China on spy schools opening spree to have more agents kitty

In Feb,China allegedly managed to penetrate the Foreign Office's internal communications network.

China has opened a significant number of spy schools since the beginning of this year in a bid to increase the training and recruitment of agents.

China opened its eighth National Intelligence College on the campus of Hunan University in the central city of Changsha last week. Since January,the Chinese government has opened similar training schools inside universities in Beijing,Shanghai,Xian,Qingdao and Harbin,The Telegraph reports.

The move comes when there have been growing concerns in the West at the scale and breadth of Chinese intelligence gathering. Britains MI5 has said that the Chinese government represents one of the most significant espionage threats to the UK.

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In February,China allegedly managed to penetrate the Foreign Office””s internal communications network.

The new schools aim to transform and modernize the Chinese intelligence services,producing spies who are trained in the latest methods of data collection and analysis. Each school will recruit around 30 to 50 carefully selected existing undergraduates each year.

The Chinese programme began in 2008 with the founding of the first Intelligence College at Nanjing University.

The establishment of an Intelligence college at Fudan is in response to the urgent need for special skills to conduct intelligence work in the modern era, a spokesman for Shanghai””s Fudan University was quoted as saying by The Telegraph.

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The United States has a similar project,named the National Security Education Program,which was set up in the wake of the first Gulf war in order to boost language and culture training for US spies.