Ministry of State Security of the People's Republic of China

The Ministry of State Security (MSS or Guóānbù; ; IPA: ) is the principal civilian intelligence, security and secret police agency of the People's Republic of China, responsible for foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and political security of the Chinese Communist Party. One of the largest and most secretive intelligence organizations in the world, it is headquartered in the Haidian District of Beijing, with powerful semi-autonomous branches at the provincial, city, municipality and township levels throughout China. The MSS is active in industrial and cyber espionage, where it has replaced the People's Liberation Army (PLA) as the country's most sophisticated and prolific advanced persistent threat actor. It makes arrests through its own component of the People's Police, and maintains the authority to conduct its own extrajudicial court hearings. The origins of the MSS begin with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s Central Special Branch, better known as the Teke, which was replaced by the Central Social Affairs Department (SAD) in 1936, which was in turn succeeded by the Central Investigation Department (CID) – the MSS's immediate predecessor – in 1955. In 1983 CID was merged with the counterintelligence elements of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) to create the MSS. Today the agency is estimated to have at least 110,000 employees, with 10,000 directly attached to MSS headquarters and 100,000 spread across its dozens of provincial branches. The agency's military intelligence counterpart is the PLA Intelligence Bureau of the Joint Staff Department.