The Official Chinese 🇨🇳 Espionage & Cold War Thread
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Engineer Arrested for Allegedly Stealing Trade Secret Technology Designed to Detect Nuclear Missile Launches and Track Missiles
A former engineer at a Southern California company has been arrested on federal charges alleging he stole trade secret technologies developed for use by the United States government to detect nuclear missile launches and to track ballistic and hypersonic missiles.
ETHER 
Beijing’s Passive-Aggressive Middle East Policy
China doesn’t aspire to lead the world, much less to establish peace, but only to undermine the U.S.
Will China broker a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? It is a question nobody is asking, because the answer is obvious—not a chance.
Yet after Beijing hosted Iran-Saudi talks that led those two rivals to re-establish diplomatic relations in March 2023, some observers wondered if China had supplanted the U.S. as the Middle East’s diplomatic broker. Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, China has put such illusions to rest: Beijing seeks not to be a leader, much less to establish peace and stability, but merely to undermine the U.S. 
As Beijing realized the benefits of wooing the Mideast’s most dynamic economy, it recognized that supporting the PLO was a liability.
While Chinese policy didn’t exactly become pro-Israel, it sought the safe ground of inoffensive diplomatic pablum. China’s 2021 four-point proposal on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reads like a ChatGPT summary of every think-tank piece on the subject.
Beijing revealed its true goals, however, with its checkbook. In 2021 Beijing announced a donation of only $1 million in humanitarian aid for Gaza
—less than many Western businesses gave in the name of corporate social responsibility. That same year, China invested more than $2 billion in Israel. 
Yet with the rise of U.S.-China hostilities in recent years, Beijing’s tune on Israel has shifted—and vice versa. After initially touting its economic partnership with China, the Israeli government—prodded in part by Washington—began to install guardrails against Chinese investment in sensitive Israeli infrastructure projects as well as on the transfer of dual-use technology. Trade and investment between the countries has fallen as Jerusalem has come to see Beijing less as a backup great-power patron and more as a security threat.
At the same time, China began to regard Israel as collateral damage in its rivalry with the U.S. During the 2021 Gaza conflict, Beijing used its chairmanship of the United Nations Security Council to blast the U.S. for “standing on the opposite side of mankind’s conscience and morality” by supporting the Jewish state. Israel subsequently joined a statement to the U.N. Human Rights Council that condemned China’s treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority.
China has since doubled down on such actions. Beijing has allowed antisemitism to flourish in Chinese media,
especially social media, while declining to condemn Hamas outright or allow information on the Oct. 7 attacks to be freely disseminated within its borders. 
Meanwhile the Yemen-based Houthis have mounted attacks on commercial shipping through the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea—which one might hope Beijing would see as a threat to its economic interests. Yet China’s naval vessels, present in the region as an “antipiracy” task force, sit idle. 
Its diplomats abstained from a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the strikes, 
and Beijing has paired its belated calls for the attacks’ cessation with criticism of the U.S.-led response.
A China that aimed to replace the U.S.-led international order with one of its own devising might see the Gaza conflict as an opportunity to act. The Brics bloc of emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization could organize a peace effort.
China’s navy could escort container ships through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait after, say, a stern phone call from Beijing to Tehran. A China interested in being the region’s go-to diplomatic broker would be cultivating Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which is ideologically at odds with the Biden White House, in hopes that Jerusalem might turn to Beijing as an alternative patron.
But China is doing none of that.Its conduct shows that it is less interested in the success of its own initiatives than in the failure of Washington’s. The real threat to U.S. interests in the Mideast isn’t rising Chinese influence but the erosion of our own. What Beijing wants isn’t a world led by China, but simply one not led by the U.S. Washington shouldn’t accept that.
Beijing’s Passive-Aggressive Middle East Policy
China doesn’t aspire to lead the world, much less to establish peace, but only to undermine the U.S.
Will China broker a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? It is a question nobody is asking, because the answer is obvious—not a chance.
Yet after Beijing hosted Iran-Saudi talks that led those two rivals to re-establish diplomatic relations in March 2023, some observers wondered if China had supplanted the U.S. as the Middle East’s diplomatic broker. Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, China has put such illusions to rest: Beijing seeks not to be a leader, much less to establish peace and stability, but merely to undermine the U.S. As Beijing realized the benefits of wooing the Mideast’s most dynamic economy, it recognized that supporting the PLO was a liability.
While Chinese policy didn’t exactly become pro-Israel, it sought the safe ground of inoffensive diplomatic pablum. China’s 2021 four-point proposal on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reads like a ChatGPT summary of every think-tank piece on the subject.Beijing revealed its true goals, however, with its checkbook. In 2021 Beijing announced a donation of only $1 million in humanitarian aid for Gaza—less than many Western businesses gave in the name of corporate social responsibility. That same year, China invested more than $2 billion in Israel. Yet with the rise of U.S.-China hostilities in recent years, Beijing’s tune on Israel has shifted—and vice versa. After initially touting its economic partnership with China, the Israeli government—prodded in part by Washington—began to install guardrails against Chinese investment in sensitive Israeli infrastructure projects as well as on the transfer of dual-use technology. Trade and investment between the countries has fallen as Jerusalem has come to see Beijing less as a backup great-power patron and more as a security threat.
At the same time, China began to regard Israel as collateral damage in its rivalry with the U.S. During the 2021 Gaza conflict, Beijing used its chairmanship of the United Nations Security Council to blast the U.S. for “standing on the opposite side of mankind’s conscience and morality” by supporting the Jewish state. Israel subsequently joined a statement to the U.N. Human Rights Council that condemned China’s treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority.
China has since doubled down on such actions. Beijing has allowed antisemitism to flourish in Chinese media,
especially social media, while declining to condemn Hamas outright or allow information on the Oct. 7 attacks to be freely disseminated within its borders. Meanwhile the Yemen-based Houthis have mounted attacks on commercial shipping through the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea—which one might hope Beijing would see as a threat to its economic interests. Yet China’s naval vessels, present in the region as an “antipiracy” task force, sit idle. Its diplomats abstained from a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the strikes, and Beijing has paired its belated calls for the attacks’ cessation with criticism of the U.S.-led response.A China that aimed to replace the U.S.-led international order with one of its own devising might see the Gaza conflict as an opportunity to act. The Brics bloc of emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization could organize a peace effort.
China’s navy could escort container ships through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait after, say, a stern phone call from Beijing to Tehran. A China interested in being the region’s go-to diplomatic broker would be cultivating Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which is ideologically at odds with the Biden White House, in hopes that Jerusalem might turn to Beijing as an alternative patron.But China is doing none of that.
Its conduct shows that it is less interested in the success of its own initiatives than in the failure of Washington’s. The real threat to U.S. interests in the Mideast isn’t rising Chinese influence but the erosion of our own. What Beijing wants isn’t a world led by China, but simply one not led by the U.S. Washington shouldn’t accept that.
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
Chinese hackers spent 5 years waiting in U.S. infrastructure, ready to attack, agencies say
The report is one of the first public indications that Chinese hackers have had years of access to U.S. infrastructure.
www.nbcnews.com
Congressman Makes Urgent Call for U.S. Sealift Capacity Expansion to Counter China
Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) is sounding the alarm on the United States' "woefully inadequate" sealift fleet capacity to counter China in the event of a Indo-Pacific conflict.
gcaptain.com
China warns students abroad not to help foreign spies
Security ministry offers cautionary tale of 2006 espionage case in WeChat post
asia.nikkei.com
How the FBI hamstrung a Chinese hacker group
U.S. operatives tricked its botnet into deleting malware from hundreds of networked devices, a cybersecurity firm reports.
www.defenseone.com
China Wants To Ditch The Dollar | NOEMA
Should Beijing successfully wean the world off the U.S. dollar, it would reshape the global economy and geopolitical landscape.
www.noemamag.com
America has more Naval and Coast Guard ships than the next 10 world navies combined.
No one is coming to our shores.
China preparing for 'protracted' war, says think tank
IISS warns of era of insecurity, with Beijing learning from Ukraine war
asia.nikkei.com
How China stifles dissent without a KGB or Stasi of its own
A secret policeman on every street
How China stifles dissent without a KGB or Stasi of its own
A secret policeman on every street
Feb 15th 2024
Illustration of a chinese police hat shining a spotlight on the silhouettes of a group of people
image: Chloe Cushman
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Much thought has gone into making the Beijing Police Museum a family-friendly attraction. Housed in a classical mansion near Tiananmen Square, the museum is big on crime-fighting heroics. Glass cases show guns used by Chinese police. A model of a police dog sports a bullet-proof vest, commando-style helmet and protective boots on its paws. During the lunar-new-year holidays, a recent weekday found parents and children admiring displays about police helicopters, drug squads, traffic patrols and cyber-officers keeping the internet “healthy”. Political repression earns a passing mention—but in a historical section. An old photograph shows student protesters being arrested by plain-clothes agents, decades before the Communist Party took power.
Finding that museum’s opposite—a site that symbolises the dark side of the police state—would not be a straightforward task. China has no direct equivalent of the Soviet-era kgb, meaning a secret-police agency with armies of officers. There is nothing in Beijing like the kgb’s Lubyanka building, a notorious city-centre prison whose name struck fear into Muscovite hearts. For all that, political protests against Communist Party rule are vanishingly rare. That is because the party has built the most capable surveillance state in history, argues “The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China”, a new book by Minxin Pei.
China’s system of “preventive repression” is designed to deter, detect and frustrate critics of one-party rule before they can organise or act, writes Mr Pei, of Claremont McKenna College in California. In part, that involves high-technology tools that have made headlines worldwide, from facial-recognition cameras and vehicle number-plate readers to mobile-phone tracking devices. Digital firewalls surround China’s internet, and algorithms monitor messaging services and online comments. Cross an unseen red line, and police will soon be pounding on the door. For good measure, the book weighs the potential of a still unfinished “social-credit system” that assigns citizens scores for social and anti-social behaviour in their business and private lives.
Yet Mr Pei suggests that gadgets cannot explain China’s success in suppressing dissent. That, he argues, is mostly explained by overlapping networks of thoroughly analogue human beings. Most of these are not full-time spooks. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, East Germany employed one Stasi officer for every 165 citizens. China would need 8.5m secret police to match that ratio, but actually employs a small fraction of that number. The Ministry of State Security, China’s main civilian spy agency, handles overseas espionage and domestic counter-intelligence. MSS branches around the country watch foreigners, Chinese with overseas connections and ethnic minorities with cross-border ties or an international profile, including Tibetans and Uyghurs. State-security agents wield fearsome powers to intimidate and detain targets without charge. But the MSS is relatively small and has “limited purview with respect to domestic surveillance”, notes the book.
A more significant secret-police agency lurks within the Ministry of Public Security, China’s regular police service, Mr Pei writes. This force-within-a-force is known as the political-security protection unit (zhengbao for short). The total number of Chinese police officers is not made public, but is thought to be over 2m. Drawing on provincial, municipal and county yearbooks and publications, Mr Pei estimates that 3-5% of all police work for the zhengbao at the national and local level. That equates to 60,000-100,000 zhengbao officers, or one for every 14,000-23,000 citizens. They are complemented by the wenbao, a police unit that watches cultural and educational establishments, especially universities.
Another elite outfit is the Political and Legal Affairs Commission, a party body. It runs surveillance operations and “stability-maintenance offices” tasked with smothering strikes and protests before they start. A powerful agency, it oversees security policy generally, and vets police and legal officials for political reliability.
China does not need a secret-police agency with millions of officers, the book suggests. That is because its surveillance state rests on other pillars that offer part-time but invaluable help. The first is rank-and-file officers in neighbourhood police stations. In Chinese propaganda, there is nothing sinister about such police. They are hometown heroes who battle crime and keep the public safe. But tracking political dissent or public discontent is their job, too. The police oath mentions upholding “the absolute leadership of the Communist Party” before it talks of protecting the public.
The police work that is not shown to children
Police stations are required to monitor “key personnel”, a formal term for millions of Chinese with police files, including ex-convicts and criminal suspects but also those deemed threats to “state security”. Police stations also watch millions more “key individuals”, a group that includes rights activists, religious believers and people petitioning the government for legal redress.
All of that involves a second pillar of the surveillance state: informants. Mr Pei quotes documents in which city governments and police districts boast of recruiting express couriers, shopkeepers, security guards, hotel clerks and building managers as informants. Xi’an, a western city, once reported one in 12 city taxi drivers working for police. Universities report that foreign faculty and Uyghur students are under close watch, thanks to students recruited to spy on teachers and classmates alike. Millions more party members and community volunteers are asked to report suspicious acts as well as colleagues and neighbours unhappy with the authorities. The system fights crime and defends the party’s monopoly on power: no clear line separates these two tasks.
This complexity suits the party. It has eyes and ears everywhere, while avoiding a stand-alone Chinese KGB or Stasi that might alarm the public or grow too mighty to control. China’s surveillance state, it turns out, is hiding in plain sight.■
Read more from Chaguan, our columnist on China:
Xi Jinping’s chaos-loving friends (Feb 8th)
Hard times for China’s micro-industrialists (Feb 2nd)
Xi Jinping looks abroad for confidence (Jan 25th)
Also: How the Chaguan column got its name