I would
not advise anyone to defect to China or to any other country, or to otherwise betray their own country.
Loyalty matters. Fidelity counts.
However, since you're
asking:
hypothetically speaking, if an American -- in particular a disgruntled current or former federal employee -- was to defect, there are probably a few likely paths forward.
1. The CIA is known to openly recruit foreign assets online, in particularly through their website on TOR. IIRC, they got a Telegram channel too. Now, I'm not sure if the MSS or any other Chinese agency is so bold as to imitate the CIA in this instance, but there are probably ways to reach them digitally.
2. Another option is to walk into a Chinese diplomatic mission in a third country, especially one that is easy to travel to, and whose domestic counterintelligence services apparatus is negligible or at least not in cahoots with any FIVEYE or FIVEYE adjacent counterparts.
3. American defectors, who are solely motivated by financial incentives, may want to keep their identity unknown to Chinese intelligence for their own safety. For such traitors, one potential path would be to reach out to a Chinese diplomatic mission electronically or even by snail mail with instructions for establishing secure and anonymized communications.
4. If the would be defector has a lot to offer via debriefings, and thinks the Chinese authorities will grant them resettlement solely on that basis, then they can just fly to Hong Kong.
Not looking to end up on a FBI watchlist or enable treason whatsoever, so not going to get instructive here.
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Just talking
hypothetical scenarios based on watching James Bond movies and that old show called Alias.
So don't any of you get silly and do anything bad or dumb with my non-instructions!