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"The bureaucratic complexity of the full answer to that question would probably overwhelm an outsider like you," Zhu says. "I will make it as simple as I can. I work ultimately for the Government of the Republic of China in Nanjing. I work within a certain division of our civil service which deals with military intelligence—a division which is, shall we say, not widely known, even among other civil servants.

"And then I also work for another group, a smaller group within that division, whose existence is even less widely known. It is like those little nested boxes for which my country is famous in the West: boxes within boxes within boxes. And I am in the innermost box."