() The Central Intelligence Agency is now using a YouTube video as a way to encourage the Chinese population to be spies for the United States.

The two videos released in Mandarin were meant to appeal to government officials who might want to partner with the CIA.

ABC News reported that, by the end of each video, Chinese government officials reached out to the CIA through the dark web, following instructions given to them by the agency.

CIA took similar approach in Russia

In 2023, the CIA also took this same approach in Russia, releasing videos in Russian that showed characters who decided to spy for the CIA.

“We are in the digital era … this is something that is taking place more and more,” Tracy Walder, a former CIA officer and former FBI special agent, told . Walder said that the CIA used this type of recruiting against Russia during the height of the country’s war with Ukraine.

ABC News reported that the CIA is continuing this effort after the Russian series had positive results. Walder confirmed this, saying, “The money spent on this, if it wasn’t getting a return, we wouldn’t continue to do it.”

She also said that the fact that the agency is still producing these videos, despite how expensive they are, means they have to be working.

China’s firewall, security measures make this difficult

The director of the Intelligence, National Security and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Emily Harding, told ABC News that China is “a particularly hard target.”

“They have a robust surveillance state that makes it very, very hard to maintain contact with an asset,” she explained.

Often referred to as the “great firewall of China,” The Golden Shield Project focuses on monitoring and censoring what Chinese citizens can see online, according to Stanford University.

Started in 1998, some of the methods used in this project include IP blocking, which will deny access to specific domains depending on your IP address, and packet filtering, which will scan data for any controversial keywords. The project also uses credit records and facial and speech recognition.

Walder told , “In China, it’s really, really difficult to get outside videos through like that. So it’s quite impressive that the CIA was able to do so.”

Russia, China are doing the same to the US: Former agent

Walder also told that this practice isn’t new, and Russia and China are also doing it to the U.S. She claimed that with the recent federal layoffs, the country has seen an uptick in this type of “recruitment.”

“They are 100% doing it to us, and we are doing it back to them in response,” Walder said.

Harding also told ABC News that, when federal layoffs started, China was “very aggressively reaching out to places online … to put out feelers.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a statement, “It [China] is intent on dominating the world economically, militarily and technologically. Our agency must continue responding to this threat with urgency, creativity and grit, and these videos are just one of the ways we are doing this.”