A group linked to the Chinese military has stolen massive amounts of data from over 100 different targets, most of which are based in the U.S., a security firm said in a report released Tuesday.
The Wall Street Journal reports Internet security company Mandiant says in the report it traced 141 major hacking attempts to a People's Liberation Army building in Shanghai, 115 of which targeted U.S. companies or organizations.
China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said Tuesday he doubted the evidence would withstand scrutiny.
"To make groundless accusations based on some rough material is neither responsible nor professional," he said according to The Associated Press.
Mandiant didn't name specific targets of the attacks but said they included information technology firms and telecommunications to aerospace and energy companies.
The stolen information allegedly includes blueprints, details on proprietary processes, pricing documents and contact lists.
The report also cites a memo from a Chinese telecommunications provider supplying communications links to the building where the hacking allegedly occurs, saying it would "smoothly accomplish this task for the military based on the principle that national defense construction is important."
China has frequently been accused of hacking, but says it strictly outlaws the practice and says it is itself a victim of such crimes
The Mandiant report comes a week after President Obama issued a long-awaited executive order aimed at getting the private owners of power plants and other critical infrastructure to share data on attacks with officials and to begin to follow consensus best practices on security.
Both Democrats and Republicans have said more powerful legislation is needed, citing Chinese penetration not just of the largest companies but of operations essential to a functioning country, including those comprising the electric grid.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
Pretty incriminating that they can not only link the attacks to pattern characteristics of previous Chinese cyber-attacks, but can trace them to precisely the building the attacks were launched from.
And the Chinese half-heartedly say: "It wasn't us. Were being accused before all the facts are known."
A good documentary video on China, that packs a lot of recent history, Chinese internal social and economic problems, and strategic threats and defense policy of China in the current era, in the context of the history that has formed China's current stance.
A report released on Tuesday by the Center for Public Integrity says Chinese hackers attacked the Federal Election Commission (FEC) website that contains records of donations received and spent by federal candidates.
The attacks, which occurred after October 1 during the government shutdown, came on the heels of warnings from independent auditors that the FEC information system was rickety and at "high risk" for an attack. But the FEC blasted the findings and claimed they were not vulnerable because their "systems are secure."
"The FEC is rotting from the inside out," wrote Dave Levinthal on the Center for Public Integrity blog.
BEIJING, May 15 (Reuters) - China condemned the U.S. Defense Department's annual report on the Chinese military on Sunday, calling it deliberate distortion that has "severely damaged" mutual trust.
In its annual report to Congress on Chinese military activities, the U.S. Defense Department said on Friday that China is expected to add substantial military infrastructure, including communications and surveillance systems, to artificial islands in the South China Sea this year.
China's Defense Ministry spokesman Yang Yujun expressed "strong dissatisfaction" and "firm opposition" to the Pentagon report and said it has "severely damaged mutual trust," state news agency Xinhua reported.
The report "hyped up" China's military threat and lack of transparency, "deliberately distorted" Chinese defense policies and "unfairly" depicted Chinese activities in the East and South China seas, Yang was quoted as saying.
"China follows a national defense policy that is defensive in nature," Yang said, adding that the country's military build-up and reforms are aimed at maintaining sovereignty, security and territorial integrity and guaranteeing China's peaceful development.
It is the United States that has always been suspicious and flexing its military muscle by frequently sending military aircraft and warships to the region, Yang said.
Despite its calls for freedom of navigation and restraint for peace, the U.S. has pushed forward militarisation of the South China Sea with an "intention to exert hegemony," Yang added.
RECLAMATION WORK
The Pentagon report said the planned addition of military infrastructure would give China long-term "civil-military bases" in the contested waters.
It estimated that China's reclamation work had added more than 3,200 acres (1,300 hectares) of land on seven features it occupied in the Spratly Islands in the space of two years.
The report said China had completed its major reclamation efforts in October, switching focus to infrastructure development, including three 9,800 foot-long (3,000 meter) airstrips that can accommodate advanced fighter jets.
Yang, the spokesman, defended the construction, saying it serves mostly civilian purposes and helps fulfill China's international responsibilities and obligations by providing more public goods.
The Pentagon report comes at a time of heightened tension over maritime territories claimed by China and disputed by several Asian nations. Washington has accused Beijing of militarizing the South China Sea while Beijing, in turn, has criticized increased U.S. naval patrols and exercises in Asia.
The U.S report renewed accusations against China's government and military for cyber attacks against U.S. government computer systems, a charge Beijing denies. The Pentagon said attacks in 2015 appeared focused on intelligence collection.
FBI Director Christopher Wray revealed last week that his agency is taking “investigative steps” regarding Confucius Institutes, which operate at more than 100 American colleges and universities. These Chinese government-funded centers teach a whitewashed version of China and serve as outposts of China’s overseas intelligence network.
Wray was responding to questions from Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who called Confucius Institutes “complicit” in China’s larger efforts “to covertly influence public opinion.” Earlier this month, Rubio sent a letter to Florida schools, urging them to shut down their Confucius Institutes. I spent a year and a half studying Confucius Institutes. I found they misled students about China’s history and pressured American scholars to keep quiet about China’s unsavory policies. The Chinese director of one Institute told me that if a student asked about Tiananmen Square, she would “show a picture and point out the beautiful architecture.” Another stripped faculty doors of banners referencing Taiwan. Colleges and universities should close their Confucius Institutes voluntarily — as the University of West Florida announced it would do in response to Rubio’s letter.
In the meantime, the U.S. government should take action. Here are some first steps.
First, make colleges choose between China’s gifts and federal funding.
American colleges accept China’s money to teach Chinese language and culture. But the federal government already awards grants for the same purpose. (See Title VI of the Higher Education Act.) When a college receives Confucius Institute funding, its eligibility for federal Chinese-language grants should decrease proportionately.
Second, require financial transparency.
The public should know how much money foreign governments pour into colleges and universities. The Higher Education Act requires colleges and universities to disclose gifts from a foreign entity totaling $250,000 or more in a calendar year. That threshold should be lowered to $50,000 — about the cost of hiring a full-time instructor at a four-year public university — and it should include the fair market value of in-kind gifts. China sends free textbooks and pays the Chinese teachers at Confucius Institutes, plus funds international trips for college administrators. Under current law, these in-kind gifts never get disclosed. That needs to change.
The Higher Education Act is up for reauthorization, giving legislators a key opportunity to enact stronger disclosure requirements. But House Republicans, in a burst of deregulatory zeal, have introduced the PROSPER Act, which would repeal these disclosure requirements entirely. (The PROSPER Act requires slightly stronger disclosure for institutions that receive Title VI foreign studies funding, but every other college and university would be exempt from disclosing any foreign gifts at all.)
In general, deregulation is good — but so is national security and academic integrity. Congress must amend the PROSPER Act to restore and strengthen disclosure requirements for foreign gifts.
Third, enforce existing law.
Of the 103 Confucius Institutes in the U.S., my research found that only 16 have reported Confucius Institute gifts to the Department of Education since 2010. The Justice Department has authority to investigate and sue institutions that fail to disclose these gifts properly. It should do so at once.
Fourth, require China to be upfront about its goals.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires agents of foreign governments or foreign political parties to identify themselves and disclose certain information to the Justice Department, which maintains a public database of such agents. Confucius Institutes and their Chinese government sponsor, the Hanban, are exempt from FARA under a provision that excludes persons or groups that “engage only in activities in furtherance of bona fide religious, scholastic, academic, or scientific pursuits.”
Confucius Institutes are propaganda machines masked as educational endeavors. The Justice Department should investigate Confucius Institutes for potential violation of FARA. Congress should amend FARA to specify what “bona fide” academic pursuits means, making it clear that foreign propaganda shrouded in an educational institute is not exempt.
Fifth, enforce antidiscrimination law.
Confucius Institutes regularly engage in discriminatory hiring practices. The American university typically agrees to hire Confucius Institute staff from a pool of candidates vetted and selected by the Chinese government, which routinely discriminates by politics and religion. In 2012, one Confucius Institute in Canada closed after a teacher filed a human rights complaint documenting the discrimination she faced for practicing Falun Gong, which is banned in China.
The Confucius Institute hiring process is also non-competitive. China requires that Confucius Institute teachers must “have Chinese nationality.” Qualified Americans are not eligible to apply. The Justice Department should investigate and, if proper, pursue legal action against American colleges complicit in discrimination.
Sixth, hold more hearings.
Confucius Institutes have the potential to threaten national security, as FBI Director Wray acknowledged. They gag American scholars who are critics of China. They are likely a tool for China to monitor, intimidate, and harass Chinese students studying in America. Representative Chris Smith held such hearings in 2014 and asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate Confucius Institutes, but this issue bears further scrutiny.
Confucius Institutes are an affront to intellectual freedom, national security, and American interests. It is time for them to close, and it is time for the U.S. to act.
_____________________________________
Rachelle Peterson is policy director at the National Association of Scholars and the author of Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education.
The main function is spreading anti-American propaganda at our universities, in a way that circumnavigates the ability to academically dispute what is being alleged.
And also is a way to recruit students for espionage against the United States, particularly in the technical field.
It's becoming increasingly less hidden that China has bad intentions toward the United States. Ironically in spite of the fact that the U.S. has built China into what it is over the last 30 years, by conversely treating China very well.
China’s massive foreign influence campaign in the United States takes a long view, sowing seeds in American institutions meant to blossom over years or even decades. That’s why the problem of Chinese financial infusions into U.S. higher education is so difficult to grasp and so crucial to combat.
At last, the community of U.S. officials, lawmakers and academics focused on resisting Chinese efforts to subvert free societies is beginning to respond to Beijing’s presence on America’s campuses. One part of that is compelling public and private universities to reconsider hosting Confucius Institutes, the Chinese government-sponsored outposts of culture and language training.
With more than 100 universities in the United States now in direct partnership with the Chinese government through Confucius Institutes, the U.S. intelligence community is warning about their potential as spying outposts. But the more important challenge is the threat the institutes pose to the ability of the next generation of American leaders to learn, think and speak about realities in China and the true nature of the Communist Party regime.
“Their goal is to exploit America’s academic freedom to instill in the minds of future leaders a pro-China viewpoint,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. “It’s smart. It’s a long-term, patient approach.”
This month, Rubio asked all Florida educational institutions that host Confucius Institutes to reconsider those arrangements in light of a growing body of evidence that China seeks to constrain criticism on American campuses, exert influence over curriculum related to China and monitor Chinese students in the United States.
One of the schools Rubio contacted, the University of West Florida, had already decided not to renew its contract with Hanban, the Chinese government entity that manages the institutes. Western Florida joins a growing list of universities that are rejecting the Faustian bargain that comes with accepting Chinese government funding and management for programs meant to expose students to China, including the University of Chicago, Penn State University and Ontario’s McMaster University. West Florida President Martha Saunders told me the decision was primarily due to a lack of student interest, but the rising concerns also contributed.
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray articulated those concerns in testimony last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said the FBI is “watching warily” and even investigating some Confucius Institutes. He said “naivete” in the academic sector was exacerbating the problem and called out the Chinese government for planting spies in American schools.
“They’re exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have, which we all revere. But they’re taking advantage of it,” Wray said.
For Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), that’s a long-awaited acknowledgment. The majority of the institutes’ activity may be benign, and it’s difficult to determine how much self-censorship participating institutions engage in, Smith said. He has commissioned a study of the institutes by the Government Accountability Office to collect data to support his call for their closure.
“They are nests of influence, reconnaissance,” he said. “They keep tabs on Chinese students, and those who attend their classes are getting a Pollyannaish take on what China is about today.”
To understand what Confucius Institutes are really about, it’s necessary to understand their connections to the Communist Party and its history. Peter Mattis, a former U.S. intelligence analyst now with the Jamestown Foundation, said Confucius Institutes can be directly linked to the Communist Party’s “united front” efforts, still described in Maoist terms: to mobilize the party’s friends to strike at the party’s enemies.
For example, Liu Yandong, the Communist Party official who launched the Confucius Institutes and served as chairwoman, was the head of the United Front Work Department when the program began.
“They are an instrument of the party’s power, not a support for independent scholarship,” Mattis said. “They can be used to groom academics and administrators to provide a voice for the party in university decision-making.”
At a minimum, Confucius Institutes must be required to provide more transparency, yield full control over curriculum to their American hosts and pledge not to involve themselves in issues of academic freedom for American or Chinese students. If they don’t do this voluntarily, Congress will likely act to compel them. Both Rubio and Smith are working on new legislation to do just that.
More broadly, if we as a country don’t want Confucius Institutes to control discussion of China on campus, we must provide better funding for the study of China and Chinese languages. If we are really headed into a long-term strategic competition with China, there is no excuse for not investing in educating our young people about it — or for letting the Chinese government do it for us.
The FBI is currently investigating Beijing’s espionage in U.S. universities, as reports recently revealed that members of the Chinese military had attended Western schools while posing as students.
As a result, some schools are starting to look more carefully at the Confucius Institutes, nonprofit public educational organizations linked to Beijing that teach Chinese language and culture on university campuses across the U.S.
The Confucius Institute was named after a Chinese philosopher and teacher from the fifth century B.C., and the first opened its doors in the U.S. at the University of Maryland, 14 years ago. It was 2004, just four years after President Bill Clinton normalized trade relations with the communist country and one year before the U.S. recognized the emerging power as a “responsible stakeholder," a nebulous concept that suggested China was acting accountably on the global stage.
David Branner, an expert in Chinese language and translation, was leading the university’s Chinese language program at the time. His department struggled to attract funding, but he wanted to keep the class sizes small so that students could get specialized attention. Branner sometimes wondered whether the university was committed to teaching Chinese language, and so its sudden decision to open a Confucius Institute, which was made without the consultation of the school’s language department, surprised him.
“It was set up in secret. No administrator connected officially with Chinese instruction at Maryland heard anything about it until the opening ceremony was announced. It was a shocking end run around all of us,” Branner told Newsweek.
Even more surprising was the fact that the Confucius Institute was helmed by a prominent Chinese physicist who had no experience teaching languages, Branner said. But the physicist had high-level connections to the Chinese government, and the institute quickly gained visibility under his direction.
“The Confucius Institute's funding grew rapidly, far outstripping the Chinese programs. We were told that if we wanted any small part of that largesse, we would have to agree to certain programmatic changes that the Confucius Institute would propose,” Branner said. “I was also told by a Confucius Institute employee that our study abroad program with Taiwan, which coexisted with programs to the People’s Republic of China, would be an obstacle to support from the Confucius Institute.”
Beijing views Taiwan as an official province of China, even though the island operates independently. Taiwan's sovereignty is a tense political issue that divides the government even in its capital, Taipei, and China pressures any allies that appear to recognize the island's statehood.
Shortly after the Confucius Institute opened its doors in Maryland, it offered to lend the university's language program a free Chinese language teacher. The staff assessed that the lecturer was poorly trained, and he spent most of his time collecting information about the Chinese language program instead of teaching, according to the faculty. Meanwhile, the official Chinese language program was increasingly sidelined, Branner said.
“The Confucius Institute at Maryland also held nominally scholarly conferences and research programs, sometimes on subjects related to language or sinology, but during my time there the Chinese language faculty was excluded,” Branner noted. “I felt that was a form of punishment for our declining to submit to the Confucius Institute.”
Ultimately, Branner determined that “language teaching was not the real point of the Confucius Institutes—the real point was propaganda.” He also suspected that the University of Maryland was chosen as the site for the first Confucius Institute because of its proximity to the federal government in Washington D.C.
“I was always surprised that the people who brought Confucius Institutes to the U.S. or administered one here were not required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA),” Branner said. “They have given the Chinese government a voice on American campuses and schools, and the Chinese government has admitted the Institutes were intended as part of a propaganda movement.”
Some schools, like the University of Chicago and the University of North Florida, have closed their Confucius Institute after Republican Senators like Marco Rubio of Florida began publicly expressing concern.
The University of Maryland's Chinese language program still exists today. Minglang Zhou, the director of the program, told Newsweek that the Chinese language program doesn't cooperate with the Confucius Institute because the faculty opposed the idea.
Representatives of the school's Confucius Institute also said that they focus mostly on outreach and that the institute is "one of the top sites in the Northeast for testing Chinese language competence, and often collaborates with the Chinese Student Association to co-sponsor events with the Chinese Faculty Association."
Donna Wiseman, the director of the University of Maryland's Confucius Institute, said in an emailed statement to Newsweek, “The Confucius Institute at Maryland has a long-standing commitment to community outreach around Chinese language and culture."
"As part of our partnership with Hanban, we are responsible for making decisions about the programs we offer to the community and the extracurricular activities we coordinate on campus," Wiseman said. Wiseman did not comment on the accusations of espionage or influence campaigns leveled at the institutes.
However, as the Trump administration launched a months-long trade war with China and began calling out Beijing for its efforts to influence U.S. public opinion, the Confucius Institutes have come under increased scrutiny.
Kirstjen Nielsen, the Trump administration’s secretary of homeland security, said that China has long-standing “holistic influence campaigns” in the U.S. FBI Director Christopher Wray revealed during a hearing in February that the bureau is investigating instances of espionage at the Confucius Institutes. Meanwhile, during a closed meeting with reporters on October 4, national security adviser John Bolton claimed that the extent of Chinese influence efforts surpassed any he’d seen from other countries.
“The Chinese influence operation, much of what we know remains classified…but it’s also a far broader effort to influence public opinions, through think tanks, through intimidating scholars,” Bolton told reporters. “It’s not like other countries don’t hire lobbyists, but I’ve never seen anything like the scope of the Chinese activities.”
One of the ways the Chinese government exerts its influence is through these language programs that simultaneously promote the political ideology of China’s communist party, experts say.
According to the nonprofit National Association of Scholars, there are currently around 103 Confucius Institutes in the U.S. that claim to promote cross-cultural understanding and global education. Hosted on college campuses around the country, they are partially financed by the Hanban, an organization connected to China’s Ministry of Education. The Hanban plays a direct role in deciding which faculty members can work at the institutes and what they teach.
“If you list the number of times a Confucius Institute affected academic freedom by tweaking information about Taiwan, you’d end up with a small book,” Peter Mattis, a former CIA analyst who focuses on China, told Newsweek.
National Association of Scholars Policy Director Rachelle Peterson conducted case studies of 12 Confucius Institutes in New Jersey and New York and discovered that the Chinese government plays a hands-on role in deciding what will be taught.
“The teachers are hired and paid by the Chinese government. They send hundreds of free textbooks for use, and there is a good deal of censorship. They present the official Chinese version history, so everything from the Tiananmen Square massacre to current human rights abuses, students get a very one-sided view of events, and teachers are pressured not to upset the Hanban,” Peterson told Newsweek.
“We know the Chinese government has many tools at its disposal. Professors that I interviewed felt like there was some possibility they were being listened to and that if they said anything wrong it would affect their ability to go back to China for research,” Peterson continued.
It can be argued that these institutes are not very different from European cultural institutes like Germany’s Goethe Institute or Spain’s Cervantes Institute, which offer language and cultural programs worldwide. But experts, including Wray, have said the Confucius Institutes work to silence critics of China and recruit Chinese students to steal intellectual property from U.S. universities.
In May, GOP Senator Ted Cruz of Texas submitted a bill—known as the Stop Higher Education Espionage and Theft Act of 2018—that proposed to shed light on the way universities interact with these and other foreign entities, but the bill has not yet passed the Senate. Meanwhile, the Hanban has opened around 501 “Confucius Classrooms” in U.S. elementary and middle schools, and the number of these institutions continues to grow each year by leaps and bounds, according to National Association of Scholars.
The accusations of “holistic influence campaigns” center on the United Front, an official branch of the Chinese Communist party whose role is to rally Chinese citizens abroad and to make sure they fall in line with Chinese Communist Party policies. China analysts say the United Front is one of the most powerful branches of China’s communist party, and its agents play an outsize role in China’s governing politburo.
Aside from the Confucius network, there are estimated to be around 150 Chinese students and scholars associations (CSSAs) that play a similar role in universities across the U.S. Some analysts say these associations co-opt Chinese students studying in the U.S. and pressure them to feed information back to Beijing.
Many experts have agreed that Chinese influence operations are something the U.S. government should monitor, but opinions differ on the severity of the threat.
“There’s no doubt that China and the Communist Party are engaged in influence operations and soft power using Confucius Institutes and CSSAs under the broad United Front umbrella. We need to pay attention to that, and we’ve been paying more attention to how they are being funded and supported,” Christine Wormuth, a former undersecretary of defense for policy during the Obama administration and former member of the National Security Council, told Newsweek.
Nevertheless, Wormuth argued that these institutions more closely resemble soft power tools than aggressive influence campaigns.
“I think that the Chinese may be using them in ways that are more aggressive than the Alliance Francais, but I don’t think they’re hugely different. We see the activities on campus becoming more controlling, paying students to show up for Xi’s visits, controlling the research agenda, it’s a bit more overt and direct than the soft power you would see coming out of democracies. But I don’t see them presenting a serious threat to our country or democracy at this point,” Wormuth added.
Daniel Gang, a faculty adviser for a CSSA at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said he doesn’t believe the hype about espionage and influence campaigns.
“Trump has said all the students are spies, but that’s ridiculous and impossible. I have lots of students, and I don’t think so. Most of the students stay in the U.S. after they graduate, they don’t go back, so why would they do that?” Gang told Newsweek.
But as U.S. universities become more expensive, the type of Chinese student arriving in the U.S. is starting to change, Gang said. The younger generation of Chinese students is more likely to come from a wealthy, well-connected family who benefits from the Chinese government’s policies back home and supports the Communist Party’s positions.
Many of the Chinese students involved in the CSSAs insist that they are only trying to bridge cultural divides and create a welcoming atmosphere in which Chinese students can thrive. But that hasn’t stopped some officials, including top White House aide Stephen Miller, from advocating for the government to stop giving Chinese students visas. Miller reportedly urged the president to issue a moratorium on all visas for Chinese students in an effort to combat espionage.
Still, others argue the universities should work to ensure that their institutions can provide opportunities for Chinese students to study and express themselves without the undue influence of the Chinese government.
“The CSSAs are problematic if they get funding from the Chinese government and are reporting on Chinese students and voices that differ from Chinese government policies. That’s the most damaging to our commitment to students. The U.S. educational experience is freedom to say what you think without fear of reprisal,” Elizabeth Economy, the director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations who is currently researching Chinese influence efforts, told Newsweek. “I think it’s important to address this issue, but it’s important to do it carefully, not in the frenzied McCarthyist approach of Stephen Miller to ban all Chinese students.”
For the record, Democrats in the Truman administration (that were far more hawkish than the Democrats' political and academic leadership now) were also dismissive about the possibility of spies and communist infiltration. Only when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Kremlin records were open to the public did the full extent of communist spies and infiltration become known.
That infiltration allowed the Soviets to gain nuclear weapons technology and begin the arms race.
That China has economically developed to the point that wages are now much higher in China, and their companies are looking for cheap labor for their industry in Africa. And also using influence on African nations to leverage African nations' votes in favor of mainland China over that of Taiwan (and of the U.S.).
Another lecture by a Harvard professor on the subject of an apparently inevitable clash of a rising China against the hegemonically positioned United States. To an audience of Harvard students who will likely be many of the decision-makers in decades to come, as these two nations grow increasingly toward conflict.
At the end of World War II, it was 39 members of the Council on Foreign Relations who wrote the U.N. charter, and set up a system that largely kept us from war over the last 70-plus years. Much as I distrust the U.N. and the forces of globalism seeking to crush U.S. sovereignty, the type of compromises discussed in 1945-1948 did work, and makes me wonder if globalism might be the better alternative to another far more devastating global war.
But I think the peace is as much good fortune as it was planning. One Russian ship breaking the Cuban naval blockade in 1962 could have triggered all-out thermouclear war. Likewise, a weather satellite launched over Norway in 1995, perceived as a possible first-strike magnetic pulse weapon, almost caused Russia to launch an all-out nuclear strike. With less than 30 minutes to decide, luckily Boris Yeltsin chose not to launch a first strike and to stand down. It was the U.S. that globalism seeks to replace that acted unilaterally to keep the peace in those 70 years.
A Fareed Zakaria quote comes to mind: "We might be getting a glimpse of what a world without America would look like. It would be free of American domination but perhaps also free of American leadership-- a world in which problems fester and the buck is passed endlessly until situations explode."
From the program Life, Liberty, Levin, where Levin interviewed Michael Pillsbury, author of the book The 100-Year Marathon, on China's 100-year plan for global dominance, and explores all the myriad ways China is pursuing that goal, with its central goal of destroying its primary rival in the process, the United States.
A Very insightful 38 minutes on U.S. national security, from a general whot has been at the center of U.S. national security for over 20 years, and was for a while the Army chief of staff.
In the first 20 minutes Keane details the overall threat and specific strategy of China, both in the Pacific region and globally, and it's own brand of colonialism, to displace the U.S. by 2030-2040 as the world's lone superpower.
He spends about 15 minutes on Russia's strategy along the same lines, to break NATO and dominate Europe. And about 5 minutes on Iran's ambitions in the Middle East, to surround and destroy Israel. Levin's show is consistently worth watching, something of a successor to the one-on-one interviews that Charlie Rode used to have. Another I saw 2 or 3 weeks ago was an interview with Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor, on on the Enron/Arthur Anderson prosecutions, and its relation (in the unethical practices of Comey, Mueller and Weismann) to the current Mueller investigation.
Kind of a slam of information packed into one 10-minute video, but still a very articulate overview of the variety of ethnic groups in China, that also has large minorities of Muslims (the third largest muslim population of any nation on earth) and Christians (this surprised me, China is 8% to 10% Christian and rising rapidly.
And China has a huge diaspora of Chinese immigrants to nations worldwide, particularly large and powerful minorities in nations across South Asia. The part about Mongolian groups also was new to me. There are 1.4 billion people in China alone, and with the vast amount of Chinese living in other parts of the world, particularly their near (and conquerable) abroad, I could see the potential for China to have a colonial period similar to what Europe had from about 1500-1945.
A clickbait title, but presents facts that show the U.S. has advantages in training and military equipment that the Chinese don't. From this point of view, the U.S. might fare much better than common wisdom generally portrays. China has a lot of corruption, they have a huge population to feed and control. Their economy is tanking, creating further internal stress. They exhaust huge resources just maintaining control of the non-Chinese population in Tibet and their other Western provinces. Covered in the video, I wasn't fully aware how severe the aging of their population is, similar to Japan, Europe and the U.S.
There's a Chinese expert named Gordon Chang who has been predicting the inevitable collapse of China for 20 years, and this video cites some of the potential reasons for that. China has vast global ambitions, but also great inherent vulnerabilities.
It was revealed on Monday and Tuesday that China has been doing extensive cyber war on both the U.S. military, and on its contractors, cyber-thefting a lot of its military secrets. It's interesting that for decades China doesn't spend money on technological research, they just steal tecchnological developments from the U.S. and other nations, reproduce and imitate the breakthrough technology, and sell it back to the U.S. market at a lower cost.
China also has intalled 25% of the intercontinental fiber-optic cable in the world, and has plans to do much more. And with it they intall the ability to interrupt, block or spy on the nations they provide that international fiber-optic cable to.
Experts go so far as to call it open warfare with the United States, and make the point that for China to do so, it's questionaable if there's any use in negotiating with the Chinese, if they would honor any agreements they would make.
Also mentioned in the report, a Rand study that at this point the U.S. would lose in in a military conflict with either Russia or China. Although I'd love to see a dialogue between Rand and the guys in the video above that say Russia and China are even less prepared for war.
About 17 minutes in a report on the U.S.'s unpreparedness for war, how the U.S. military has over 800,000 less solders than it had during the Cold War, how only 71% of military aircraft are combat-ready, and just under 50% of our F-18 fighter jets are ready. And repeating the warning that U.S. forces are given qquestionable odds of being able to win a conflict with either Russia or China.
Also informative on the reasonss for our current state of military unpreparedness.
Keane was the general who gave President W. Bush the plan for a troop surge to win in Iraq in 2006-2007. And was the assistant Army chief of staff until his retirement.
Another really insightful video on China's military preparedness, and its ethnic divisions, political rifts and other technological challenges and lack of qualified applicants. (The problem of not enough recruits physically strong enough, smart enough, drug and alcohol free, and educated enough, is a problem that is similarly lowering recruiting standards in the U.S. to allow the military to meet recruitment goals. With the clear difference that the U.S. force are volunteers, whereas the Chinese ones are conscripts. )
Comforting that maybe we're not on the edge of a Red Dawn scenario.
: Is China building a military base in the Western Pacific? Australia and New Zealand are worried about reports of Chinese military expansion in Vanuatu. Does the west have reason to be concerned?
Joining us at the Roundtable is Malcolm Jorgensen, who served in the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade - advising on China's Pacific militarisation; Yan Bennett, Manager of the Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University; Yu Jie, Head of China Foresight at LSE Ideas - part of the London School of Economics; and Kerry Brown - Director of the Lau China institute at King's College London.
Roundtable is a discussion programme with an edge. Broadcast out of London and presented by David Foste
Newt Gingrich has the same opinion as Gordon Chang, that there is no negotiating with China, China will not honor any agreements they make with the U.S. and other countries, that the only choice is to move all U.S. industry out of China to starve them into compliance with the rest of the world. And Gingrich further suggests tax break incentivize to move U.S. companies out of China.
Gordon Chang again emphasizes that China is overtaking us economically, where if we don't fight back now, in the near future we will "no longer be able to defend ourselves".
If Hillary Clinton had become president, if any of the other 2016 Republican primary candidates other than Trump had become president, any of these people as president would have just sat on their hands and let China enslave us economically, as presidents of both parties have for the last 30 years. Joseph Biden and son Hunter Biden, and the visibly anti-Trump bureaucrats in E.U. and Ukraine posts who have been giving testimony the last few weeks make that clear. There is an establishment system of people in both parties who have been enriching themselves by selling us out for 30 years, more than 30 years, and Trump is making great strides to reform that system and take us off the path to destruction.
Dragging the self-enriching establishment globalist bureaucrats with him, kicking and screaming all the way. The Washington globalist swamp creatures resent losing their lobbyist cash cow, even if it is saving the United States in the process.
Peter Zeihan, a guest on Watters World last night (starting 26 minutes into the video) says that the rise of globalism, with the full participation of the United States, is the only reason China was ever able to become a world power. And that China's collapse was always inevitable, but that the current Coronavirus outbreak has overnight turned global sentiment against China, and predicts that China (or at least its communist government) will collapse within the next 3 to 4 years)
That China is very reliant on foreign trade, and lacks the navy to protect its trade.
China has intensely pissed off over 181 nations, by their open negligence and deliberate release of the virus, by: 1) restricting air travel inside of China during the Covid-19 pandemic, but purposefully allowed travel out of China to infect other nations worldwide. and 2) China suspiciously filed a patent for remdesivir as a treatment for Covid-19 in January 2020 just before they announced to the world that the Covid-19 virus was highly contagious human-to-human. Clearly planning to to profit off the misfortune China unleashed on the rest of the world. 3) Also in January, China pre-emptively bought up most of the world's medical supplies, that other nations needed to fight Covid-19, and then China price gouged at far higher prices selling PPE medical supplies to other nations, to further exploit the misery that China itself created. Whether purposefully or accidentally created, China deliberately orchestrated spread outside China, and used the World Health Organization (WHO) to assure global complacency to do so. It appears initially an accidental outbreak within China, but the deliberately suppressed warnings, silencing the WHO to enable its spread outside of China, amounts to a global weaponization for China's benefit of what began as an accidental domestic outbreak.
Germany already sent China an itemized bill for the lives and economic damage done to their country. Many countries, including the U.S., Japan, Germany and others, are in the process of moving their manufacturing out of China and either back to their home countries, or to other nations outside of China. In addition to the economic losses from the outbreak in China, this will insure that China continues to decline and does not recoup their losses.
China also forces companies operating in China to give up industrial trade secrets to the Chinese government, then creates new Chinese companies with those secrets to compete and drive the companies out of business. China also angages in cyber-theft, that further steals about $600 billion a year from the U.S. alone, and hundreds of billions more from other nations and private companies worldwide. China spends very little on research and development, they just steal the reseach from other nations.
All these things were creating an increasing distaste for doing business in China. And the Covid-19 outbreak is the final straw that will accellerate the exodus of business out of China. To the economic benefit of the U.S., Mexico, India, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Phillipines.
Another nice benefit will be that China will have far less new revenue to spend on expanding its military. And that the nations who take the business from China will have more to spend on their militaries, to resist and deter further Chinese aggression.
I don't know if the 3 or 4 year timeframe for a Chinese collapse is an accurate timeframe. But it parallels a prediction of Chinese collapse that Gordon Chang has been predicting since at least 2001. For nations in the South China Sea, I think that collapse can't happen fast enough.
Predictably, the attempts by China to sell a propaganda narrtive that the U.S. and not China is responsible for the outbreak is convincing no other nations, and is truly intended for internal persuasion of Chinese citizens, to rally anti-Americanism as a way to prevent the fraying support within for the Chinese Communist Party government. I'm not sure that message is even selling within China. But as with the 8 Wuhan doctors who tried to warn the world of the Covid-19 outbreak, to publicly dissent could get Chinese citizens arrested or killed if openly expressed. But social media within China made clear that residents didn't believe the official state version of events, or believe the Covid-19 infection and death numbers, and that Chinese citizens were furious with their government for the outbreak and that lack of credible facts reported.
Projections of the actual numbers of Covid-19 infections begins at a low estimate of 45,000 dead, and 2.9 million infected. A far cry from the official alleged 3,200 dead, and 80,000 infected, a number that the Chinese government "corrected" a week or so ago, increased by 50%, but still comes nowhere near the true numbers. The true numbers have been projected by foreign news media speaking to funeral homes and the numbers of urns ordered for ashes, and by the massive thousands of cel phones that suddenly had been shut off and discontinued service.
At the center of U.S. Pacific region policy is its relationship with Taiwan, and the imminent threat for decades by China to conquer Taiwan. China literally runs military air and naval exercises to do so every day.
Certainly, if China felt they could get away with it and decisively win, they would invade Taiwan today. There are elements within the Chinese government and military leadership who are eager for war, and not just with Taiwan, but with the United States itself. There are others in China's government who prefer to play the long game, that over 10 or 20 years China will grow exponentially more both economically and militarily, while the U.S. and its Pacific alliances will weaken or completely dissolve, in which case China can achieve the same victory without firing a single shot.
And China's aggression with Taiwan, with Hong Kong, with outright genocide within Hong Kong, within Tibet, and within Xinxiang province against an estimated 2 million Uyghurs. And its recent expansion into Afghanistan, and revealed advance support and training of a Taliban takeover, its aggression in the South China Sea against Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan and the Phillipines, its border aggression against India and Nepal, its across the board aggression demonstrates the threat China poses not just to the Pacific region, but to the entire world. And the level of overwhelming hostility and genocide they would impose on any vassal state or region, to insure no opposition will be permitted, or even permitted to live.
It's good to see that China is not necessarily as unstoppable as it is often portrayed as being. In this case, Australia inadvertantly exposed there is at least one way to bring China's entire system crashing down.
A United States Coast Guard cutter conducting patrols on an international mission in the Pacific Ocean was denied entry to a port in the Solomon Islands raising concerns about China's growing influence in the area.
The cutter Oliver Henry was taking part in Operation Island Chief monitoring fishing activities in the Pacific, which ended Friday, when it sought to make a scheduled stop at Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, to refuel and re-provision, the Coast Guard office in Honolulu said.
There was no response from the Solomon Islands’ government for diplomatic clearance for the vessel to stop there, however, so the Oliver Henry diverted to Papua New Guinea, the Coast Guard said. Additionally, it was reported that a British vessel was also denied entry but the British Royal Navy has not commented directly on those reports.
During Operation Island Chief, the U.S., Australia, Britain and New Zealand provided support through aerial and surface surveillance for Pacific island nations participating in the operation, including the Solomon Islands.
China has been assertively trying to expand its presence and influence in the Pacific, and Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare alarmed some neighbors, the U.S. and others after he signed a new security pact with China. The pact has raised fears of a Chinese naval base being established within 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) of Australia’s northeast coast. A Chinese military presence in the Solomon Islands would put it not only on the doorstep of Australia and New Zealand but also in close proximity to Guam, the U.S. territory that hosts major military bases.
"China is gaining ground in its efforts to gain dominance in the Pacific," Former United States Department of Veterans Affairs Assistant Secretary James Hutton tweeted in response to the news.
"China is now running the Solomon Islands," Gordon G. Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China, posted on Twitter.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Because the U.S. military is the only part of the federal budget that President Biden and the Democrat-Bolsheviks are slashing funding for. They made a modest increase in military spending, that in proportion to inflation is actually a large cut in military spending. Even as Biden covid-mandates have caused at least 60,000 of the brightest and best in our military to leave. EVEN AFTER the covid vaccines have proven to be ineffective, and have a much higher ratio of permanent injury and death than any other vaccine, the Biden administration keeps up the vaccine mandates in our military. To purge the military of Republican/conservatives, and those of Christian faith.
And because the Biden family has directly profited from selling out to the Chinese, gaining a fortune of at least 31 million dollars. And possibly far more. Hunter Biden's windfal from a $1.5 billion investment for the Bank of China has not been made public yet. Hunter Biden has openly boasted in his e-mails (on Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop computer) about his high-level dealings with "the spy chief of China". Either by Benedict Arnold-like outright treason, or by capitulation to Chinese blackmail of the Biden family, the Chinese communist government has complete control over the Biden administration, and through him, the entire U.S. military (i.e., "elite capture").
Gee, why would China be so aggressive in expanding its borders throughout the Pacific? Wow, such a mystery.
Arguing against the prevailing view, that China instead has no interest in invading Taiwan, but that China (President Xi Xinping) is instead sabre-rattling to rally nationalism within mainland China, to distract from China's growing economic crises.
But that if Xi Xinping's supporters put enough pressure on him to back up his rhetoric with action or be seen as weak and a paper tiger, he would invade Taiwan, just to rally his support and avoid being voted out of his position, but not because he actually wants to invade Taiwan.
Interesting history review too, that Imperial Japan occupied and owned Taiwan from 1895-1945, and China only got it back because FDR pressed for giving it back to China (BEFORE the Communists took over in 1949), and that's the only reason it technically belongs to China now in the first place.
And this was a report from a year ago. Xi Xinping and China's rhetoric has grown increasingly bellicose since then. Some of which is quoted in this report.
A Chinese admiral enthusiastically expressed his eagerness to sink a U.S. aircraft carrier in the South China sea. And Xi's continued rhetoric about violently crushing any nation that stands between China and its seizure of Taiwan. Although as I cited earlier, a Taiwan invasion poses huge risks for China, an invasion on the scale of the Normandy invasion in 1944, that could be a destabilizing embarassment for China if it fails. And the revealed weakness and heavy losses for Russia in the Ukraine invasion no doubt make China not want a similar national humiliation. China seems to prefer economically and diplomaticaly isolating Taiwan, to get them to surrender without a war. But I'm deeply concerned that Biden's weakening of the U.S. makes China increasingly confident that if they invade Taiwan, the U.S. will either be unwilling or even incapable of defending Taiwan.
As with an Australian 60 Minutes report I posted early in the Covid-19 topic in March 2020, and other British articles I've posted, I'm often amazed at the facts detailed in British and Australian media, that George Orwell's liberal media in the U.S. completely ignores.
A great overview of the history of Taiwan, both as a possession of China, and of historic periods Taiwan belonged to Japan and other powers. And of the balance of power between China's current military, despite its growth, as compared to arsenals of the U.S. and other world powers. That China's vulnerabilities both miliary and economic, deter China from wanting to invade Taiwan. It's interesting that Taiwan from 1895-1945 belonged to Imperial Japan, and that when returned in 1945 briefly, then belonged to the Chinese republic of Chiang Kai Shek, and has never belonged to Communist China. So a militarily stronger Taiwan would be emboldened to more clearly state that they will never join China, and to state that Communist China has no more claim on them.
And China's enormous dependency for imports of food, oil, natural gas and nitrogen (for farming), that China relies on foreign nations for such a high percentage of these, that China could very quickly be brought to its knees if deprived of these imports, in a matter of weeks, if punishing sanctions and shipping blockades were imposed on them over a Taiwan invasion.
I've known for a long time about China's desire to get the Amur river region back from Russia (an area twice the size of California, including Vladivostok), and that it is the lower hanging fruit, easier to leverage from a militarily over-burdened and sanction-crippled Russia, than Taiwan would be, to fight a costly war for.
But despite that Taiwan appears to be less feasible to conquer than first appears, the absolute control of Xi Xinping over China's elite, the lack of Chinese elite leaders to be able to dissent from Xi, and the lack of communication between the various branches of the Chinese government, make an irrational impulse to invade Taiwan a possibility.
A great video that shows Taiwan's deterrants and incentives for China to never invade, and what a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would look like. And what Taiwan's strategies for defense would be.
1) China's population is aging, that will diminish China's force of military age men, and an aging population will cause a decline in the economy and war capacity of China. . 2) China wants to seize Taiwan to gain economic advantage, by taking control of the global semiconductor market (even as the U.S. and Europe are already working in the next few years to eliminate the West's dependence on Taiwan semiconductors.) 3) The U.S. has a temporary deficit in war production capacity, that temporarily leaves the U.S. vulnerable to not being able to keep up production during a hot war with China over Taiwan. War in Ukraine made this vulnerability visible. But the U.S. is now rebuilding its war capacity. 4) The war in Ukraine over-extends the U.S.'s ability to fight a second regional war over Taiwan, combined with aging vulnerable U.S. military systems that limit the U.S.'s capacity to fight a war across the Pacific, to aid Taiwan. That again, is a temporary vulnerability China could exploit if they start and win a war over Taiwan while that vulnerability remains.
The saving grace will be if China is unable to increase their military war preparation for invasion (estimaed ready by 2027), before the U.S. is able to build a deterrent against invading Taiwan.
China was been building its military in ways that threaten Australia for the first time. Australia was formerly far enough away to not be at great risk of invasion. But now China has missile that could hit Australia in about 8 minutes. So Australia is building its air force and missile capability to put a Chinese navy at much greater risk if China were to do so against Australia.
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