China’s security ministry says foreign spies are slandering revolutionary heroes online

China’s leading anti-spy agency has blamed foreign agents for comments on social media that it says distort history and “slander” revolutionary heroes.

“There are foreign spy agencies flooding online comment sections with unofficial and fake history about our country’s historical heroes, trying to discredit and slander our historical culture and heroic role models, and dispel people’s admiration for heroes and their identification with our historical culture,” the Ministry of State Security said in a social media post on Monday.

The post on the ministry’s official WeChat account warned that “some foreign spy agencies” were “stealing state secrets, disrupting online order and posing a threat to national security”.

Foreign spies pretended to be interested in politics, military matters, economics or science and technology and tried to steal information by interacting with social media users, the ministry said.

It said officers had discovered that spies were using “manual screening or algorithmic capture” to entice people to post sensitive information such as the “parameters, serial numbers and developers of our research equipment” in the comments under a video about a “certain Chinese technology project”.

The spies also recruited trolls or used bots to “recklessly fabricate and spread false statements that discredit our government and policies”, the ministry added.

The ministry has become increasingly active on social media with warnings about the risk posed by foreigners.