The growing threat from China

To understand the threat that China poses, one really does need to get some feel for what it is, why it is, and how deep and broad it is. Former director of operations and intelligence at Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Nigel Inkster, writes in a New York Times opinion piece:

China Is Running Covert Operations That Could Seriously Overwhelm Us

The culture of the Chinese Communist Party has always had a clandestine nature. But as the party has become an even more dominant force in China since President Xi Jinping took power a decade ago, this has metastasized in state institutions. China can best be described as an intelligence state. The party views the business of acquiring and protecting secrets as an all-of-nation undertaking, to the point that rewards are offered to citizens for identifying possible spies and even schoolchildren are taught to recognize threats.

The West cannot fight fire with fire. Mobilizing government, society and economic and academic systems around competition with foreign foes the way China does would betray Western values. But leaders of democracies need to internalize the sea change that has taken place in China and ensure that engagement with Beijing is tempered by a hardheaded sense of reality.

The last state intelligence threat of comparable magnitude was posed by the Soviets. But the Soviet Union was isolated and impoverished. China’s successful economy, on the other hand, is a key engine of global growth, vastly increasing Beijing’s reach.

Barely visible on the world stage 30 years ago, China’s intelligence agencies are now powerful and well resourced. They are adept at exploiting the vulnerabilities of open societies and growing dependence on China’s economy to collect vast volumes of intelligence and data. Much of this takes place in the cyber domain, such as the 2015 hack of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, in which sensitive data on millions of federal employees was stolen. Chinese intelligence operatives also are present in state-owned enterprises, state media organizations and embassies and consulates. China’s consulate in Houston was closed by the Trump administration in 2020 after it served as a national hub for collecting high-tech intelligence.

But Chinese covert operations don’t stop there.

China’s Intelligence Law, which was enacted in 2017, required its citizens to assist intelligence agencies. But this legislation simply formalized a situation that had already been the norm. The wider China challenge comes from organizations and actors engaged in activities that may not conform to normal concepts of espionage. 

Much of this is organized by the United Front Work Department, a party organization that seeks to co-opt well-placed members of Chinese diaspora communities — and whose scope has been expanded under Mr. Xi. China also endeavors to entice other Western citizens. A textbook case, exposed this year, involved a British politician whose office received substantial funding from an ethnic Chinese lawyer who thereby gained access to the British political establishment. One Chinese approach is to patiently cultivate relationships with politicians at the city or community level who show potential to rise to even higher office. Another is known as elite capture, in which influential Western corporate or government figures are offered lucrative sinecures or business opportunities in return for advocating policies that jibe with Chinese interests.

For China, this work is about survival. Technology and business intelligence must be acquired to keep China’s economy growing fast enough to prevent social instability. Mr. Xi has stressed the need to adopt “asymmetrical” means to catch up to the West technologically.

China may be ahead of the game now, but there are tools that Western intelligence and security agencies can bring into play, including providing staff members with the requisite language skills and an awareness of China and the workings of the Chinese Communist Party. But they need help.

Liberal democracies cannot just play defense; political leaders must champion greater investment in offensive intelligence collection capabilities and outreach programs that educate businesses, political organizations and other potential targets about their vulnerabilities. Systems also are needed to assess the national security implications of what otherwise might just seem normal commercial activities by Chinese companies or non-Chinese entities acting as fronts for Beijing.

Western policymakers and intelligence services must innovate and adapt. But they also must ensure that strategies they employ honor the ideals of freedom, openness and lawfulness that pose the greatest threat to the Chinese party-state.

Inkster’s arguments that China needs to (1) steal Western technology to keep up, and (2) subvert democracy to maintain the dictatorship, feel spot on. Western democracies and technology really do pose threats to China’s economy and dictatorship.

Given America’s broken political system and the blatant anti-democratic autocracy that dominates the Republican Party, it does not seem that the US can deal competently with the threat. American radical right multi-millionaires and billionaires fund the GOP. In return for their funding, they demand and are getting weakened civil liberties and governments less able and/or willing to defend democracy. The ex-president was completely serious when he said this in 2018 about Xi Jinping after he became dictator for life in China:

“He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.”

There you have it. The current leader of the Republican Party publicly wishing the US president had power for life. The GOP did not repudiate that, so they support it by silent complicity. That is similar to the GOP openly supporting and justifying the 1/6 coup attempt by still calling it “legitimate political discourse.”

Anyone who still believes that the Republican Party is a defender of democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties, is dead wrong on all three points. So dead wrong that their ludicrous false beliefs could kill a whole lot of us and put most of us in cruel Christian fundamentalist-capitalist authoritarian misery for the rest of our miserable lives.