An Incomplete List of Everything Threatening China’s National Security

What do snapping turtles, tissue boxes and college students looking for part-time jobs have in common?

They all might be hiding threats to China’s national security.

That, at least, is the message being pushed by the Ministry of State Security, China’s main intelligence agency, in a flurry of recent social media posts. Every few days in the past month, the agency has published an addition to its long, wide-ranging list of dangers, with the stated goal being to keep the public vigilant and enlist it to fend off foreign enemies.

The drumbeat is part of a broader push by China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, to make national security the country’s top priority, above other longstanding goals, such as economic development.

In Beijing’s view, that requires far more than strengthening spy agencies or investing in the military. It requires activating every Chinese citizen to be on the lookout, in what China has called a “whole of society” mobilization.

The creation of the usually secretive security ministry’s social media account last year was one step toward that goal. The account’s posts are reaching a wide audience: Each one on WeChat has been read more than 100,000 times — the maximum view count that the messaging platform will show — and hashtags about the warnings have been top trending topics on Weibo, another social media site.

In the past several weeks, here are some of the risks the security agency has warned about: