The CIA released a new public video on 12 February as part of an effort to recruit potential informants within the Chinese military, Reuters reported.

Langley produced a video “depicting a disillusioned mid-level Chinese military officer,” to advertise the opportunity for officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to work with US intelligence.

The video is the “latest U.S. step in a campaign to ramp up human intelligence gathering on Washington’s strategic rival,” Reuters wrote.

“Anyone with leadership qualities is bound to be subject to suspicion and ruthlessly eliminated,” the fictional officer in the video says in a reference to a recent purge of the military’s ranks.

In a speech on Tuesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping pointed to the military purge, saying the past year had been “unusual and extraordinary,” and that the army had “undergone revolutionary tempering in the fight against corruption.”

In the most prominent case, General Zhang Youxia, vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) and Xi’s closest military ally, was removed from his post in January amid allegations of corruption.

Last year, the CIA launched a similar campaign to encourage high-level officials in China’s Communist Party to betray their country, providing detailed Chinese-language instructions on how to contact US intelligence securely.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the videos had reached many within China, bypassing Beijing’s internet censorship firewall, giving government officials an “opportunity to work toward a brighter future together.”

“Our past videos reached millions of people and inspired new sources,” an anonymous CIA official claimed while speaking to Reuters.

The news agency added that US intelligence is devoting significant resources to rebuilding its spy network in China after Beijing “crippled its reach,” killing or imprisoning more than a dozen US sources during a two-year campaign starting in 2010.

US officials reportedly disagreed over how Beijing was able to target its assets in the country.

“Some were convinced that a mole within the CIA had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the CIA used to communicate with its foreign sources,” the New York Times (NYT) reported.

In 2015, a well-publicized breach gave Beijing access to thousands of US government personnel records, including those of intelligence contractors.