Name: How China's 'Perfect' Spy Got Caught | Exclusive Preview
Uploaded: 2026-02-20T21:31:20.000Z
Duration: 6 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I at least had in my head this idea of a spy, of James Bond, somebody jumping out of airplanes.

This story is about aviation secrets, in particular jet engine trade secrets.

These are technologies that China wants very badly.

What China is alleged to be stealing en masse from the United States.

We cannot tolerate a nation that steals the fruits of our brain power.

GE was almost like a pack rat when it came to electronic information.

You have text messages, you have videos, you have photos.

You have so much digital evidence about what he was doing.

What type of real spy is going to take a photo of a top secret blood oath?

I think it was clear Xi was a stand in for some of the bigger conflicts that were going on between China and the United States.

His goal was to get US Citizenship to become an intelligence officer.

So is there anything else you would like to report to or discuss with US Army Intelligence?

Ji Qiao Chun, in many ways, is kind of the prototypical college kid for most of this story.

He goes to a very prestigious university, the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and

This is a very important topic for the Chinese government.

Jet engines are one of the hardest to replicate technologies.

These were developed primarily during World War II, and

for many decades, the US and Europe have held a monopoly.

China has expended a lot of effort and energy on stealing those technologies.

GE is at a job fair about six months before he is set to graduate with his engineering degree, and

he sees this kind of mysteriously labeled booth where there's a person who's purporting to be a professor recruiting for what he only describes as a confidential unit.

It doesn't take long for Xi to realize that he's being recruited for the Ministry of State Security, China's premier intelligence agency.

MSS stands for the Ministry of State Security, and it's basically China's main intelligence agency.

Think of a combination between the CIA and the FBI.

The MSS doesn't really see a distinction between spying for the government and spying for Chinese companies and getting the kind of secrets they would be interested in in their attempt to catch up and surpass past their competitors.

The vast majority of the actual MSS officers stay in China and never leave China, and

Ji is unusual in that he is someone who is recruited in China and sent overseas really as an MSS agent.

There are two reasons the MSS was interested in Xi.

One, he had technical knowledge that could help them identify trade secrets to steal.

And the other was that he had a visa to travel to the US and he was clean.

So in that sense, he's the perfect person to recruit to go spy in the US.

They are really laying it on thick that this would be a really cool kind of sexy, interesting opportunity.

They're taking him out to dinners, they really wine and dine him.

It was also something that appealed to his sense of helping his country.

He was into this idea of being a spy, like a James Bond type spy in some very basic way.

And I think that was a lot of the allure.

He travels to Nanjing, where the aviation trade secret theft is really kind of headquartered.

That's where he gets his initial training.

Once GE signs with mss, he's really excited about it.

This might be the coolest thing that ever happened to him to be recruited to be a spy.

He sends his friend photos of his MSS registration form, and

his friend even tells them, like, hey, are you supposed to be sending this to me?

He is sending pictures of all of these hundred dollar bills, US dollars, and

he's laid them out over what looks like possibly his living room.

The sense is this kid is so excited to tell somebody that he's a spy and he's not supposed to, but

Mid 2013, Gee gets his visa, he travels to the US and he begins studying at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Gee's daily life in Chicago, to start, is pretty routine.

He goes to school, he works out, he plays games online at night.

His girlfriend comes to visit him in Chicago, his parents come to visit him, and he travels.

They went out west, and on one trip, they pass through Salt Lake City, and

he has an encounter that really would wind up changing his life.