Sharri Markson, host at Australian media outlet Sky News, reported that a major leak has occurred. The leak contains a registry with the details of nearly two million members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), exposing members who are now working around the world. The leak also reveals how the party operates under Xi Jinping.
Ms. Markson said the leak is a registry with the details of Communist Party members, including their names, party position, date of birth, national ID number and ethnicity. “It is believed to be the first leak of its kind in the world,” the Sky News host described.
“What’s astonishing about this database is not just that it exposes people who are members of the Communist Party and now live and work around the world, from Australia to the United States and the United Kingdom,” Markson said. “But it’s astonishing because it lifts the lid on how the party operates under the president, and under Xi Jinping himself.”
Ms. Markson highlighted that the leak shows that party branches are embedded in some of the world’s biggest companies and even within government agencies. “CCP branches were established inside Western companies, allowing the infiltration of CCP members into those companies, who, if asked, answer directly to the Communist Party, and even to the president himself,” she noted.
“Along with the personally identifiable data of 1.95 million CCP members, most of them from Shanghai, there are also the details of 79,000 Chinese Communist Party branches, many of them inside companies.” Markson said the leak is a significant security breach that is likely to embarrass Xi Jinping. “It is also going to embarrass some global companies that appear to have no plan to protect their intellectual property from theft and economic espionage,” she said.
Ms. Markson said the data was extracted from a server in Shanghai by Chinese dissidents, whistleblowers, in April 2016, who used it for counterintelligence purposes. “It was then leaked in mid-September to the newly formed international non-partisan group, the ‘Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China,’ and that group is made up of 150 legislators from around the world.”
Ms. Markson went on to explain that “it was then handed to an international consortium of four media organizations, The Australian, The Sunday Mail in the United Kingdom, De Standaard in Belgium and a Swedish publisher, to analyze over the past two months, and that is what we did.”
Ms. Markson said: “It should be noted that there is no suggestion that these members committed espionage, but the concern is whether Australia or these companies knew about the CCP members and, if so, whether steps were taken to protect their personal data.“
However, the danger lies in the fact that since 2017, all Chinese citizens are required by law to “support national intelligence work.” Several legal experts have interpreted this as an obligation both to spy for the Chinese Communist Party regime abroad and to spy on their own compatriots, inside and outside China.
The Chinese newspaper The Epoch Times further identified that the list also included members working for the 610 Office (an extrajudicial entity created specifically for the purpose of persecuting Falun Gong).
Source: ChinaScope
