According to Shaomin Li in the American Spectator, the CCP spy agency has sent out a social media warning:

China's State Security Ministry issued a public social mobilization order on Aug. 1 through the Chinese social media platform WeChat entitled “Full-Society Mobilization Needed for Counter-Espionage!”

And they are offering up to 500,000 yuan for spy tips. So, if you are a foreigner in China, you are a high-value target for any aspiring Chinese in need of a financial injection. Li himself was arrested in 2001 in China on spy charges because he was too pro-Taiwan. Don't think the CCP will change any time soon: "it can emphasize catching spies or deemphasize it depending on its priority, not on the rule of law."

Not exactly. Governments go after spies not from any objective evaluation of enemies, but from their regime threat perception. In the case of the CCP it goes way back: "it had already been arresting and executing thousands of CCP members under the pretext of capturing spies in the 1920s and 1940s." Of course, it was fighting a war with the Nationalists; anyone could have been a spy. And in the Cultural Revolution, of course, Mao was chasing spies. The whole future depended on beating up anyone with the wrong idea about the glorious Great Leap Forward and its subsequent famine.

Today President Xi is facing severe economic headwinds, on the Evergrande real-estate front, the youth unemployment front, and who knows what else. The problem couldn't be the stupidity of the top-down authoritarian regime itself. Gotta be enemy spies.

Back in the U.S. in the early days of the Cold War, the U.S. got all worked up about Communist spies. And no wonder, with Treasury chief Harry Dexter White a spy for the Soviets and the Rosenbergs stealing our nuke secrets. Of course, a limit was reached when the lowly born Whittaker Chambers ratted on the high-born Alger Hiss as a Communist spy and hid the proof in a backyard pumpkin. Everybody knew that Alger Hiss was a good guy, from Johns Hopkins, Harvard Law, and a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Alger Hiss a spy? The very idea!

If you are still not sure who's the bad guy in Chambers vs. Hiss, just look at the photos on Wikipedia.

Of course, it was rather embarrassing for all the fashionables who flocked to Communism in the 1930s to be caught on the left foot by the sudden threat of Communism after World War II, although experts agree that the victors in any war very often fall out after the victory. But fortunately, good people managed to cool the jets of Commie Hunter Joe McCarthy, and Richard Nixon got his desserts in the 1970s. Today we look back at the Commie Hunters as villains and the Commie Spies as practically heroes for standing up to the fascist mob.

 So spy hunts don't just show up randomly. They show up when a ruling class is feeling the heat. A ruling class that is solid in the saddle doesn't worry too much about spies and traitors. But when things start going wrong; that's when the spies show up. It makes complete sense that the emergence of the ridiculous Donald Trump in 2015 should be all mixed up with Russian Collusion. What other reason would cause a sensible politician like Hillary Clinton -- now memorialized as Hurricane Hilary -- to act on the sensible suspicion that Trump was a dupe of the Russians?

A Spy Scare is a "tell." It tells us that the ruling class feels the need to fight back against enemies, real or imagined. Really? Our noble and lordly educated class feels threatened by a few middle-class yahoos and with concerned parents turning up at school-board meetings?

You may think that this attitude is paranoid, but I think it is natural for anyone in politics. Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt taught us that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. If you ain't a friend then it stands to reason you are probably an enemy, and when it comes to enemies, you can't be too careful. That's why the U.S. has a good-natured "intelligence community" of 18 intelligence agencies devoted to the exposure of enemies. The intelligence community understands that it is the first line of defense for our noble rulers. They recall how noble Prince Hamlet said:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

Of course, King Claudius was never too sure about Hamlet, so he needed his intelligence community of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to do a spot of spying on their old school friend. They were such fun that Tom Stoppard made the spies into a comedy.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Lorie Shaull