Tri-Service

China's 'Dangerous Love' Foreign Spy Warning

China has issued a poster titled 'Dangerous Love', warning young female government workers about dating handsome foreigners who could turn out to have secret agendas.

The comic book-like poster tells the story of an attractive young Chinese civil servant nicknamed Xiao Li, or Little Li, who meets a red-headed foreign man at a dinner party and starts a relationship.

The man, David, claims to be a visiting scholar but is actually a foreign spy who butters up Xiao Li with compliments on her beauty, bouquets of roses, fancy dinners and romantic walks in the park.

After Xiao Li provides David with secret internal documents from her job at a government propaganda office, the two are arrested.

Take a look at our gallery below, where we've translated the speech bubbles in each cartoon:

In one of the poster's final panels, Xiao Li is shown sitting handcuffed before two policemen, who tell her that she has a "shallow understanding of secrecy for a state employee".

The poster has appeared on local governments' public bulletin boards, targeting mainly rank-and-file state employees.

A Beijing district government said in a statement that it would display the poster to educate its employees about keeping classified information confidential and reporting to state security agencies if they spot any spying activity.

President Xi Jinping has overseen sweeping security reforms

It said it would familiarise employees with ways to counter espionage.

The poster is part of the central government's inaugural National Security Education Day, which is aimed at making people aware of security problems in China and was marked by speeches and the distribution of materials.

In a case publicised as part of the campaign, Chinese state media reported that a former computer technician has been sentenced to death for selling 150,000 classified documents to an unidentified foreign spy agency.

Computer technician Huang Yu has been sentenced to death

State broadcaster CCTV said Huang Yu, who once worked for a Chinese research firm specialising in encryption, received payments for providing the documents between 2002 and 2011.

It added that he had done so after being filled with anger at having been sacked.

CCTV did not say when Huang was tried on the espionage charge, or if he has already been executed.

Huang was shown with his head shaved and dressed in prison clothes discussing his case on television. He urged others aiding foreign countries in spying against China to turn themselves in.

The country's state secrets law is notoriously broad. It covers everything from the precise birth dates of state leaders to industry data - and information can be labelled a state secret retroactively.

President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, has overseen sweeping security reforms aimed at combating domestic and foreign threats.