China Syndrome

Okay, I admit it: even for all the blogging I've been doing over the past week or two, there are a few topics I meant to get to but let slide. And this topic most egregiously. So we'll catch up on it in round-up form.

Chinese Espionage Vaults To Top Of FBI Priorities

There aren't many of us Sinophobes, but if you're one of the few, the proud, and fear the Red "yellow" peril (and don't think of Hogan Knows Best when you see that reference), you had to be wondering how long it would be before you'd see a story like this:

The FBI is deploying hundreds of new agents across America to crack down on spying by a small army of Chinese agents who are stealing information designed
to kick-start high-tech military and business programmes.

The new counter-intelligence strategy reflects growing alarm at the damage being done by spies hidden among the 700,000 Chinese visitors entering the US each year.
"China is the biggest [espionage] threat to the US today," David Szady, the assistant director of the FBI's counter-intelligence division, told the Wall Street Journal.

Officers said the campaign to close down China's wide-ranging espionage effort was now one of the major intelligence priorities after the struggle against terrorism.

Since losing their top intelligence conduit back on January 20, 2001, it appears that the ChiComms have decided to, as you might have expected, swamp us with sheer numbers. Cap'n Ed points out from the Telegraph article that most of these spies are not "professionals" in the conventional sense, but compensate for that weakness (if you want to call it that) by their ability to disappear into Chinese emigre communities, the vast majority of whose members are legit. Add to that the far greater complexity of the Chinese language and its numerous impenetrable dialects and it makes the task of trying to track all these spooks all but impossible.

An Alarming Alliance: Sino-Russian Ties Tightening

The Butchers of Beijing are busy on a whole bunch of fronts. One equally as alarming as the above is their de facto military alliance with the Russian Federation:

T[wo] week[s ago saw] an ominous precedent: The first-ever joint Chinese-Russian military exercises [that] kick[ed] off [on August 18th] in Northeast Asia.

The exercises [we]re small in scale — but huge in implication. They indicate a further warming of the "strategic partnership" that Moscow and Beijing struck back in 1996.

More importantly, they signal the first real post-Cold War steps, beyond inflammatory rhetoric, by Russia and China to balance — and, ultimately, diminish — U.S. power across Asia. If America doesn't take strategic steps to counter these efforts, it will lose influence to Russia and China in an increasingly important part of the world.

In other words, the part of the world that we are trying to democratize in order to save our own skins from jihadi WMD terror - a phenomenon of which the ChiComms are making very shrewd and subtle use.

The aforementioned joint military exercises "only" involved about 10,000 troops, but had other ominous implications for U.S. strategic interests:

[A]lthough Russia nixed the idea, the Chinese demanded the exercises be held 500 miles to the south — a move plainly aimed at intimidating Taiwan.

Beijing clearly wanted to send a warning to Washington (and, perhaps, Tokyo) about its support for Taipei, and hint at the possibility that if there were a Taiwan Strait dust-up, Russia might stand with China. [emphasis added]

Otto Von Bismarck once said of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire (paraphrased), "In every bilateral relationship there is a horse and a rider. In this alliance it is my determination that Germany should always be the rider." That determination was abandoned after Bismarck was dismissed as chancellor in 1890, and Imperial Germany ultimately ended up the horse, getting dragged into what became World War I by their Austro-Hungarian allies.

It would seem that in the Sino-Russian version Moscow hasn't yet donned the saddle, but Beijing is pulling that piece of equipment out of the geostrategic barn:

The exercise also gives Russia an opportunity to strut its military wares before its best customers — Chinese generals. Moscow is Beijing's largest arms supplier, to the tune of more than $2 billion a year for purchases that include subs, ships, missiles and fighters.

Rumors abound that Moscow may finally be ready to sell strategic, cruise-missile-capable bombers such as the long-range TU-95 and supersonic TU-22 to Beijing — strengthening China's military hand against America and U.S. friends and allies in Asia.

Russia needs money; Red China is awash in it. That is ultimately what makes the ChiComms the rider in this pairing, and what will compel Moscow toward a steadily more belligerent stance vis-a-vie the West on Beijing's behalf.

America Losing Ground To China In Central Asia?

In the meantime, the Red Chinese are busily subverting the former Soviet Central Asian republics (aka "the 'stans") right under the Russians' noses - and threatening a principle staging area for our GWOT:

Kazakhstan's foreign minister [last Tues]day pledged his country's support for U.S. military operations in Central Asia and said his country worked to water down neighboring countries' efforts to evict American troops from the region.

Foreign Minister Kasymzhomart Tokayev added that the U.S. military presence since the 2001 Afghanistan war and China's emergence as a regional and global power were helping revive the 19th-century "Great Game" struggle for influence in the region. ...

Kazakhstan, a U.S. ally and the only Central Asian nation to contribute troops to the postwar mission in Iraq, startled the Bush Administration last month when it endorsed a communique from the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) widely interpreted as demanding a deadline for shutting down U.S. bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, set up to support the Afghan war.

The increasingly influential SCO includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but is dominated by its two largest members - Russia and China. Both Moscow and Beijing have been unnerved by the prospect of permanent U.S. military outposts in their strategic backyard.

The irony of this particular gambit is one out of which foreign policy "realists" would get a chuckle. Our foreign policy is no longer "amoral" when it comes to the democratization or lack thereof of the regimes with which we are willing to deal, whereas the ChiComms are coming to the 'stans and offering all manner of economic assistance with no such strings attached. The Kazakhs, at least, are nominally sticking with us, but it must be admitted that it's not all that surprising that the SCO is proving to be a beguiling suitor. Dictators, after all, do tend to speak the same language, and hard, cold cash tends to smooth out any lingering problems in "translation."

Cap'n Ed makes a good faith attempt to argue for the maintenance of our current democratization policy. I haven't changed my tune on it, rest assured, but I think Mr. Morrissey's argument has a gaping trap door:

In the short run, that puts us at a disadvantage - but when the tyrannies eventually fall, the people of Central Asia will remember who assisted them in standing on their own two feet and who helped their oppressors keep them down. Our strategy still has the most sound long-term value, and we should not back down from democratization.

"Eventually" is one helluva soft spot. Ed's description sounds most analogous to the old Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe, which, in this context, were noteworthy in that those tyrannies only fell when the bigger tyranny that dominated them fell first. With the PRC moving into the 'stans via this SCO vehicle and attempting to create its own group of adjoining satellite states, that creates an obvious conundrum: if we let Beijing succeed, we'll have to defeat the PRC before Central Asia can be (re-)liberated; but preventing that success would seem to demand at least "greater flexibility" in our "democratize or else" foreign policy paradigm.

China Begins ‘Unrestricted Warfare'

I did say that the ChiComms are, shall we say, "broadly" engaging us. And not just by nibbling 'round the edges, or by old-fashioned means:

Chinese Web sites are being used to target computer networks in the U.S. Defense Department and other federal agencies.

The hackers have successfully penetrated hundreds of unclassified networks, according to officials who spoke to the Washington Post.

Thus far no classified systems have been breached.

But authorities are concerned because even seemingly innocuous information can yield useful intelligence to an enemy when pieced together from various sources.

"The scope of this thing is surprisingly big," said a government official who spoke anonymously to the Washington Post about the incidents, which stretch back as far as three years and have been code-named "Titan Rain" by American investigators.

Some analysts in the Pentagon believe the attacks constitute a coordinated effort by the Chinese government to spy on U.S. databases.

Also, the Chinese published a military manual in 1999 entitled "Unrestricted Warfare." The book calls for "computer" warfare against the United States, the nation China has identified as its likely enemy in a future war.

To borrow from another analogy, if Red China is Nazi Germany, then we're in about 1935, with our enemy's power and influence waxing, their aggressive intent overtly telegraphed, and now just as seventy years ago, the West is taking little note of any of it.

The big difference is, the ChiComms are in no hurry, and are perfectly willing to let surrogates (Islamic fundamentalists, North Korea, and "eventually" the Russians) wear us down until they decide the balance of forces is sufficiently in their favor to make their bid for global domination.

Doesn't mean that outcome is inevitable - far from it. But averting a Pax ChiCommica - or nuclear Armageddon - will require a great deal more pro-activity on our part in slowing Beijing's various and sundry projects before they can metastasize into something that we would rather not face.