China’s state media have a new group of heroes to lionise after spycatchers scored apparent victories over Japan and the US, the country’s biggest rivals.
The foreign ministry in Beijing confirmed on Monday that six Japanese citizens had been detained for unspecified “illegal activities”, which Japan’s Kyodo news agency had earlier reported involved suspected espionage.
That news came after a weekend New York Times report that Chinese authorities had at the start of the decade imprisoned or executed more than a dozen spies recruited by the US Central Intelligence Agency, severely disrupting American intelligence-gathering in the country.