On a cold, dark morning in Beijing, a few people in black entered your residence, covered your head with a black cloth, and stuffed you into a van, driving towards the unknown darkness. Along the way, through the small gap in the black cloth, you saw a face in the escort team clearly – it was the woman who had knocked on your door the previous night, claiming to have no other option and begging for shelter in the capital. In that moment, you shuddered. The “seeker” who was grateful to you the night before was now sitting coldly on the side of the police officer with a smirk.
This is not a scene from a novel or a movie, but the real experience of Yu Hong, a petitioner, in September 2012.
Such betrayals are not isolated incidents. In October 2017, rights activist Ma Bo received an urgent call: “Someone is in danger, please come help!” Without hesitation, she hurried to the scene, only to be met by police cars and cold handcuffs already waiting for her.
A more extreme ethical dilemma occurred in 2016: a person disguised as a persecuted religious follower attempted to infiltrate an underground religious organization, but was rejected for failing identification verification. In response, this person self-harmed with a knife on the spot and threatened to kill their children, forcing volunteers to open the door and accept them. To save lives or protect the organization? Faced with a ticking clock of life-threatening situation, the volunteers chose the former, only to be followed by police arrests.
Three incidents, three methods, pointing to the same essence: the Party meticulously studied human compassion, sense of responsibility, and empathy, and turned these best human moral qualities into traps – while achieving political goals, they destroyed the kindness and trust between people.
The method of “weaponizing” human conscience and trust is one of the key research findings in Epoch Times’ latest exclusive report “The Wall Has Ears – A Study of the CCP’s Special Situation System”, which spans over 100,000 words.
The term “special situation” that repeatedly appears in the report is the official term within the CCP’s public security and national security systems for these off-the-books secret human resources – they do not wear uniforms, do not receive public salaries, appearing as regular people’s friends, neighbors, colleagues, or seekers of help, while secretly collecting intelligence and executing arrests for the Party-State machine.
Spanning eleven chapters with four professional appendices, “The Wall Has Ears” for the first time systematically pieces together fragmented evidence from victims’ memories, court files, and foreign judicial documents to form a complete institutional panorama: How does the CCP transform ordinary people into invisible reconnaissance tools that can be called upon by the state at any time?
The majority’s perception of “informants” or “whistleblowers” often stagnates in the shallow narrative of “someone betraying a friend”.
The report deliberately avoids this moral judgment and instead offers a core diagnosis: what is truly alarming is never an isolated moral collapse, but an entire set of organizationally trained, mass-replicable state control capabilities.
In the operational terms of the CCP’s political security defense (Guobao) and national security system, this process is referred to as “Wu Jian” – the abbreviated form of selecting targets and establishing secret relationships.
The report carefully breaks down the complete lifecycle of turning an ordinary member of society into a covert tool: from identifying targets with “access conditions”, to understanding their economic situation, criminal leverage, or vulnerabilities of family members; from forcibly establishing single-line control using fear or incentives, to assigning investigation topics, single-line contacts (where each informant only communicates with one fixed contact person, remaining isolated from others, and faces no collective repercussions in case of exposure), regular verification, until the relationship becomes dormant permanently after failure.
This meticulous analytical argument is the hallmark that distinguishes this report from general “whistleblower” articles: it is not rushing to provide emotionally charged moral qualifiers, but offers readers a surgical knife to dissect the authoritarian dark web.
The details disclosed in the report upend public’s daily understanding.
Counterintuitive One:
The most fiercely criticized individuals online are not necessarily “absolutely safe”. People often assume that those who openly insult the top leaders of the CCP online would never collaborate with security agencies. The report negates this assumption: for missions requiring infiltration of highly vigilant dissenting communities, a suitably sharp, radical, seemingly “anti-CCP” face can be precisely the “pass” that security agencies allow to earn core trust.
Counterintuitive Two:
Having been in prison or facing severe penalties is actually a recognized “gilding” tactic within the industry. While being imprisoned may seem like the best proof that one is not an insider, the report cites public testimonies from former public security intelligence personnel that reveal industry practices known as “gilding” and “re-melting” – agencies might artificially create a verifiable criminal record, or have special situations get arrested and serve sentences along with co-defendants during a crackdown, in order to firmly establish an unshakable identity as “one of us” in the eyes of others, and continue mining for intelligence during detention and imprisonment.
These details are not baseless assertions; their credibility stems from the evidence chain meticulously listed in the report: from Ye Fu’s account of the “Xiong Zhaopolitical case” to Zhao Wei’s coerced experience revealed during an interview with an international organization in the “709 case”; from the open testimony of human rights lawyer Wang Yu to several recent indictments and judgments in U.S. federal courts.
How extensive is the CCP’s secret human network? Two sets of official public figures quoted in the report are particularly noteworthy:
First, in 2009, the head of the Public Security Bureau in Kailu County, Inner Mongolia, revealed in a public interview that every police officer and auxiliary police officer should establish 20 informants in communities, villages, and industrial units; while concurrently recruiting at least 5 informers (long-term providers of intelligence), 4 criminal special situations (informants specializing in assisting in criminal cases) per person. In that ordinary county town, the actual number of informants under the control of the public security agency exceeded 12,000.
Second, by the end of 2017, the registered “Chaoyang Masses” in Chaoyang District, Beijing, exceeded 140,000 people, with over 210,000 various types of clues entered that year.
The report specifically warns readers not to equate these individuals simply with “full-time agents”. What these data truly reveal is a hierarchical, on-demand network logic: extensive social tentacles (network staff, volunteers) infiltrate various aspects of daily life, collecting vast amounts of information, while professional agencies undertake deeper probing and information screening.
The report emphasizes: the Party-State does not need to turn everyone into an informant; it just needs to keep ordinary people under its watchful eye.
The scope of this report does not stop at mainland China. The tenth chapter systematically lays out cross-border repression and infiltration cases concluded or under trial in courts of the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, and other countries over the past two years – from the New York “Fuzhou Overseas Police Station” case, to the Wang Shujun case where private interactions were documented in electronic “diaries” for reporting, and the Tang Yuanjun case where cooperation was forced due to the inability to visit a critically ill mother.
The unique value of these international cases lies in their “judicial visibility”: while domestic clandestine operations are often hidden behind official files, with victims left to rely on fragmented memories, Western criminal proceedings through electronic device retrieval, shared accounts, bank transfers, wiretapped recordings, and courtroom cross-examinations verify the usually invisible chain of “true identity – secret orders – close relationship – information reporting – benefit to the Party-State”.
For overseas Chinese scholars, engineers, students, and community leaders, this report is not only a revelation of geopolitical intricacies but a guide crucial for personal safety.
As senior commentator at Epoch Times, Li Linyi, remarks, for readers interested in CCP politics and intelligence research, the value of this comprehensive report lies not only in exposing the truth, but in its unparalleled normative and instrumental attributes. The four appendices accompanying the report constitute the most solid database in this type of Chinese research:
Appendix One (Core Cases and Action Chain Quick Reference):
Concises dozens of historical and current cases into matrices based on “social entry points – key actions – forced takeover – main consequences”;
Appendix Two (1949-2026 Institutional and Case Timeline):
Thoroughly chronicles the 76-year history of the special situation system evolving from revolutionary party covert work to modern political security infrastructure;
Appendix Three (Mechanisms and Chapter Matrix):
Helps researchers quickly locate specific control measures in the report’s academic dissection;
Appendix Four (Terminology and Case Status Quick Reference):
Strictly distinguishes judicial statuses such as “accused,” “pleaded guilty,” “convicted awaiting sentencing,” and “final judgment,” discarding the shortcomings of public “whistleblower” entities that blur facts and charges.
Yu Hong, Ma Bo, and that tearful religious volunteer who opened the door, their suffering ultimately left no official record of “state involvement”. The report aims to remind society that it is precisely this: the deepest harm of secret policing often goes unrecorded in verdicts. Its most dreadful product is turning society into a desert of mutual suspicion, where everyone fears for their safety.
When seekers are suspected as bait, helpers fear their goodwill being weaponized, and caution builds among friends and colleagues, the CCP doesn’t even need to dispatch police cars – society has already completed self-censorship and retreat in fear.
As Li Linyi points out, Epoch Times’ exclusive report is meant to tear through the veil woven by mystery and fear. Authoritarian shadows fear the light shining on them, and understanding every gear and logic of this machine is not only about exposing evil but also the first step towards rebuilding social trust and breaking through walls of fear.