In the UK Chinese funded international masters/phd students have to send back to China reports about their fellow students as a condition of their funding.
There's no mandatory spying expected if the position is funded privately or by the host institution.
I expect that the spying is just limited to their fellow state funded students although I have heard of significant tension between mainland and Hong Kong students about this. I don't know if Hong Kong students have to spy.
In Turkey when they have a new shiny politician, there's a running joke to check if they went to University of Exeter. For some reason, all the lightly islamist politicians of Turkey have been to Exeter at some point in their life.
> In the UK Chinese funded international masters/phd students have to send back to China reports about their fellow students as a condition of their funding.
That's a major claim, do you have a link to an article or source?
Not the OP but I found this interesting so went digging [1].
>Amongst other things, the contract also commits the recipient to “regularly submit” a formal “Situation Report” (called the Study/Research/Training Situation Report for Personnel Studying Abroad 出国留学人员学习/研修情况报告) to the relevant Chinese embassy or consulate, and “participate in annual PhD student reviews” there.
You can find the template of this report online by just Googling "出国留学人员学习/研修情况报告", it has English translation and appears to have a "Professor's Evaluation" section to be filled and signed by the foreign advisor.
There might be something else but this looks like a progress evaluation form and is hardly concerning.
> There might be something else but this looks like a progress evaluation form and is hardly concerning.
There is indeed something else
> An online announcement from January 2019 by the Chinese consulate in Belfast even suggests recipients should report important papers published, patents obtained, and inventions made by those they work with at British universities.
I was unable to load the url for this, but it's not looking good. A certain line is crossed when you have to start reporting on ip that isn't yours.
If you presume innocence, this requirement can also be interpreted in a harmless way as the funder asking the student to report his/her achievement for an evaluation of the progress.
The level of detail and the scope would matter a lot. It's very different whether the student is required to show that he coauthored 2x Science, 1x Nature Photonics and have a patent about something pending, or he need to furnish detailed information about an on-going/unpublished work.
I would also expect these dodgy reporting to be done in a more delicate way if they do exist then what's shown on this PDF. Citing the report in my first reply suggests that PDF is simply not a good source.
Note that these are reports about their fellow chinese state funded students not any students they are with. They are not told to report on regular students, the university, companies or governments.
The students have to report on each other. Effectively spying on each other.
Also note that there are many private universities in China and private research institutions which send a significant number of students where I imagine this requirement doesn't apply.
Until recently these threads were flagged and removed from HN, and participants to conversations stating these things were warned of possible future bans.
It looks like the conversation has changed quite dramatically. The geopolitical tone has trickled down to tech and VC.
Firms like a16z are going all in on "American dynamism", which is basically about competition with China.
It's almost every week you hear about China's sixth gen fighters, NGAD, drones, military spending, etc. in the media. Now the various institutional interests want to invest in capabilities to deter this.
But this kind of conversation, even if handled delicately in a way that was super mindful of not being xenophobic, was entirely forboden just a few short years ago.
Talking about Chinese national students as possible spies. Wow. My ban avoidance scar tissue still tingles with this subject matter. I'm wondering out loud if this geopolitical tension and rivalry is kosher to talk about now.
As an Chinese expat, I have indeed heard rumors about undercovers from Chinese three letters agencies in events organized by dissentients (like falungong) and I would try my best to avoid being involved.
However I hope the collateral damage to the innocent Chinese expats can be minimized. The reason of many of those to stay outside of China are concerns about the the ruling party and the desire to keep a distance from it. (Admittly also a higher quality of life, but no longer true in many cases.)
Regardless of who you know, don't you think these claims are partly driven by, and drive, xenophobia - the same xenophobia and nationalism being applied to many things?
So? You might need to confront the possibility that these are not the evils you've been led to believe they are. It appears they may well be healthy, rational, vital traits for a people to survive and thrive. A population that actively resists or perverts these natural behaviours through xenophilia is not long for this world.
I don't need to wonder, I can see the vivid trail through history of oppression, hate, violence, and destruction of humanity and everything it builds.
> natural behaviours
Always the argument of people perpetrating evil (or nonsense): It's natural! Murder, rape, hatred ... killing your sibling or parent is natural - it's in the Bible! Starvation, disease, warfare, cheating on your partner, theft, ... every bad thing is natural.
So is every good thing, and many/most/all cultures have long said you have the moral choice, in Abrahamic religions ever since we left Eden. We have the knowledge of good and evil.
> A population that actively resists or perverts these natural behaviours through xenophilia is not long for this world.
Nothing is worse for humanity than warfare, and it's common cause is xenophobia and nationalism. The West has done very well embracing new immigrants. The USA is almost all immigrants or their decendents.
You don't have to embrace hate or these nonsense arguments. The treasures of freedom and peace and justice are at hand; you only have to take them up. They are far more capable and productive than these fears - look at the most free, most safe, most prosperous countries in the history of the world, with no peers or competition. They are all built on universal human rights - universal!
This is just ignorance and hate, fabrications that don't pass even the most basic examination, all to rationalize racist white supremacy.
If you want to identify dangers to you, don't do it by skin color. Look at the people telling you to be afraid, to hate, urging you to it. Those aren't good people, and they don't have your interests at heart. They are using you for truly bad things. No respected leader in US history or elsewhere does those things - think of Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, etc.
The only problem is you believing this nonsense. Stop and I promise, your life will be easier and all these supposed threats will vanish as soon as they leave your mind. I spend much of my life in integrated environments, with absolutely no hint of a problem. Everything is fine, until the bigots show up.
Now if we could deport bigotry, imagine how much more peace and happiness we'd have. What a waste of life it is.
> This mindset is driven by hatred of White people and ignorance of White achievement and culture.
Those are the lies people are telling you to encourage fear and hate - that someone out there hates you. I truly don't think about white people, achievement or culture, ever, and I never hear anyone discuss them, except white supremacist leaders trying to create hate and fear. You might as well say I hate people in some village in the Peruvian mountains - they aren't in my consciousness.
Now that you mention them, that's because I don't think of them as groups that exist beyond white supremacists - in my experience, it's a worldview limited to white supremacists - nor do I think that the definition of whiteness makes sense. Nobody else I know or talk to ever mentions them, or ever talks about erasing them or anyone at all.Could you give an example of what you are concerned about?
And whatever you believe or like, I hope you worship / follow / enjoy it to the fullest. My opinion is irrelevant to that. Governments are there to protect your rights, as Jefferson wrote, and I'd be outraged if anyone tried to take yours and your culture away and I'd want to protect them; I'd want our government to protect them.
Where support, love, and tolerance for others stop is when the others are parasites on freedom - when they use theirs to take freedom away others. And that's what racism and white supremacism do. Then I'm going to protect the people you attack just like I would protect you.
Of course the leaders of hate and fear have rationalizations why it's ok. Bad people always do. Tthe devil never says 'I'm the devil and these are bad things'. People are misled, seduced, and hate and fear have historically been the most common means.
Let's all protect each other's freedoms. That's what it's all about. Let's get together and then we're invincible. People who want to weaken you try to split you apart.
White people are a tiny global minority, and yet everywhere we exist in numbers is currently a target of mass immigration of non-Whites. This is not an accident. Soon there will be nowhere on earth for our people to live in peace and harmony among ourselves.
You're mistaken if you think it's a virtue to ignore this. If you are White, it's disgraceful. If you have White kids, it's unconscionable.
I'm sure you realise that I could turn back all of the things you said on your own position. I see endless demonization, fear-mongering, prohibition, ostracism, censorship and lies about White nationalism than any other movement in the West. Your government hates White people. It misleads you to hate us and to fear White collectivism.
What do I care for freedom if my great grandchildren have no homeland? are despised minorities in a soulless economic zone? are freely assaulted and killed by foreign authorities? don't exist...? That's such a suicidal, nihilistic ideology.
Stronger together indeed. White unity at every opportunity.
> I'm sure you realise that I could turn back all of the things you said on your own position. I see endless demonization, fear-mongering, prohibition, ostracism, censorship and lies about White nationalism than any other movement in the West. Your government hates White people. It misleads you to hate us and to fear White collectivism.
I really don't. If you could give me some examples, it would help. Also, I don't think of 'turning back' what you say, but maybe I misunderstand you or just don't know about something.
> White people are a tiny global minority, and yet everywhere we exist in numbers is currently a target of mass immigration of non-Whites. This is not an accident.
Do you mean that someone or some group is intending to disrupt 'white' societies? Who and why?
If whites are a minority, normal demographic patterns that cause change over time would seem likely to cause the minority communities to become more integrated - just a matter of numbers
> are despised minorities in a soulless economic zone? are freely assaulted and killed by foreign authorities?
Could you share some examples of these things happening? I really don't know about it.
As just one anecdote, I've lived in places where 'white' people were a small minority, and there was no problem at all. There was no mention of or discussion of a problem.
The only discrimination I see in my experience is when other people are minorities among whites - then some white people discriminate against the minority.
> Soon there will be nowhere on earth for our people to live in peace and harmony among ourselves.
Your idea of 'our people' is, I think, one that few share. Most white-skinned people don't identify with skin color, in my experience. For example, I far more often hear people say they are part Polish, Irish, etc. I've only heard very few - white supremacists - say they only want to live with other white-skinned people.
That doesn't mean you can't have your perspective. But other people aren't attacking you - they don't even think or care about it. Twisting it into fear and hate is what evil leaders do, to get people to do evil things.
Also, you are responsible for the consequences of your words and actions (and so am I) - if people die, you have the blood on your hands. There's no excuse for it. And it's predictable that spreading hate, especially white supremacy, leads to evil results.
Nothing has changed in terms of HN moderation. You shouldn't conclude anything from one data point (or a handful of them) - there's far too much randomness.
dang would have to weigh in but it might be accepted because it’s not that far fetched? Look at all the other allegations in the economist article we’re discussing - in the context of all that flagrant conduct asking state funded students to rat on others is relatively tame.
It seems like it would play right into spies hand, if you convince people "don't even think this is a possibility!"
This reminds me of the paradox of tolerance. You know there would be no hand wringing in china about whether they could even discuss the possibility that some Americans in china could be spies.
I'm not sure about CSC (China Scholarship Concil) funded students, but being an intern funded by a Chinese university myself some years ago, I didn't need to report anything back beyonds a final scientific report signed by my US advisor.
Tangential: in my personal experience, the need for CSC funding for UK PhD programs is due to the very little available funding opportunities for foreign students. Doing a PhD without financial support in an expensive country is ridiculous for most families in China.
Most students would actually try to avoid that if it's possible to secure funding in alternative ways (like the paid PhD programs elsewhere in the world), as CSC funding comes with a requirement of returning to China after finishing the study and this limits opportunities of the students to work abroad afterwards.
Soon enough anything that is even remotely a security threat (pretty much any non-trivial app) will require clearance and in office work.
The North Korean hacks into several companies are an example of how bad it is now, add in some good deep fake technology and soon you will not be able to distinguish who is actually working for your company.
> Soon enough anything that is even remotely a security threat [...] will require clearance and in office work.
I think this is one of those things that sucks but may be necessary.
You need to trust the knowledge workers that make up your economy to not send your research to a hostile nation so they can take advantage of your R&D investments.
And you need to know that your critical infrastructure (beyond Internet and trains, think about electricity and running water) isn't vulnerable to being slowly pwned and then shut down all at once in a catastrophic event that coincides with a forcible military reunification of one Asian country with another.
Although the latter problem is less malice and more general incompetence in the cyber security realm. Can't solve that with a security clearance or RTO. Solar Winds anyone?
>> vulnerable to being slowly pwned and then shut down all at once in a catastrophic event
A few years ago everyone thought that would happen to Ukraine, that Russian hackers would shut down everything from water delivery to weapon systems. The hackers almost certainly tried, yet the lights remained on. Imho we overestimate the power of "nation-state hackers" and underestimate the resilience of our systems.
Ukraine also had a significant amount of non-computerized legacy infra from the Soviet era which reduced the scope of IT/OT attacks.
On the other hand, because of early mover advantage, a lot of utilities in the US computerized fairly early but the upfront cost of maintenance remained high.
Wasn’t the initial first day blitz overwhelming many border-adjacent units and military bases was largely due to pwned 4g/5g infra and having those troops accurate location?
my theory is that behind the scenes the Ukraine is a proxy Warzone for nation state hackers and while the support of weapons was limited the support in countering online attacks would be rather unlimited
unfortunately among many circles, it is the opposite. More and more "zero trust" .. more logging and audit, more spot checks, more re-logins .. It is a culture clash, always-on networking has made it much worse, since security professionals have endless lists of problems they see.
> More and more "zero trust" .. more logging and audit, more spot checks, more re-logins
Shades of HIPAA. It tries to tackle security and privacy of patient data but it winds up applying large corp requirements (inappropriately) to small practices. There seems to be little distinction of who the regs are being applied to.
One upshot is that small practices have to dedicate resources to understand/audit/report/comply with requirements that don't apply to them.
ex: Extensive audits of how a practice secures local patient data that doesn't exist - because it fully resides on remote provider platforms.
If you seriously think it's possible, than you yourself should be worried a lot -- the last thing the West needs is even stronger China with its enormous industrial base and control of Siberian resources.
It’s very different than Japan. Japan is more like the US, capitalist where some companies are cozy with the government.
China is a communist state, where the state or affiliated entity is an owner or partner in significant enterprises. Many industrial commodities have national security interests.
Chinese intelligence entities have embedded engineers in a variety of sectors… a few years ago a guy got caught embedding turbine designs inside of nature photos from GE Vernova. Another recently got caught exfiltrating aviation trade secrets, including turbofan designs.
This type of intelligence and technology transfer is no doubt helpful to Comac, the PLA controlled aircraft manufacturer.
> It’s very different than Japan. Japan is more like the US, capitalist where some companies are cozy with the government.
It’s like Japan at the end of the 80s in term of economic development and the US reaction to it (but you might not have been born when people talked about the Japanese ogre) not in terms of political structure. But even then if you take a realistic look at the free market in Japan and Korea, it might not look that free actually.
> Chinese intelligence entities have embedded engineers in a variety of sectors…
Yada, yada, again same shit than with Japan at the time.
The US routinely spies on all its commercial partners to. Multiple scandals involving European companies in the last decade and let’s not talk about how it uses its stupid embargo laws to punish foreign companies it does not like.
Should we also ban the US from international commerce too or does this logic only apply to country that threaten American interests?
> The US routinely spies on all its commercial partners to.
This is completely irrelevant, as there's no evidence that the US uses its state intelligence apparatus to engage in industrial espionage, stealing secrets from private Chinese companies and feeding them to American companies. There's ample evidence that the PRC does this, and has been doing this, for decades, against many different countries (including the US and different member states of the EU).
> Should we also ban the US from international commerce too or does this logic only apply to country that threaten American interests?
This is whataboutism, part of the standard PRC influence playbook, and is obviously irrelevant to bring up (as we're not discussing some sort of moral tit-for-tat) and only meant to serve as a distraction from the PRC's very real and well-documented history of espionage and what the US (and other countries) should do about it.
> This is completely irrelevant, as there's no evidence that the US uses its state intelligence apparatus to engage in industrial espionage
Apart from recent and historical evidence to the contrary[0;1], one has to expect that every member of the G20 group is doing the same against everyone else - and has also been doing so for decades. Perhaps more importantly, you have to assume that every intelligence agency in that same group are constantly (re)compromising and extending their foothold in their peers' communications systems as much as they can.
From a national security perspective, to refrain from doing so would be irresponsible. That said...
> There's ample evidence that the PRC does this, and has been doing this, for decades
This is also true. The approach taken by China was brutally effective: in order to allow foreign investment into China, the investor company had to accept terms that started with Technology Transfer programs.[2;3] For a Western company, ongoing access to relatively cheap and educated labour, in addition to a market of a billion+ potential customers, the short term tradeoffs were each seen individually profitable enough to compromise on their longer term sustainability. After all, it made the graphs go up.
The technologies that the companies chose to keep out of China were then the juicier, self-selected targets for pure industrial espionage.
The way I see it, we're slightly more than a decade away from reintroduction of internment camps. One of the G20 players is going to overstep the invisible boundaries, in a game where the rules are constantly rewritten. The result will be an inevitable knee-jerk reaction, propped up by the already visibly rising nationalistic and xenophobic fervour.
We are entering the age of the next round of the Great Game, this one fit for the 21s century, for the control of all six continents.[4]
Your first citation [0] does not actually provide evidence for the claim that the US government is engaging in IP theft and passing that IP to US companies - spying on a defense minister (even though it's something that shouldn't happen given that the US and France are allies) is categorically different, and is something that you would expect countries to do (even if be disappointed at them) for defense and strategic purposes only, without any IP theft. You'd need additional evidence to indicate IP theft.
Your second citation [1] links to no sources and makes the massive error that the NSA is a department of the CIA. I don't think that it's trustworthy, although I can look up the story later and if I find other sources we can see if it's plausible.
> Perhaps more importantly, you have to assume that every intelligence agency in that same group are constantly (re)compromising and extending their foothold in their peers' communications systems as much as they can.
Yes, I think this is a reasonable assumption - I'm not saying that it's right, but it's reasonable. However, that's still categorically different from the IP theft being discussed, in the context of being able to trust your knowledge workforce and having good cyber security.
Thanks for the analogy to the Great Game, this is interesting!
Intentional deception. CIA meddling with another state's economics is completely separate from them stealing IP and you know it.
> contracts somehow leaking and trade secrets being stolen
You have provided precisely zero evidence for the claim that the US government is using their powers to steal IP from other countries' companies and giving it to US companies, and you've already intentionally tried to receive readers by bringing up something irrelevant, so it's highly likely that you are fabricating claims.
> Also how is it irrelevant to a discussion about China being unreliable because they practice corporate spying? It’s not whataboutism.
The discussion is whether other countries have to guard against China stealing their IP. Discussion of whether non-China counties engage in the same behavior is completely irrelevant, and bringing it up is literally textbook whataboutism, because when discussing this matter, you literally are saying "what about <other country>" when that country isn't the subject of discussion.
And to be absolutely clear: it should be obvious, but I am not stating that CIA intervening in other counties' economies isn't bad - just that it is objectively difficult than IP theft of the kind the PRC engages in.
You've still provided zero evidence for this claim.
>> The discussion is whether other countries have to guard against China stealing their IP.
> It’s not whataboutism to point that the US is charging China with something it has been doing itself for a long time.
That is literal textbook whataboutism - we are talking about China taking stuff from the US and you are saying "what about the US taking from other countries?"
You still haven't read the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism) which says " Whataboutism or whataboutery (as in "what about ...?") is a pejorative for the strategy of responding to an accusation with a counter-accusation instead of a defense against the original accusation." and that's exactly what you're doing, responding to the claim ("accusation") that China steals IP from the US by counter-accusing the US of doing the same. It doesn't matter whether it's true - it's still whataboutism.
> It shows that the core discussion has actually nothing to do with IP. It’s all about the US feeling its allegedly hegemonic position being threatened.
This is attempted manipulation of the discourse. The comment you originally responded to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42541481) was about the technical challenge of the US trying to prevent its IP from leaking to the PRC. Yes, that actually has "everything to do with IP".
You're trying to change the topic entirely to something irrelevant, which is claiming that the US's "allegedly hegemonic position being threatened".
I cited two well documented situations where the PRC paid Chinese expats to steal specific materials to help PLA owned firms develop specific products.
Show me something other than whataboutism and double talk.
Snowden's words are meaningless - he didn't even read the majority of the documents he himself leaked, he just grabbed everything that wasn't bolted down - and saying that the US monitors other countries' companies is also completely different from the IP theft being discussed. Monitoring other countries' companies happens routinely for intelligence purposes and does not connote IP theft.
So, once again, you have provided zero evidence for your claim.
> I’m always shocked by the average American level of ignorance about what the US does…
In addition to being condescending, breaking the HN guidelines, and engaging in emotional manipulation, you are also being highly ironic by displaying your own ignorance while sneering at others.
> So much for whataboutism.
I already explained to you how you're engaging in whataboutism:
> The discussion is whether other countries have to guard against China stealing their IP. Discussion of whether non-China counties engage in the same behavior is completely irrelevant, and bringing it up is literally textbook whataboutism, because when discussing this matter, you literally are saying "what about <other country>" when that country isn't the subject of discussion.
This applies regardless if the claim about what the US is doing is true, which in this case it isn't.
It’s clear at that point that you are just going to refuse any sources. I haven’t provided zero evidence you are discarding my evidence (which includes a report from the EU by the way).
If you fail to see how knowing if the US is engaging in IP theft is relevant to a discussion about US-lead effort to isolate China motivated by IP theft from them, I don’t think I can do anything for you. It is not whataboutism. It’s the heart of the issue.
The core issue is that the US is becoming protectionist to try to protect its threatened position and trying to drag other countries in its madness. IP theft is merely an excuse.
You broke the site guidelines so badly in this thread that I've banned the account. I don't want to ban you, but you've been crossing the line frequently and badly:
Long ago I worked at a company that had equipment sold to a US military contractor and we had to send someone onsite to fix it.
You were instructed that anything you had in your vehicle when you got to the gate (in the middle of nowhere) might be confiscated. Show up with the rental car, keys, ID, and necessary equipment only. Nothing but you and your clothing would leave the site, yes it cost a laptop each visit (that we sent ahead). ID, car and keys stayed at the gate.
Blindfolded while onsite until you got to the equipment, someone would take you to the bathroom.
It was a lot, but I suspect some form of “all electronics dropped here” should be the SOP in a lot of places.
It kinda horrifies me when I hear about congressional members upset about not being able to take their phones to some meetings and so on.
How does it work in US, you just look at the guy and then he sends you his IBAN?
Aren’t companies required to establish an employee’s origin by bureaucratic means? IDs, SSNs, notarized copies, work permit, etc? Why are North Korean guys even a problem, it feels like they shouldn’t be able to fake identification numbers and permits, unless something is fundamentally wrong with the country’s accounting.
Experian was hacked and 168 million Americans had all of lives information stolen - the data that is supposed to verify who I am and tracks all of my financial life, everywhere I've ever lived and of course my social security number.
Not one thing to fix this was done. Anyone could buy my information and be me, NOTHING was done to fix this insanely huge problem.
But they can’t fake notarization, can they? What I’m getting from your comment is that they can send a screenshot of your id and that’s enough. If so, it is indeed a problem on the employers/legislation side. Expecting your numbers to not leak was a bad plan from the beginning. You should be able to publish these without any serious consequences for anyone involved (apart from deanonymization-related issues basically).
I’m also heavily “leaked”, but nobody can do anything with my numbers without actual counterfeiting. I could share my ids here if not for pseudonymity. The fact that your identity can be legally hired into a company without your proven id hard copies, that’s the root of the problem, imo.
It’s pretty trivial to commit a variety of frauds against you, and moderate difficult to get valid ID impersonating you. I worked with a non-federal US government entity that employed many investigators who spent 80% of their time looking into what you’re talking about. With the exception of simple frauds addressed with facial recognition (usually people impersonating dead or disabled relatives to avoid consequences of DWI or divorce), they felt that they weren’t scratching the surface.
The US is plagued by stupid right wing people who think that ID is satanic, and stupid left wing people who think that ID by nature will marginalize poor people. Because we’ve allowed the federal government to outsource ID to the states, the US is stuck with inadequate identity framework for a long time.
In my experience, National Security tends to mean the security of (primarily) the US Gov and (secondarily) Gov contractors and major campaign donors. National Security applies to individuals when justification is needed to deploy systems that surveil Americans (not suspected of a crime).
> For a long time the U.S. military resisted the use of PALs. It feared the loss of its own independence, and it feared malfunction, which could put warheads out of action in a time of crisis.
Indeed there is such a thing, it's the I-9 document check and is required for all new employees.
The problem is that identity theft is so ridiculously easily in the US that it's trivial for bad actors to just steal someone's identity. The solution is to fix identity theft.
This starts with the framing. One does not have their identity stolen. The counterparty is instead defrauded into believing something that is not true - and the problem must be made entirely theirs.
It’s mad. Criminal A defrauds company B by pretending to be some rando C. And somehow this ends up being C’s problem, and we just accept this as normal.
What? Every US account I have can receive international transactions via an IBAN number. They just aren't used for domestic transactions - this is the same in the UK (where a sort code is used in place of a routing code, but has exactly the same purpose).
They use Swift BIC and an account number at the branch because that’s already there and there is one thing American banks hate even more than communism it’s change and having to spend any kind of money to modernise.
Doesn't this result in more over the shoulder opportunities by insider threat actors (i.e. spies) in conventional open office settings? Unclear how this meshes with outsourcing also.
I think anybody (especially a private employer, but really anyone) hiring somebody from an adversary country who thinks they can conduct an effective background investigation is fooling themselves. There's not really any avenue of investigation (other than vetting via your native intelligence service) that doesn't lead back to the foreign government, or an agency they control.
...some ultra-short story fragment about AI & trust protocols so hoovering up all the resources that Usenet & text-only email make a comeback, as nothing more sophisticated functions any longer.
As a non-Chinese and a non-American, I care less about the usual geopolitical games, including spying, and more about how the Chinese government treats its own citizens. No freedom of speech or conscience, no political freedoms: just work and be an obedient small truckle in the mechanism of the Leviathan. Plus the return of the Cult of Personality, which once even the CCP tried to abandon, but ultimately failed. These are not results of American meddling, these are their own internal choices.
I don't buy the explanation that being unfree is somehow intrinsic to East Asian cultures. We have had plenty of authoritarian regimes in Europe, too, and several hundred years ago few people could call themselves personally free.
I don't want this model of governance to spread around the globe again. It has been tried before, with disastrous results. Unless we abandon the concept of universal morality completely, treating your own people as disposable serfs is wrong.
While I don't like the lack of freedoms in China, the Chinese government has done an amazing job lifting it's people out of poverty. I am not Chinese but I think most people around the world would gladly take that over being poor (most western people do not know how bad and undignified life in poverty can be)
The same government has the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution on its conscience, two initiatives that caused a lot of poverty and destruction for its citizens.
This is the inherent risk of all authoritarian regimes: if the top boss goes crazy and demands, say, that you all start to kill sparrows, there is no way to stop him or remove him from power. No division of powers.
The very same mechanism caused the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Have you actually ever been to China or spoken with any Chinese people in China? (Not expats, but, say, taxi drivers and businessmen.)
Frankly, they're practically as free as Americans and Europeans. In some respects they're more free. There's far less violent crime and property crime, too, so living in the city feels more free in ways which should be obvious -- women can walk around alone at night and not fear for their own safety. Imagine walking around Memphis at midnight, alone and unarmed, or parts of London... even as a man, it would be very ill-advised.
China's business culture, also, is very explicitly laissez-faire, competition between firms is brutal, and there's less red tape than you'd get in Europe.
They do a lot of things right.
> treating your own people as disposable serfs
How do you mean? How is the average Shanghai banker any more or less of a serf than a banker in Frankfurt or Indianapolis? Democracy?
The crime aspect is always an interesting talking point. I see it a lot with folks saying things like "when I visited the US i had to wear my backpack backwards to avoid thieves". (a line like that got reposed several times on HN and reddit for a while, it was almost a meme at one point).
Living in the US, I never do that ... not worried about thieves. Somehow not robbed.
People see some articles or movies and they just assume every negative thing is an enormous / constant threat I think.
Is Memphis representative of the Western civilization? I have never been to Memphis, but I just returned from Warsaw, Poland. (I wrote my previous comment literally on IC Sobieski.) It is very safe at night, even if you are alone and unarmed. So is Prague, where I lived for 26 years.
The average banker anywhere isn't likely a serf, but the average banker is not an average citizen.
An average citizen in China was, for example, subject to three years of Zero Covid policy gone wild. AFAIK it took some street unrest, very untypical for China, for the government to reconsider.
For all their faults, Western governments didn't stick to three years of nonsense during Covid. The people who would got voted out, because they could be voted out.
> The average banker anywhere isn't likely a serf, but the average banker is not an average citizen.
A banker is like any other professional. But we can go one step down: Is the average taxi driver more of a "disposable serf" in China than the West?
And consider your use of the word "disposable." If you travel to China and defraud Chinese citizens, they will throw the book at you. If you travel to China and murder a Chinese citizen, they will execute you, and quickly. I've personally been involved in a civil (commercial) legal case in China, and I walked away extremely impressed with the speed, low cost, and the fairness of their legal system, whereas the system in the West seemed almost completely broken to me. (That civil case in China cost less than $10k, start to finish, including trial. In US Federal Court, $300k+ before we even got to trial, thanks in large part to "discovery" and pretrial motions which were -- accurately -- deemed unnecessary in China. Ran out of money before trial and had to settle, lol.) Chinese people enjoy extremely robust legal protections. Their own government evidently doesn't consider them disposable; quite the contrary, it signals that they're not to be trifled with.
If you travel to Finland and murder a Finn, you'll probably get a statistically average sentence of 12 years.
In which country is the innocent life of its citizens more "disposable"? Are China's "disposable serfs" not afforded obviously better protection from evil and harm?
Look, my point is that the Chinese do an awful lot right. In the administration of law, commerce, industry, etc., we should look at them and realize that we in the West have a lot that we can still learn. It's not all bad.
As for Covid, that's a very particular matter and the US/EU/UK/Canada/Australia didn't exactly cover themselves in glory.
Memphis had 63.9 homicides per 100,000 people in 2023.
I don't have stats for individual Chinese cities, but China's rate is 0.46 per 100,000 people. In China, it's plausible that the cities are safer than the countryside, and I don't think that Beijing's number is substantially higher than the national average.
Basically, you are 139x more likely to be murdered in Memphis.
Factor out the domestic violence, bar fights, and gang activity, and how many of these are random people minding their own business that happen to get shot for walking around at midnight? Probably zero I'm guessing.
It’s comical that you are comparing Memphis to China. But lets take this even further and increase our sample set from just Jan 2023 - Dec 2023, to Jan 1923 - Dec 2023, this is more indicative of the downsides of authoritarianism, and clearly shows Memphis as less homicidal than China.
> more indicative of the downsides of authoritarianism
Look at the trends and think about what you're saying. What you're calling "authoritarianism" (very vaguely defined) has brought order from chaos. I don't know if there's a single large American city that is now safer than Beijing. Sure, things were different in 1960. "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
That Chinese cities are safer is obviously true. That there's tremendous small-firm competition and a more or less hands-off attitude towards private business is also true, which people who buy anything from China or speak with Chinese business partners quickly come to realize.
Frankly, I'm not even convinced that the average Chinese person has less say in his or her Government than the average American or (especially) European.
> I don't buy the explanation that being unfree is somehow intrinsic to East Asian cultures.
You have the obvious examples of Taiwan and (formerly) Hong Kong - actual Chinese political entities, free and democratic and strongly embraced by the people there, and much more prosperous than Communist-controlled China. Also, Japan, South Korea, ...
> No freedom of speech or conscience, no political freedoms: just work and be an obedient
There is significantly more politics involved in how the CPP is run than you think and people complain more than you seem to believe. It’s far from an open democracy but it’s not North Korea either.
This is not standard operating procedure worldwide, in part because there aren't that many countries folks are trying to flee to:
> America granted him asylum and he settled in New York, becoming the leader of Chinese pro-democracy groups. But in August 2024 he was arrested by the FBI. He admits to having used his position to collect information for the Chinese government and to report on his fellow activists. He did this so that the government would allow him to return to China to see his ailing parents.
Do you have an example of a western government only letting someone come home to visit ailing parents in exchange for spying on their countrymen in a foreign nation?
I’m sure it happens just because there are lots of people. But I’m having a hard time coming up with a western nation that has a significant political dissident diaspora. I’d guess that the war on terror might generate one somewhere?
The FBI targeted an Canadian scientist of Chinese origin and his family members because he declined to spy on China for them.[0,1]
After he declined to spy on China, the FBI accused him of being a Chinese spy. The accusations turned out to be completely spurious, and the FBI agent involved was found to have knowingly spread lies about the scientist. But before his name was cleared, he was fired by his university, and the FBI made all sorts of public declarations that he was a spy.
Do you have any numbers that would verify that? Or even any other statement on that issue? Pretty sure determining the "scale" of any kind of intelligence activity is unbelievably murky, as you might be able to imagine.
Nice a Wikipedia article. Where can I find any indication of comparative scale compared to any other nation, like I asked?
Just going by a blind guess and knowledge of the world, I guess it's pretty much correlated with economy and geopolitical dominance, so I'd expect America to be number one simply as a result of it's wealth and strategic dominance in the last century, and then China somewhere around the level of the rest of NATO or Russia or something (though I'm sure rapidly rising, which would explain the growing anxiety of the corporate mouthpieces in The Economist).
In a nutshell, it has a unique structure, a wider mandate, and operates a bit differently than your typical intelligence service - especially domestically.
"One of the largest and most secretive intelligence organizations in the world, it maintains powerful branches at the provincial, city, municipality and township levels throughout China."
>operates a bit differently than your typical intelligence service - especially domestically
Fair enough.
But as wild speculation with no real insight, I'd guess that such a large mass organizational structure probably also precludes the same rigid centralization and advanced capabilities of other intelligence agencies i.e. it probably operates more as a snitching hotline to gather less specific intel on a wider range of people with less ability to perform any actionable espionage type operations, instead of a horde of spies illegally infiltrating every western government, university, and business.
What else is new? This was already well known among grad students in the late 90s. We even knew there was some kind of hierarchy, with one of the student acting as «political officer».
China can coerce it's diaspora through their family ties and social circle back home[1]. That isn't normal and is very difficult to pull off in democratic countries.
There are sufficient “loopholes” that would allow Western democracies to do this. The only difference is that China is forthright about what it does & is willing to do.
Look at the Assange fiasco for example, or Guantanamo Bay, or the use of rendition to allied states by the CIA, or sitting in on torture conducted by allies (recently in Yemen), etc.
Not to mention the complete disregard of international law when it comes to Israel, and in the same, hypocritical breath, repeatedly insisting that the Russians must follow international law (which they should).
Unequivocally supporting and providing complete material support for a country that has been accused (or investigated for) of genocide by credible sources (MSF, ICJ) comes pretty close. Especially when most of the bombs used for said genocide were provided willingly by the US, knowing that it will be used to level a city to the ground.
Not really, for most countries this kind of intelligence gathering is really expensive with low ROI and so not worth it. (Edit: word order for clarity.)
The typical country is closer to Cambodia or Honduras not a world power. China can leverage it, but most countries aren’t China.
Intelligence is only worth what you can leverage it for. Knowing a stock is going up tomorrow by 5% isn’t worth much for most people, but it’s worth a far more to someone who can toss 100m into it.
America has a vast economy, huge military R&D spending, massive foreign entanglements etc, and it’s arguable if the CIA is worth its budget. I’m not arguing it should be defunded, but there’s been significant debate even within the intelligence community around the topic for a bunch of different reasons.
Scale that down to a developing country with 10 million people and human intelligence gathering within foreign countries is almost guaranteed to be a waste of time and money.
Cuba's dictatorship does the same blackmailing its immigrants in U.S to spy for them, and using immigration waves to insert hundreds of its "agents" into the country.
There should be a substantial CIA effort to recruit at every US university with more than 2 Chinese nationals. Student loans forgiven and green cards for the family.
The idea is good, but will probably only really work for students with weak family ties back to the PRC, which will be pretty rare. For those with loved ones in the PRC, there is ample documentation that the CCP will threaten their families to get them to come back (one of the techniques used in Operation Fox Hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fox_Hunt). Arranging for a "family vacation" to the US that turns into permanent residence will only work a few times before the CCP catches on.
Why is this downvoted? The comment sounds plausible.
The Chinese mob (wink wink) has the biggest money laundering operation in the world. They have brokers who pick up (source) and deliver (destination) the cash. They do all the currency conversion. And then have an internal market to auction the conversions. All over Chinese government controlled networks like WeChat. Very clever.
The Triads have been doing this kind of dark market money transfers for decades (it's mentioned in the book Mr Nice like it was old news in the 80s). I've met Chinese people who use it to send/receive from family and investors in mainland China. I've met agents who investigate the networks of companies Chinese mobsters make to cover up their tracks.
You're right, but also lumping every rich Chinese into a "part of a mob" is kinda funny. We talk about how we've outsources a buttloads of manufacturing to China, how they're making a killing out of their industrial policies and etc. Obviously there will be millions of people in China who are rich through their businesses. Just like in the states.
Dirty money will always exist, and currently exists in every single country. But in the past 20 years, there have been a rise in the amount of rich Chinese. Just like rich Japanese of 80s through their RE investments and etc.
You cannot as a private person legally move more than about 100K USD out of mainland CN per year. You have to resort to criminal elements. Only they have the network. It's one of those things everyone does but lives in fear of being used against them by an enemy down the line.
I mean, 50K/year limit is pretty trivial to overcome. Those controls exist in a lot of countries, and anyone who has a decent amount of money is aware of ways of getting around it legally.
It's a side effect of the currency controls Xi put in place in 2017-18.
Around that time, the Xi admin began limiting the amount of currency outflow from a single household to around $50-100k a year. That isn't enough for international tuition in most cases in the US, or moving abroad.
As such, anyone who wanted to move or pay tuition in the US began leveraging shadow banks.
It doesn't apply if you do direct bank to bank transfer to university, no? IIRC $50K limit per person is put on RMB <-> USD conversion, and that's is usually enough for yearly living expenses. I might be wrong, but that's how it was explained to me by my Chinese colleagues back in the day.
From what I heard from friends, a lot of programs didn't support bank-to-bank transfers with Chinese banks, and a lot of family money was grey (not necessarily due to corruption, but due to the nature of business in China, which changed rapidly in just 30 years).
There were much less invasive ways to nudge businesses to convert black/grey money into white money but the method the Xi admin began enforcing in the 17-18 period also helped with solidifying control.
Kinda sad tbh because a lot of these reforms are needed, but they became politicized.
About twenty-five years ago, two Chinese students at my university were killed for seemingly no reason. Whoever killed them didn't steal anything. They hadn't been in any known conflicts with others in the community. It seemed completely random. But it wasn't. Turned out the husband was the son of the governor of some rural province in China. The father got into some kind of conflict with rivals, so they sent someone to the US to murder his son and daughter-in-law to send him a message. They were in the US under aliases but that didn't protect them, neither did being on the other side of the planet in a small, rural college town.
If China wants to reach out and make an example of students in the US who turn their back on their homeland, they can do so very easily and in a manner that both has plausible deniability and sends a clear message to other students. We're an open society and it's impossible to protect everyone from other nation-states if they see an individual as a threat to the nation-state's interests.
can you link any source about this happening? seems like it would be high-profile and documented but can't find any reference to this event so i kinda think you made it up if i'm being honest
Amazing how this site's comments have been decaying in quality since a few years now. Obvious propaganda article, from a media that doesn't even try to hide that it's mainly a propaganda media, is commented on seriously without any kind of reality filter, and it gets to the top comments...
I've been using HN long enough to know this kind of comment has been repeated since the old days. It's just a weird ad-hominin comment people make when they aren't used to disagreeing with the majority.
The only thing you ever say is baseless criticisms of the intellectual prowess of HN and the media. Either justify these criticisms, accept we are the way we are, or leave.
India is nowhere near being a superpower that could challenge the US so I think the threat is not the same. Plus Indian society is a bit more open and free than Chinese so lots of people told to spy can easily come out.
The superpower aspect is true. Otherwise, India is very friendly with Russia. But we (i.e. big capital) want their H1B labor and outsourcing, so the narrative isn't there yet and many tech companies are headed by Indian CEOs.
I'm exaggerating the above, but until recently China wasn't deemed to be a problem either, so the narrative does seem to play a role.
> until recently China wasn't deemed to be a problem either
What changed is Xi Jinping became president. Until then China was considered a good citizen of the world. Xi Jinping started attacking neighbors, claimed ownership of south china sea, and so on, and this aggressive behavior damaged China's reputation.
I think there's a more important part that we might be overlooking - China is going forward with "play to win" strategy, rather than "play to exist". In the past couple of years, you can see how in North America we've started pushing "we have to win by all means" idea. For the first time, since 80s (when Japan was going to overtake USA), we have a real competitor now. And that competitor has been able to push through policies and prove that they can overcome hardships. They have a big demographics problem, but it's not going to hurt them for the next decade+. Still a long way to go, especially if you consider random statistics like there are 200M gig workers.
Basically, USA is scared that a political ideology that's not compatible with the western standards can become the most successful one that lifts its citizens. It will never be liked by any of the governments, because locals will be able to point towards China and say "well, why do they have it better?!".
How does this work? How would you even trust China to not just throw you in jail?
I guess the US government figured it out because he went to China and then came back and they’re like oh yeah that makes no fucking sense
Or for the conspiracy minded, they ‘let him’ escape to Taiwan and told him to go set up a pro democracy org in the states and this aling parents thing is all just cover
There is a lot wrong with the US, and I (not American BTW) will criticise it quite freely and frequently BUT comparing the US to China is just ridiculous.
What the US does can be criticised by its citizens, and protested. People can be punished. Wrongdoing can be exposed. Plenty of people in the US criticise the invasion of Iraq. I doubt many Chinese will find it safe to criticise the occupation of Tibet.
Democracies can and do bad stuff, but internal opposition and accountability limit it, and often but an end to it.
> What the US does can be criticised by its citizens, and protested. People can be punished. Wrongdoing can be exposed. Plenty of people in the US criticise the invasion of Iraq.
You won't be protesting in the U.S. without significant risks to your economic and social status. BTW - The Iraq war was several wars ago, and most of the people chatting here weren't even born for the first Iraq war.
2017 became the year the censors and suspensions of anti-social media started. Now with A.I. mods owned by an entitled parasitic elite, we get a highly censored world were your only recourse is offline, often in solitude.
If you care to test your theory, that you can criticise who you like in the U.S., I suggest you protest Israel, loudly and often.
> If you care to test your theory, that you can criticise who you like in the U.S., I suggest you protest Israel, loudly and often.
People do, and are.
Go to China and protest about Tiananmen Square. You'll be picked up, and put away in minutes, no due process, no independent court, nothing. Who knows what happens to you, or when you get out.
yes the US has better rule of law and is an actual democracy, for sure. but China does not seem to be so bad by the standards that we hold our own allies to, so to me it is unclear why we have become locked into this neo cold war so quickly. some of our allies make china look like a saint in comparison
Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Thailand, Vietnam. That's not counting those relations that aren't close nor adversarial.
The only authoritarian regimes not allied, nor neutral, with the US are Cuba, Iran, NK, Russia and Venezuela.
It's not present day but let's not forget the series of military genocidal dictarships supported, founded and allied by the US in south america in the second half of 20th century.
the demise of China’s rule by committee has been vastly overstated in the West imo.
i wonder about this ‘dictatorship inevitably goes to war’ - a glance at WW2 and you could be forgiven for concluding the exact opposite re: the Iberian peninsula
The americans had their own justifications for those actions that were supporter by a coalition of nations, and none of that was to conquer territory. China on the other hand is flatly trying to conquer territory and limit the freedoms of the people who live there afterwards. They are, in fact, the bad guys here.
It's about keeping western capital interests in line, stopping developing nations from nationalizing key resources etc. Bolivia is a good example of a country that has persisted against it.
That is the US role in the world - we are the Hegemon, it is what we must do to remain the Hegemon. China wants to be the Hegemon but they can't get there as long as we are.
China wants to change the entire ordering of the world - that is a much bigger deal than the US invading Iraq or Afghanistan.
The US government is a meandering blob of racoons in a trenchcoat. Occasionally a hand will _do_ evil but even odds whether they realize it or meant it. Partially depends on which particular raccoon is where. Some of the racoons are evil.
China is actively directed by a small group of well coordinated, evil raccoons. See, you know, the constant genocide.
The US Government has done incredibly stupid and catastrophically foolish and harmful things - being hoodwinked into Vietnam by the French, for example - but the Government is not inherently, actually evil, in any way, shape or form.
In all things, there are factors which encourage, and factors which discourage, and in the end, you get what you get.
The French worked as hard as possible to get American military support in Vietnam so they could remain the colonial power. They did a very good job of it.
It was all an appalling tragedy. All the Vietnamese wanted was independence, and in particular from the appalling misrule of the French.
> China has been engaged in a massive military build-up for many years now - and there is on the face of it no reason for that at all, because China is threatened by precisely no-one.
Do you realize the US is in the same position? The US has no credible threats to its territory anywhere. However it has the most massive military in the world and it is spread to every single continent. I would suggest that's exactly the reason why the Chinese have a need for a military.
It's logistically impossible for the USA to invade China.
The USA spends a few percent on its military, something more than say the EU, but the reason the military is so large is because the economy is so large. When we say the USA has the largest army, we're really saying the USA has the largest economy.
The Chinese economy is now comparable to the US economy, by dint of their being about three times as many people, but we're looking now at a massive military build up along with intensely threatening behaviour toward Taiwan. Do we forget the repeated massive military exercises to chastise "separative elemnts" in Taiwan, every time a senior US politician visits? do we forget the events in Hong Kong? the ongoing suppression of Tiananmen Square? and of the Uyghurs?
There are two as it happens - the other one is Eastern Russia - ethnically asian, although not Han. Notice how Putin is always present for the pacific exercises, even when one might think he had better ways to spend his time on the western front.
Just curious, do you apply this same logic to US government and history? What kind of evils get prescribed to the so called democratic land of the free?
you think it's a total non sequitur but im just asking what i think is a simple question: whether that logic is applied fairly and accurately within the context of being a world superpower. otherwise you just end up potentially looking like a hardline racist parrot to some readers.
Do I also need to include disclaimers about Russia, North Korea, Iran, etc, being bad anytime I criticize China as well? Or are they exempt for some reason? Are you following your own advice, to criticize fairly and accurately across the board?
I don't apply the same logic to any country's history. It wouldn't make sense to hold modern China accountable for the Qing, or the civil war, or the Cultural Revolution. Like the original commenter, my biggest concern by far with the Chinese government is their repeated public statements that they plan to violently conquer a neighboring country and integrate it into their own. The US has undertaken a lot of military adventures I don't agree with in the past few decades, but annexation is a red line that almost every country in the world agrees to and respects.
The CCP can certainly be held accountable for the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. They're truly Mao's heirs, and whereas some previous leaders left Mao's path, Xi is firmly back on track.
I agree that China should be regarded as a particularly problematic country, but I would like the US to have a more comprehensive and introspective attitude. The US can stop the mutual bullying and take the high ground. That doesn't change the facts about China, but shifts in foreign policy and/or PR can at least give the US a better grounds as the primary opposing actor to China, if not incentivize China to change too.
I don't agree that a comprehensive attitude is appropriate. I have plenty of criticisms of US foreign policy, but China's plans for Taiwan are absolutely incomparable to any of them. There's quite a lot of diplomatic compromises that I think the US ought to make if they would secure Taiwanese independence, but right now the Chinese government are themselves completely unwilling to introspect or take a comprehensive attitude about it.
Yeah I also share this experience, pretty much every Chinese person I know will not hesitate to stress how much discrimination has affected everything about their lives abroad, especially education and careers.
Its worth noting how little attention comparable "activities" from "good" countries like Israel or Saudi Arabia get, even when they're turning journalists into barbecue in foreign embassies, illegally installing spyware, backdoors, or even booby-traps on commercial products, or sending money to violent street mobs and mass media campaigns alike to oppose domestic civil protest against their own war crimes against civilians.
Of course I probably don't need to mention when western nations do the same or worse to the "bad" guys.
It's a problem of their own making. While it's not true that 100% of Chinese nationals are involved in spying, it's correct to think there's a highly likelihood of someone coming from there to be involved. If you don't want to be treated like habitual spies and thiefs then maybe don't engage in spying and thievery habitually and the problem is easily solved.
Uhh, none of my friends are spies as far as I'm aware? Or close friends with Xi Jinping, or thieves (!?)... What did they do to deserve being blacklisted from jobs in their industry?
Side note, surely you understand how indefensible it is to say "well maybe not 100% of this nationality is bad, but if they didn't want a hard time then the heads of their undemocratic state shouldn't be doing such and such"? Would it be ok if I denied you jobs and called you a thief for the wrongs your government likely has done? (a government which you're also far more likely to be responsible for)
Except, there were communist infiltration plans in the 1950s. The same as theres coordinated russian plans supporting conservative nationalists.
If you want rational protectionism, America would need to stop treating businesses as the unit of concern and enact stronger worker privacy and consumer protections.
The same way CIA backdoors are intrinsic unsafe, so are lax employee and consumer protections.
If any actual communist spies were rooted out by McCarthyism it was entirely coincidental, given that the actual purpose of McCarthyism was to oppress and blacklist undesirables like Jews and homosexuals and further Joe McCarthy's own political aspirations by collecting compromat on people. The definition of "communist" in those times was very loose.
Just like how QAnon is obsessed with satanic pedophile rings that don't really exist, despite the existence of pedophile rings being real, because they don't actually care about child abuse as much as accelerating mistrust of and harassment against the LGBTQ community by implying any non-heterosexual identity is equivalent to pedophilia. A stopped clock is still right twice a day.
If it's rational to mistrust foreigners because they might be spies, history suggests it's just as rational to mistrust the motives of people who spread fear and uncertainty about nefarious enemies within. Americans have far more to fear from their own government's attempts to grasp for power than they do from Chinese spies.
This bc we now realize that China is screwed in the future - the Chinese population will be well under a billion people by 2100 - long before then the only thing their society will be able to do is deal with the problems that come from dropping 500 million people.
This is all bc of the 1 Child policy and it cannot be easily fixed - if it can be fixed at all.
China can only take Taiwan with the Millennials or Gen Z generations - Xi Jinping knows this and wants Taiwan to be part of his legacy.
Now is the best time to do this if they are ever going to. I've long been saying that it Trump is reelected that they will invade that January he takes office.
I hope you are wrong, but the Russian invasion of the Ukraine might support your view.
Russians have a terrible low fertility, integrating the Ukraine into Russia might have been a last shot at staying the ethnic majority in the country.
Update:
Ih had stetes wrong numbers of the composition of the Russian population before, claiming that only 40 million of russias inhabitants were ethnic Russians.
Reverse Trump Derangement Syndrome? Why would that apply here? Pelosi's visit did kick off the whole process. The information is based on the U.S. liberal press and not Breitbart.
Biden at the time said she went on her own. Given everything that has happened since, it is not unreasonable to assume that she had more establishment support.
If you call that a "conspiracy theory": No it is just a theory. Citizens and journalists never get full information and are therefore forced to speculate. If they didn't do that, democracies would collapse.
Many other countries would help people with opportunistic industrial espionage so there is a distinct advantage to proactively working with their spy agencies. This is not the case in the West, there is still industrial espionage but it's established and not opportunistic so far fewer people are involved.
Don't most countries do this? I am pretty sure the US has lots of spies everywhere and they spy on allies (famously on Angela Merkel's phone) and enemies. Israel spies on other countries including the US. Does China do anything differently?
I’ve been in a meeting where the Chinese professor in USA on a joint country course sends many of their students to a technology conference and I’m not sure how, but most of his students who attended the conference somehow decided to write their reports on US military uses of technology instead of what Facebook or Google demoed. This meeting had students attend from both China and USA.
I’m sure he has plausible deniability, but I left that meeting thinking wow that professor is really a spy. This was before the pandemic.
There's no mandatory spying expected if the position is funded privately or by the host institution.
I expect that the spying is just limited to their fellow state funded students although I have heard of significant tension between mainland and Hong Kong students about this. I don't know if Hong Kong students have to spy.