By WANG WEI
Politics Correspondent
BEIJING (China Daily Show) — US-China relations were further strained yesterday after China announced the conviction of US citizen Randy Donovan of espionage.
Donovan, 32, from Boulder, Colorado, sat Chinese civil service examinations three times between 2006 and 2009, failing each time. The Chinese procurator alleges the CIA funded each attempt.
Chinese civil service examinations receive a high volume of applicants annually, each desperate to grasp the “Iron rice bowl” of near-guaranteed prosperity the positions are said to entail.
This year, the most hotly competed post was that of deputy undersecretary at the Tobacco Bureau, Gansu Province.
Approximately three and a half million applicants vied for the position, which comes with a salary of 2,500 yuan but is said to have secondary benefits, worth around 200,000 yuan per month, including: previous title-holder’s mistress (if still under 25), a number of grace-and-favor apartments for “visiting dignitaries” and a Mercedes-Benz for “rural visits.”
Donovan aroused suspicions after declining invitations to KTV parlors on the pretext that he “didn’t care for karaoke,” after telling shocked colleagues he was happily married and had no mistress.
An anonymous American intelligence agent told China Daily Show that the agency has been attempting to infiltrate the service for years.
“We got a guy in back in 1998,” said the source, “but his reports rapidly deteriorated into a string of complaints about having to pay for his bosses’ meals, with unnecessarily detailed notes of his failure to ejaculate with various girlfriends.”
“He didn’t seem to do any actual government work at all,” added the source.
“We lost him last year after he died of rapid-onset syphilis, contracted during a post-banquet visit to a karaoke parlor, after which he was declared a Revolutionary Martyr in China and given the Distinguished Service Medal of Honor back home.”
Recently declassified MI6 intelligence archives reveal several penetrations into China’s government by British agencies between 1949 and 1976, working with an agent known only by the initials “MZD.”
According to the documents, the agent was paid large sums for “industrial and technological sabotage; systematic undermining of agricultural, educational and scientific development; and assassination of competent leaders and large swathes of the intelligentsia.”
Scribbled notes by an unnamed civil servant describe the mission as “successful beyond our wildest dreams.”
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