with law (Art. 7).⁵

The Xu Yanjun case (United States)

On 10 October 2018 the US Department of Justice announced economic espionage charges against Xu Yanjun, a deputy division director in the Sixth Bureau of the Jiangsu Province State Security Department. He had been arrested in Belgium on 1 April 2018 and was extradited to the United States on 9 October.²

On 5 November 2021 a jury in Cincinnati found him guilty on all counts, including conspiracy and attempted economic espionage and theft of trade secrets, among them secrets relating to GE Aviation’s composite engine fan; on 16 November 2022 the court sentenced him to 20 years in prison. According to the DOJ, he was the first Chinese intelligence officer extradited to the United States to stand trial.⁶

On 8 August 2024 the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the conviction.⁷

Attribution of cyber attacks

On 19 July 2021 the UK government, together with its allies, attributed to the MSS the activities of the groups known as APT40 and APT31. The UK’s NCSC judged it “highly likely” that APT40 is linked to the MSS and sponsored by the MSS Hainan State Security Department, and “likely” that APT31 is a group of contractors working directly for the MSS (see APT).⁴

On the same day, following the unsealing of an indictment against four members of APT40, the FBI and CISA stated that an employee of the front company Hainan Xiandun had acted on the instructions of MSS officers from the Hainan department; the targets included universities, the aviation and defence industries, healthcare and maritime transport in the United States, Canada, Europe and the Middle East.⁸