Around 493 AD, according to Chinese historiographical tradition, General Tan Daoji is said to have ordered the construction of enormous mounds of sand covered with sacks of rice in order to deceive the enemy about the true size of his army’s provisions. It is from stories such as this—more legendary than historically documented, yet precisely for that reason paradigmatic—that the corpus of the Sanshiliu Ji, the Thirty-Six Stratagems, emerged: a collection of strategic maxims traditionally attributed to the late Ming period, rooted in the tradition of Sun Tzu yet distilled into concise, almost proverbial formulas designed for oral transmission long before scholarly study.
Crossing the Sea Without the Sky Knowing. The first of the thirty-six stratagems reads Mán tiān guò hǎi (瞒天过海), commonly translated as “Cross the sea without the sky knowing.” It does not describe spectacular deception but precisely its opposite: the art of operating beneath the veil of normality, routine, even administrative banality. One does not hide in darkness; one becomes invisible in broad daylight by blending into what is already familiar and ordinary, so that the observer—the “sky,” the authority that watches—finds nothing worthy of concern. The stratagem exploits a simple cognitive bias: surveillance naturally focuses on what appears exceptional, while what appears ordinary slips below the threshold of attention.
- More than two thousand years after its conception, this principle offers a remarkably accurate lens through which to understand one of the most effective—and least discussed—tools of China’s projection of influence in the West: the co-optation, through career opportunities, of individuals who have held prominent positions in Western academia, politics and business.
The visible front and the hidden front. The West has gradually learned, not without difficulty, to recognise and counter China’s most visible initiatives: the exclusion of Huawei from 5G networks, Italy’s withdrawal from the Belt and Road Initiative, the strengthening of golden power legislation, tariffs on semiconductors. These measures responded to actions that Beijing, by structural necessity, carried out in plain sight—physical infrastructure, intergovernmental memoranda, initiatives that inevitably leave visible traces, parliamentary hearings and newspaper headlines. On this terrain, Western defences have progressively hardened.
- Yet it is precisely the growing effectiveness of these formal defences that makes it rational for Beijing to shift its centre of gravity towards an arena that no golden power legislation was ever designed to oversee: people.
- Not openly funded think tanks or foundations bearing Chinese names on their front doors—these too are now increasingly scrutinised—but individual professional trajectories: the former public official who, after leaving office, is hired as a consultant by a Chinese technology company; the university professor offered a generously remunerated visiting chair at a university in Beijing or Shanghai, or a well-funded research project; the corporate executive invited to join an international advisory board with compensation well above market standards.
- None of these actions, taken individually, is illegitimate. They fall within the ordinary professional mobility that characterises open economies and are often presented—correctly, from the perspective of those involved—as recognition of professional merit in a global marketplace.
The mechanics of ordinary co-optation. It is here that the first stratagem becomes a useful analytical tool. To cross the sea without the sky knowing means, in this context, never offering any individual an incentive that could plausibly resemble an explicit act of loyalty to a foreign power. Instead, what is offered is something perfectly recognisable and culturally legitimate in the Western world: career advancement, financial reward, academic prestige or an international platform.
- The package itself—the salary, the title, the sponsored conference, the office with a view—becomes the vehicle of influence, rather than any explicit instruction or request for betrayal. The strategic effect emerges only over time and through accumulation.
- A former member of parliament sitting on the advisory board of a Chinese technology group brings with him or her a network of institutional relationships that continues to function long after public office has ended. To Western interlocutors, that individual continues to enjoy the credibility of a former public servant rather than being perceived as a representative of foreign interests.
- Likewise, an academic whose career has been supported through Chinese funding, scholarships or visiting appointments may, through understandable psychological dynamics even before conscious calculation, develop a more accommodating interpretation of Beijing’s policies in public interventions, scholarly publications or technical assessments—without ever receiving explicit instructions, and often without being fully aware of the process.
- Similarly, an industrial executive who has served as a consultant for Chinese companies carries those professional relationships—and the perspective shaped by them—back into positions of responsibility within Western corporations or institutions.
- Replicated across an entire continent over the course of a decade, the cumulative effect of these individual trajectories produces precisely what no single job offer could achieve on its own: a broad network of interlocutors who, in most cases acting entirely in good faith, tend to soften, relativise or normalise Chinese positions within their respective professional spheres.
Why the Western sky fails to see. The recent debate surrounding the participation of AgID Director General Mario Nobile in the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai should be understood within this broader framework.
- The event itself — a technology conference designed by Beijing to position Chinese models, from Alibaba to DeepSeek, as credible alternatives to Western standards — is not merely a showcase for Chinese technological platforms. It also serves, systematically, as an opportunity to establish initial contacts and build professional relationships with foreign officials, researchers and business leaders, some of which will later evolve into consulting roles, research collaborations or recurring invitations.
- The issue is not whether that particular participation was, in itself, illegitimate. The point is that episodes of this kind constitute the initial nodes of relational networks that gradually consolidate over time through channels which, taken individually, remain entirely defensible as ordinary forms of professional cooperation.
This asymmetry does not stem from negligence but from a structural limitation of liberal democracies. Rules governing conflicts of interest, cooling-off periods for former public officials and transparency requirements for academic funding have been designed, across most Western countries, to prevent preferential treatment benefiting individual companies or domestic lobbying interests. They were not conceived to aggregate, at a national level, the growing number of former politicians, academics and corporate executives who maintain professional relationships with entities directly or indirectly linked to the Chinese state.
- No institution has, within its mandate, the task of assembling these individual trajectories into a coherent strategic picture.
- This is precisely the condition presupposed by the first stratagem: a sky that observes reality through separate compartments—public ethics, academic conflicts of interest, corporate compliance—and therefore fails to perceive the single design that runs through them all.
- A further, more subtle cultural factor compounds the problem: the distinctly Western tendency to regard international professional mobility as a sign of openness and merit rather than as a potential vector of influence.
- It is precisely this interpretative framework—the almost instinctive confidence in the neutrality of the global labour market—that the stratagem exploits.
- Beijing has no interest in challenging that assumption. On the contrary, it has every incentive to cultivate it, because that very confidence ensures that each individual career opportunity can continue to circulate without triggering the warning mechanisms reserved for threats that are explicitly recognised as such.
A coherent defensive posture. This interpretation does not imply the impractical—and ultimately counterproductive—proposal of prohibiting former public officials, academics or corporate executives from maintaining professional relationships with Chinese counterparts.
- Such a response would be disproportionate. It would unnecessarily restrict the freedom to work and conduct research while depriving the West of valuable channels through which to observe China’s technological and institutional evolution directly.
- Rather, it points to a different necessity—one that has already been explored, with partial success, in several Anglo-Saxon countries through transparency registers covering foreign funding for research.
The objective should be to make visible what today remains structurally opaque: A public, genuinely accessible register of appointments, consultancies and funding received from foreign entities by individuals who have held significant public or academic positions, combined with a reasonable extension of cooling-off periods for the most sensitive roles in technology and national security.
- The antidote to the first stratagem is not to close the sea—that is, to constrain professional and scientific mobility to the point of paralysis—but to train the sky to look differently.
- Not only at the conspicuous moves that already trigger, almost reflexively, the instruments of golden power legislation and sanctions, but also—and above all—at the countless individual career paths that are perfectly legitimate when viewed in isolation yet, taken together, constitute the true architecture through which Beijing captures influence among Western elites.
The bottom line: Ultimately, this is a battle of institutional awareness before it is one of regulation.
- So long as the West continues to measure Chinese influence solely through the lens of investment flows and physical infrastructure, the sea will continue to be crossed—one career at a time—right before its eyes.
Why the author matters: Alberto Pagani (born 1971 in Alfonsine) is an Italian politician, academic, and national security expert.
- He served as the Group Leader (Capogruppo) for the Democratic Party (PD) in the Chamber of Deputies Defense Committee during his tenure as a Member of Parliament from 2013 to 2022.
- Pagani acted as a prominent delegate to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, actively shaping international defense strategies and European security policies.
- He teaches International Terrorism and Security Studies as a contract professor at the University of Bologna.
