Chinese reporter Zhao Guangjun arrived in Finland at the end of 2011. At that time, he was already an experienced correspondent nearing retirement age.
Zhao and his wife moved to East Helsinki in a prosperous residential area by the sea.
Neighbors still remember the couple well. They say that the lady was a skilled cook and that Zhao liked to invite the neighbors to eat.
Zhao asked the neighbors a lot about Finland. The conversation took place in Finnish, as Zhao had been a correspondent in Helsinki before. But he did not tell about his own life in China.
What the neighbors didn’t know was that at that time Zhao’s activities were already being investigated by the Swedish security police.
Zhao Guangjun, who worked as a correspondent for a Chinese newspaper in Helsinki between 2011 and 2015, was actually an intelligence officer of China’s Ministry of State Security.
‘s investigative journalism MOT editor has found out in cooperation with the European media with The operation of China’s intelligence apparatus. The cases bring new information about what kind of cover roles China is using to obtain secret information.
Zhao’s story is told in the MOT documentary Vakooja / reporter, which will be published on Wednesday, November 20, at Areena.
MOT has confirmed information about his role from several sources. He has no criminal convictions. We are publishing his name because the case shows how China uses journalists as an intelligence cover.
Zhao did not grant MOT an interview.
The role of Zhao, who lived in eastern Helsinki, was revealed as a byproduct of a trial.
It is about the trial that took place in Sweden in 2018. It condemned an agent living in Sweden who spied on the Tibetan community in Stockholm, recruited by China.
The agent made up to 12 trips to Finland between 2013 and 2015.
After the trips to Finland, money appeared in his account, a total of several thousand euros broken into smaller installments.
– [Tuomittu] has been in contact with three different individuals connected to China’s Ministry of State Security who have been identified as intelligence officers, says the judgment of the Södertörn District Court.
The agent’s contact person was Zhao Guangjun, a correspondent for the Chinese newspaper Suomen.
Only little information is available about the meetings between Zhao and the Swedish agent in Helsinki. It only appears from the judgment that there were several of them, the places were restaurants and shopping centers, and the meetings were of short duration.
Zhao’s duties seem to have included at least paying the agent’s fees, which rose to thousands of euros. According to the judgment, the agent made significant cash deposits into his account already in 2013 and 2014.
Spy editors don’t publish diligently
Only one photo of Zhao is publicly available. In it, he interviews the Prime Minister of Norway Gro Harlam Brundland At the end of the 80s.
In Finland, Zhao wrote stories about Finnish Christmas, election results and Independence Day traditions, among other things. The stories seem to have been created with very little effort. They typically don’t have interviews with anyone.
The intelligence services also monitor the publishing pace of foreign journalists in the country.
Based on the stories found online, Zhao seems to have written an average of 1–2 stories a month during his years in Finland. For example in Belgium the journalist suspected of intelligence connections has published an average of three stories a month.
You can’t be completely sure that all the stories are still online, but the number and quality of the stories raises the suspicion that for some the editor’s job is not a full-time job.
The newspaper of the Communist Party is used for intelligence
In Finland, Zhao represented a newspaper whose Chinese name, “Guangming”, refers to enlightenment or enlightenment. It is a newspaper of the Communist Party with an extensive network of correspondents around the world.
It is almost certain that the Chinese Ministry of Security uses the magazine for intelligence, he says Peter Mattis.
He started his career as a China analyst for the CIA, the US intelligence service. Today, he heads the non-partisan foreign policy Jamestown Foundation.
– Are all the journalists of this daily newspaper employees of the Ministry of Security? No, but it can be said that some are, he says.
Australian researcher and writer Alex Joske agrees. He has written a book about the intelligence of the Chinese Ministry of Security.
The newspaper in question is not the New York Times or the BBC, he says.
– It is not a particularly prominent paper in China. I think the reason for the extensive network of correspondents is actually the Ministry of State Security, he says.
Joske estimates that there are as many as 100–200 journalists working in different parts of the world who also work for the Chinese Ministry of Security.
The Swiss intelligence service also estimates in its recent report that it is typical for China to use people posing as entrepreneurs, tourists or journalists in its intelligence.
The Finnish Security Police does not comment on Zhao Guangjun’s case, but says that the journalist is a typical undercover role of an intelligence officer.
Spying on refugees is not illegal in Finland
According to the district court, the case of the agent convicted in Sweden was a typical example of how Chinese intelligence works.
It was about so-called refugee espionage targeting the Tibetan community. Spying on a person is a crime in Sweden, but not in Finland.
Therefore, Zhao Guangjun did not violate Finnish law in the case that came to light.
The protection police has long presented spying on refugees criminalization also in Finland.
In the verdict given in Sweden, it was emphasized that there was no doubt about the reasons for the convicted agent’s contact with the intelligence workers.
– The probability that contact with these persons was just a coincidence and not part of refugee espionage is almost non-existent.
The last story of the spy
Zhao Guangjun’s career as a public journalist in Finland ended with a harmless little thing.
The last story left from Tampere was a text prepared by the Tammerkoski school, which told about the visit of schoolchildren from Beijing.
– Little ambassadors present Chinese culture, he wrote in February 2015.
Around that time, Zhao Guangju and his wife moved out of their home in East Helsinki. They returned to China.
In the same year, 2015, the trips to Finland of the agent convicted in Sweden also ended. He started visiting Poland instead.
requested an interview with Zhao through the magazine’s Nordic and Baltic section. According to the newspaper, Zhao has been retired for several years and did not give an interview.
The Chinese embassy in Finland does not comment on the dual role of journalist-spy in Finland. In its email response to , it demanded to stop spreading disinformation about the “so-called Chinese spy threat”.