Culture and State Intelligence Behaviour: A Retroductive Explanation of China’s National Intelligence Culture

This thesis argues that a state’s cultured beliefs have a real and direct causal influence on its intelligence behaviour by shaping how a state perceives intelligence, believes intelligence should interconnect with society, and thinks intelligence systems should be structured and managed. To this end, the thesis first introduces a theory of national intelligence culture to explain how culture influences state intelligence behaviour and why this cultural influence leads to variations in behaviour between states. Its embrace of a critical realist research design and rejection that observability is the sole basis for judging the reality of things makes the proposed theoretical framework able to explain cultural influences even if empirically observing that causal influence might be impossible. In other words, the study’s primary contribution is in providing a framework to explain culture’s causal power and influence on a state’s intelligence behaviour. Second, the thesis applies the proposed framework to explain the cultural influences on the People’s Republic of China’s contemporary intelligence behaviour. Drawing on an extensive body of Western scholarship and Chinese language sources, this study demonstrates that a cultural approach can provide a more in-depth understanding of China’s evolving use of cyber-enabled economic espionage to support the country’s national development than the structuralist theories that have traditionally dominated the study of intelligence. The key argument of this study is that cultural influences offer the best explanation of China's intelligence behaviour and why it has not conformed to US and broader Western views on what is acceptable and what is unacceptable in the game of intelligence. It also demonstrates that the academic study of intelligence benefits from intentionally introducing non-Western perspectives.