Yang Hengjun's death sentence shows power of China's secret service

SYDNEY -- China's Ministry of State Security, with an estimated staff of 110,000, is perhaps the world's biggest intelligence service, but one of the least known to outsiders and certainly not imbued with popular espionage legends like its Western counterparts.

Around 20 years ago, Yang Hengjun set out to remedy that with a set of three novels about undercover battles between the MSS and the CIA, spiced with sex, mayhem and high-level corruption. Published in Hong Kong and Taiwan, readers across China were avid readers of smuggled copies.