More CCP Spies on LinkedIn

Hi Global Recap readers,

As a head of state, you can’t just say “bad is bad.”

Why? Because one tug on the diplomatic web rattles everything else. A strained relationship can hit trade. Trade hits jobs. Jobs hit livelihoods. Livelihoods hit social stability. And instability hits the economy again. It’s a recursive chain that can spiral fast and no leader wants to light that fuse.

At least, not until the people decide they’re ready for it. 👇️ 

🇺🇸 UNITED STATES
China's Quiet
Loans into America

A new AidData report says Chinese state banks pushed more than $200 billion in hidden loans in hidden official lending into the United States over roughly 25 years, making the United States Beijing's single largest borrower.

Much of that money slipped in through offshore shell companies and often helped Chinese firms buy into sensitive U.S. tech and infrastructure, while regulators were looking the other way.

• Scale: AidData tallies more than $200 billion in Chinese official lending to nearly 2,500 U.S. projects between 2000 and 2023, from LNG terminals and pipelines to data centers and corporate credit lines for giants like Amazon, Tesla, Boeing, and Disney.

• Method: The money often took a detour through shell firms in places like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and Delaware, which made the loans look like ordinary private finance instead of credit from state banks that answer to the Communist Party's Central Financial Commission.

• Targets: A big chunk of the lending bankrolled Chinese acquisitions or stakes in U.S. firms working on robotics, semiconductors, biotechnology, and other dual use tech that matters for fighter jets, submarines, and telecom networks, not just gadgets and insurance products.

• Red flags: Once regulators dug in, they forced reversals. One example is the $1.8 billion purchase of an 80% stake in the U.S. insurer Ironshore by the Chinese conglomerate Fosun. The deal was financed in part by about $1.2 billion in loans from four Chinese state-owned banks, routed through a Cayman Islands vehicle to support Fosun’s acquisition of Ironshore.

  • Ironshore at that time already owned Wright USA, an insurance agency that specializes in professional liability policies for federal employees, including many CIA and FBI personnel.

  • This obviously heightened regulatory concerns about sensitive data exposure under foreign ownership.

• Arms race: Washington has tried to catch up by beefing up the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. and blocking more deals since 2020, but China has responded by opening more than 100 overseas branches of its banks so it can keep routing capital through ever more opaque offshore structures.

🇬🇧 UNITED KINGDOM
LinkedIn CCP Spies

Speaking of China, U.K. Security Minister Dan Jarvis told Parliament the government will not tolerate "covert and calculated" interference after an MI5 alert warned MPs and staff about suspected Chinese state recruitment on LinkedIn. The warning named two profiles and triggered a package of new security measures.

• Profiles: The notice singled out LinkedIn accounts named "Amanda Qiu" and "Shirly Shen," which MI5 says operate for China’s Ministry of State Security, though the real account holders are unknown.

• Tactics: Pitches posed as "civilian recruitment headhunters" seeking "insider insights," with paid trips to China and payments in cash or cryptocurrency to cultivate long-term sources across Parliament, think tanks, and consultancies.

• Response: Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle and Lords Speaker Lord McFall circulated the alert. Conservative researcher Simon Whelband found a three-month-old message from "Shirly Shen" offering a supposed consultancy role.

• Measures: Jarvis announced £170m to upgrade encrypted government tech, tighter rules on covert political funding, stronger Electoral Commission enforcement, extra protections for university research, and security briefings for candidates in elections next May.

• Politics: Ministers are considering adding China to the enhanced tier of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme. Jarvis said no decision yet. Beijing called the claims "pure fabrication" and lodged "stern representations."

🇱🇧 LEBANON
Training Camp
Or Not?

An Israeli airstrike on the Ein el-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp near the southern city of Sidon killed at least 13 people and injured others, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Israeli officials say they hit a Hamas training site, while Hamas calls that claim "fabrication and lies" and insists the strike tore into a civilian area.

• Where: Ein el-Hilweh, the crowded refugee camp on Sidon’s outskirts, saw a drone strike that hit a car in a mosque car park.

• Target: The Israel Defense Forces say the site was a Hamas compound used to plan attacks on Israel and describe the op

  eration as a precision strike on militants, not on the camp’s residents

• Denial: Hamas rejects that outright, saying it has no military infrastructure inside Palestinian camps in Lebanon and that the attack hit a playground and sports area used by teenagers, not militants.

🇺🇸 UNITED STATES
Trump Shrugs
Off Khashoggi

Today, President Trump invited Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the White House in a lavish show of friendship. He’s now being accused of going too soft on the prince after publicly defending him over the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

That criticism is absolutely fair. But it also overlooks the fact that while Biden vowed accountability during his campaign, his own diplomatic posture (meeting with MBS, declining to sanction him directly, and backing a legal claim that he enjoys immunity) signaled a similar trade of principle for pragmatism. You can’t hammer one leader for violating a standard while giving a pass to another who crossed the same line, and the claim that "Trump is a dictator courting another dictator" doesn’t really hold up unless a double standard is the operating principle.

• Setting: This trip was the prince's first Washington visit after seven years. He was greeted with black horses, a red carpet, a military band, and a flyover of F-16 and F-35 jets over the White House.

• Murder: For those who are not familiar with the Khashoggi story, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist living in the United States at the time.

  • Khashoggi had shifted from longtime insider to one of the kingdom’s most prominent critics—especially of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. By 2017–2018, his Washington Post columns blasted MBS’s crackdown on dissent, the jailing of businessmen and royals, the war in Yemen, and what he called a growing climate of fear silencing Saudi public life.

  • He was killed and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

  • A declassified U.S. intelligence report in 2021 assessed that Mohammed bin Salman approved the operation, a finding the crown prince has denied while calling the killing a "huge mistake."

• Defense: When ABC’s Mary Bruce asked about Khashoggi and 9/11 families who object to the visit, Trump cut in, calling it a "horrible" question, and later suggested ABC’s license should be pulled.

• Deals: Beside all the controversy, MBS announced that a previous Saudi pledge of $600 billion in U.S. investment is being bumped "to almost $1 trillion," with money pointed at AI, rare earths, and other high-tech sectors. Meanwhile, Trump signaled approval for selling advanced F-35 fighter jets to the kingdom, a move that worries some lawmakers and security officials who see risks for Israel and opportunities for China to hoover up sensitive tech.

• Geopolitics: The two men also talked up a security pact and the idea of Saudi Arabia formally joining the Abraham Accords, but MBS repeated his line that he needs a "clear path" to a Palestinian state before trying to sell normalization with Israel to his own public.