Washington. The CIA has a message for Chinese government officials concerned about their standing under President Xi Jinping’s leadership: Work with us.

The US intelligence agency released two Mandarin-language videos Thursday on social media platforms YouTube and X, encouraging disaffected Chinese officials to contact the CIA. The videos garnered more than 5 million views combined within the first day.

The campaign comes as CIA Director John Ratcliffe has pledged to enhance the agency’s use of human intelligence and sharpen its focus on China, which has increasingly targeted US officials with its own espionage efforts.

“These videos are aimed at recruiting Chinese officials to steal secrets,” Ratcliffe said in a statement to The Associated Press. He added that 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,” Ratcliffe said.

The cinematic, two-minute-long videos depict scenes of Communist Party elites, luxury vehicles, and towering skyscrapers, while narrators describe their growing disillusionment with the system they once served.

In one video, a man portrayed as an upright party member expresses his anxiety about internal power struggles and the implications for his family’s safety. As the music intensifies, he declares, “I’ve done nothing wrong. I can’t go on living in fear!”

He is then shown using his smartphone to contact the CIA. The video ends with the agency’s seal.

Links provided beneath the videos offer detailed instructions on how to securely contact the CIA, along with warnings about potential fake accounts posing as the agency.

The effort is the latest in a series of attempts by the CIA to simplify and safeguard the process for informants to share sensitive information.

Last fall, the agency published online instructions in Mandarin, Korean, and Farsi, advising would-be informants how to reach US intelligence safely. The guidelines include contacting the CIA via its public website or through the darknet, a section of the internet accessible only through tools that mask a user’s identity. Similar instructions in Russian were posted three years ago.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.