one Senior Chinese Communist Party official looked at an unmarked van outside his building as he rushed in and closed the door. In his room, he picked up the framed photos of his wife and two children clinging to her, and then turned his eyes to the footage of the National People's Congress playing on TV.

He said in Mandarin: “When I ascend to the party, I look at the abandoned people.” “But now, I realize that my fate is as unstable as they do.”

Most importantly, he said, he had to find a way to protect his family. He picked up the phone and contacted the US Central Intelligence Agency.

This is a scene, in one of two Chinese videos released to the public on May 1, which is part of the recruitment of Chinese informants. In another video, a junior CCP official sees his work does not improve his life, while a senior official lives for his life.

"If we dedicate to the path we designated for us, we will teach us that we will have a bright future," the official said. "But there are only a few results from our efforts."

At the end of the first video, the text "Fate in Hand" is displayed on the screen. The second conclusion says: “Heaven can help those who help themselves.”

The videos were released last October after the drive to recruit informants in China, Iran and North Korea, which included posting messages in Mandarin, Farsey and South Koreans on CIA’s social media accounts and providing instructions on how to securely contact the CIA. The agency said it has seen previous success in similar campaigns following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to recruit Russian informants.

"We want to make sure that individuals from other authoritarian regimes know that we are doing business," a spokesperson for the agency said at the time.

"One of the CIA's main roles is to gather intelligence for the president and our decision makers," CIA director John Ratcliffe told Fox News Wednesday. "One way we do this is to recruit assets that can help us steal secrets."

Notes to CIA officials last month reportedly said China is the agency's top priority.

"There is no strategic competitor in our country's history that is stronger than the Chinese Communist Party," Ratcliff wrote. "It aims to dominate the world economically, military and technologically, and is actively trying to outperform the United States in every corner of the world."

Beijing has not officially responded to the videos as of Friday, but has previously stated that the United States is launching false information against China's system.

However, experts doubt the effectiveness of social media campaigns in countries with strict surveillance and internet restrictions. “It seems they are based on their success in Russia, but I would question this will consider the effect of the majority of North Koreans not having access to the internet,” Mason Richey, associate professor of international politics at Hancook University in Seoul, told the BBC in October.

Similarly, Ja-ian Chong, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore and a non-resident scholar at Carnegie China, told Time that he was unsure how the videos would penetrate China's "great firewall."

But the agency said the videos appear to target disillusioned or unsatisfied officials in the Chinese government, which is effective: "If we don't work, we won't make more videos," an official told Reuters.

Chong said tensions between China and the United States, including the re-effect of selling Thais since Donald Trump returned to the White House, both "becoming more suspicious of each other."

"Whether it is through damage to individuals or computer networks, there may be more efforts to gather information from the other side," Chong said. There have been reports of increased cyberattacks on both sides, including the infiltration of Chinese state-sponsored hackers into the U.S. Treasury system in December, and China published the names of the so-called NSA hackers in April.

But besides any success the U.S. has seen in gathering Chinese intelligence, it also warns: “There may be more domestic repression.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping led a thorough anti-corruption and anti-competitive campaign that has cleared high and low-level officials and instilled public paranoia.

Read more: China's expanded anti-competitive law threatens business consultants and consultants

Chong said that in recent years, China's tightening of espionage has made intelligence gathering particularly difficult, a former intelligence official told NBC News in 2023. China's anti-emergency law gives states a broad power to monitor and collect information based on states, as well as requiring cooperation between companies and individuals.

But CIA officials told Bloomberg in October that Xi Jinping's power consolidation has also been a source of Chinese dissatisfaction, which has brought opportunities for recruitment.

Chinese spies also have high risks. China is one of the few countries that are still espionage. In March, a former engineer at the China Institute was sentenced to death for spying. Australian writer Yang Hengjun was sentenced to espionage in February 2024. In November last year, a former state agency employee was sentenced to death for leaking confidential information to foreign intelligence agencies.

The CIA is also working to restore its reputation. Starting from the end of 2010, over two years, China managed to infiltrate and dismantle the spy networks of U.S. intelligence agencies in the country, the main reason revealed in 2018 was the agency's destruction on its secret communications system. The violation has resulted in the arrest and execution of at least 20 informants in China. The CIA reportedly acquired its system from a visit to China by 2013 and has since been rebuilding its spy network in China.