America’s formidable spy agency the CIA has decided to go in for a major reorganization intended to focus more on China, the agency’s director announced on Thursday,  as the Xi Jinpig government has emerged as the most serious geopolitical threat for the superpower.

At the heart of the effort will be a new China Mission Center meant to bring more resources to studying the country and better position officers around the world to collect information and analyze China’s activities.

The new center “will further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st Century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government,” William J. Burns, the agency’s director, said in a statement.

“Throughout our history, CIA has stepped up to meet whatever challenges come our way,” Burns said in a statement on Thursday. “And now facing our toughest geopolitical test in a new era of great power rivalry, CIA will be at the forefront of this effort.”

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Another new center will focus on new technology and global problems like pandemics and climate change. Called the Transnational and Technology Mission Center, part of its mission will be to identify new technologies that could be used by the agency to help collect intelligence and by others against C.I.A. operatives.

The changes reflect a general policy across the Biden administration’s national security team of giving added attention to a new generation of challenges and threats to the United States after two decades in which terrorism dominated the work of the intelligence community, according to the New York Times.

In a statement on Thursday, the CIA said the China Mission Center was formed “to address the global challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China that cuts across all of the agency’s mission areas”.

It will address global issues critical to US competitiveness, the CIA said, such as emerging technologies, economic security, climate change and health challenges.

Relations between the two superpowers have hit rock bottom in recent days with China flying military planes near the self-governed island of Taiwan. However, a US official said on Wednesday that Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to hold a virtual meeting by the end of this year.

China is considered an especially difficult challenge for the US intelligence community given the insularity of its Communist Party leadership, its large military and security services, and its development in advanced technologies that can engage in counter spying.

Underscoring the challenge, the CIA recently sent a memo to its agents around the world admitting that it was experiencing a shortage of informants from other countries, with some captured or killed, leading newspapers the New York Times and the Washington Post reported.