China’s Spying Poses Rising Threat to U.S.
wsj.com
wsj.com
> “What hangs in the balance is not just the future of the United States, but the future of the world,” Bill Priestap, assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
> U.S. complaints that China is stealing intellectual property from American companies have been at the center of President Donald Trump’s trade war with Beijing. The Trump administration is planning to indict Chinese hackers and take other actions to call out China for intellectual property theft, according to people familiar with the matter.
Interestingly enough, CIA has a slightly different view on the topic: "While current US policy, as recommended by Gates, does not include providing private business with government intelligence data for commercial gain, the question is apparently still open. It is a valid question and not simply a search for new missions by intelligence organizations seeking to preserve their budgets."
That's just the published budgets also.
Furthermore, America is relatively sparsely populated not because of a moral belief that having fewer kids is better for the environment but merely because that is the stage of demographic transition it is in due to its economic development. In addition, it was very sparsely populated before the arrival of European colonizers.
In addition, even if we look at the cumulative figure, America has historically been the number 1 contributor to global warming[1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Maybe it has something to do with population size, but IMO it is more to do with their economic structure and system of government. Japan is a democracy, and they believe in markets. Since War 2 they also seem a little less pushy with their neighbours...
To the extent that Japan was encouraged and did "voluntarily" limit migration.
How the wheel of time turns... different players, same games.
Where do you get that idea? Germany is one of the most active countries in diplomacy and is at odds with the US all the time.
A problem in the respect that China appears to have an integrated strategy, while the US does not.
China’s Government, communist party, and PLA possess deep integration with it’s BATH(Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei) superplatforms.
The US government is in perpetual conflict with it’s domestic FAANG+(Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, others) tech leaders. As FAANG+ are in constant conflict with each other.
Think of China/BATH and US/FAANG+ akin to respective military services.
China’s operate in an integrated “combined arms” fashion, while US’s are in perpetual conflict with each other.
Compounding this is the spying issue.
During the Cold War, the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact proxies worked hard to steal western tech, with some success.
But a few chips can’t be fully exploited without the manufacturing supply chain to go with it. Stealing a semiconductor assembly line is next to impossible.
Stealing atoms can be hard, stealing bits is much easier.
In 1946 90% of R&D was military. In 1989 50% of R&D was military, 50% commercial In 2019 90%+ of R&D is commercial with duel use potential.
The US has been focused almost exclusively for 18 years on enhancing lethality against insurgents at massive expense.
Meanwhile, China has been building a global platform.
Innovative Strategy > Innovative Technology
And Lethality is not Strategy.
One Belt, One Road description should be expanded to include One Platform, One Network.
I think the US is in a different “war” than what it has been preparing to fight.
Platform “warfare”.
A battle between geodigital operating systems instead of the battle between ideologies as during the Cold War.
The best competing value proposition wins, and the US is not offering a strong value prop at the moment.
The Aus has been focused on Clausewitz when it should have been focused on Metcalfe and Zipf.
Just a political “scientist” and veteran who knows just enough about computers to be dangerous to myself and others within the blast radius.
Sure, the US gov is going to drop some fines on Facebook, but those companies cooperate with some US gov agencies too. Does the conflict get in the way of military contracts/capacity of the US gov? I doubt there's any significant impact. If so, then there's a problem. Most of the conflict seems consumer-focused though. I feel certain there is cooperative spying efforts going through FAANG+ just as much as China/BATH. China just indirectly advertises its cooperation with companies, while the US denies it completely.
I would classify them as authoritarian capitalism or mercantilism.
I do see a relative difference between the two.
BATH have integration and alignment with China’s government and PLA strategy and objectives.
They have near 100% market share in China and have begun to export their model at both the citizen user level as well as the sovereign enterprise level.
The US government is unlikely to incorporate enhancing FAANG+ network effect within its trade partners, while it’s far more likely that China could/would use One Belt, One Road initiative to nudge trading partners into the digital BATH equivalent.
The massive amount of bilateral trade between the US and China doesn’t allow for a traditional Cold War adversary model.
So how does one develop leverage over the other, build the biggest and most integrated geodigital network.
Focused on Metcalfe rather then Clausewitz.
With a destination described by an analog to Zipf’s Law.
However, the current administration has directed increasingly sharp criticism at Google, Amazon, Apple, and Twitter to name a few.
Previous administrations have gone after Microsoft when it was at its market share apex.
While I think it is a good idea to retain and utilise anti-monopoly regulation, at the same time we run the risk of foreign government integrated hybrid commercial entities that can be weaponised in the global geodigital realm.
I get what you're saying, but ironically for the analogy, China just reorganized their military forces a few years ago along US lines, with both administrative and operational theater commands for any given unit.
However, the PLA possesses at its core the General Political Department allows the PLA the ability to conduct warfare well outside the scope of the US military(Title 10) versus CIA(Title 50).
And PLA doctrine includes the Three Warfares:
Public opinion Psychological Legal
While the US is focused on lethality.
Lethality doesn’t enhance your country’s integrated network effects.
Just my $0.02!
The campaign to colonize Iraq and Afghanistan was too piecemeal. It produced for a while, but was ultimately too narrow in scope so it ran its course and revealed its outcome. And seemingly only a handful of companies were in on that take, rather than a widespread corporate consensus. They're pushing ISIS to continue that theater, but the topic has become tired.
So they ramp up the ominous never ending sources of threats. Is China the bigger threat or is Russia the bigger threat? The Party has been framed, and there is no "if" - pick your team. It might depend on whether you'd rather wear red xor blue. It might depend on whether you prioritize acreage/driving/explosions or density/walking/restaurants. As long as you remember to do your part and assume anyone who doesn't fully agree is on the other team. Fear globally, fight locally.
We are indeed being attacked. Not by the actions of China (or Russia, or etc), but by our "leaders" responding in predictable country-destroying ways out of their own self interest. One need to look no further than USG doing precisely what Bin Laden asked for an infuriating example.