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Germany’s popular weekly magazine Der Spiegel reported on July 15 that the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a German Intelligence Agency, had set up a designated “China Task Force” to monitor the growing number of Chinese spy activities in Germany. Many Chinese spies work as staff workers in the Chinese Embassy and are particularly active in issues related to Taiwan’s Independence, Tibetan Independence Movement, and so on.
According to a European correspondent of Taiwan’s Liberty Times newspaper, there’s similar activity by Chinese employees in almost every prominent German company. For instance, a security guard in a Siemens office building in Southern Germany had stopped Chinese employees several times from entering the company alone at night.
One Siemens middle level manager told the reporter that even a piece of paper recovered from the trash could be sent out by fax after someone made a copy. This kind of behaviour has damaged Chinese employees’ credibility.
Der Spiegel's report said that German intelligence estimated that about 20 to 50 Chinese spies currently lived in Germany, ordinarily remaining silent and low-key. But they immediately come to life when there is development on issues related to Taiwan’s Independence, Tibet, Xinjiang, Falun Gong, or China’s democracy movement.
The report also listed several instances. For example, the German government is considering denying a visa for a diplomat in the Chinese Embassy in Munich, because he was caught several times spying on overseas Uyghurs. A Chinese employee of the Zeiss Company has been in constant contact with the Chinese Embassy, and has invaded the company’s internal network to collect the company’s business secrets; A Chinese university scholar in Southern Germany regularly sent confidential documents containing the company’s thin film technology to China on weekends.
