China has marked its first national anti-espionage day with Dangerous Love, a poster campaign warning against “honey traps”, featuring a handsome red-haired foreigner and an attractive, naïve Chinese civil servant.
China is trying to increase the awareness among the people of foreign spies in their midst, and this month staged National Security Education Day, a quasi-holiday to warn people of the dangers of silver-tongued foreigners with a hidden agenda.
Little Li, who works in a government foreign publicity department, meets the dashing foreign academic David at a dinner and is soon swept away by his romantic patter and gifts of flowers.
“You’re pretty, sweet and exceptional. Honestly, I fell for you the first time I saw you,” says David in the 16-panel cartoon.
Little Li (who wears the same purple dress throughout the story) reckons that having a handsome, romantic and talented foreign boyfriend is not too shabby, and they start dating.
But David is a foreign spy who convinces Li to give him confidential documents, ostensibly for an academic article he is writing. She overcomes her misgivings about breaching state confidentiality and hands him a hard drive containing secret information over yet another romantic dinner.
However, David stops calling afterwards, and in the final panel, Li is pictured bawling her eyes out as two stern policemen accuse her of showing “a very shallow understanding of secrecy for a state employee”.
“You are suspected of violating our nation’s law,” they say, as reported by China Law Blog.
“I didn’t know he was a spy. He used me,” she wails.
The cartoon poster is the latest in a series of animations used in increasingly sophisticated propaganda campaigns in China to push the Communist Party’s stance on areas of information security and human rights.
One series of videos to mark National Security Education Day featured Superman, the Joker, Alibaba chief Jack Ma, Spongebob Squarepants, Colin Firth’s character from Kingsman: The Secret Service and Mr Bean (although the picture appears to feature Rowan Atkinson as Johnny English, rather than the hapless Mr Bean) to explain two new counter-espionage laws, the Counter-Espionage Law and the National Security Law.
Despite the image of America portrayed by Superman, Captain American and their ilk, the people safeguarding the United States’ national interest “are not men with magic powers and chest muscles,” the videos say.
One video shows President Xi Jinping, who has made stamping out graft one of the planks of his administration, playing whack-a-mole as he tries to combat graft, and among those singled out for censure in the video are senior Communist Party officials, state security chief Zhou Yongkang and political star Bo Xilai.
This week, a computer technician from Sichuan was sentenced to death for leaking more than 150,000 classified documents to an unidentified foreign power, while his brother-in-law was sentenced to three years behind bars on the charge of negligent disclosure of state secrets.
