Month: August 2020

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Strategic Approach to China, Part 2

The White House has released a comprehensive examination of the strategic relationship with China. The New York Analysis of Policy and Government presents, in three parts, the complete document. Today’s portion examines the challenges facing the U.S. from China’s growing threat.

Challenges

The PRC today poses numerous challenges to United States national interests.

  1. Economic Challenges

Beijing’s poor record of following through on economic reform commitments and its extensive use of state-driven protectionist policies and practices harm United States companies and workers, distort global markets, violate international norms, and pollute the environment. When the PRC acceded to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, Beijing agreed to embrace the WTO’s open market-oriented approach and embed these principles in its trading system and institutions. WTO members expected China to continue on its path of economic reform and transform itself into a market-oriented economy and trade regime.

These hopes were not realized. Beijing did not internalize the norms and practices of competition-based trade and investment, and instead exploited the benefits of WTO membership to become the world’s largest exporter, while systematically protecting its domestic markets. Beijing’s economic policies have led to massive industrial overcapacity that distorts global prices and allows China to expand global market share at the expense of competitors operating without the unfair advantages that Beijing provides to its firms. The PRC retains its non-market economic structure and state-led, mercantilist approach to trade and investment. Political reforms have likewise atrophied and gone into reverse, and distinctions between the government and the party are eroding. General Secretary Xi’s decision to remove presidential term limits, effectively extending his tenure indefinitely, epitomized these trends.

In his 2018 Findings of the Investigation into China’s Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) determined that numerous acts, policies, and practices of the PRC government were unreasonable or discriminatory, and burden or restrict United States commerce. Based on a rigorous investigation, USTR found that the PRC: (1) requires or pressures United States companies to transfer their technology to Chinese entities; (2) places substantial restrictions on United States companies’ ability to license their technology on market terms; (3) directs and unfairly facilitates acquisition of United States companies and assets by domestic firms to obtain cutting edge technologies; and (4) conducts and supports unauthorized cyber intrusions into United States companies’ networks to access sensitive information and trade secrets.

The list of Beijing’s commitments to cease its predatory economic practices is littered with broken and empty promises. In 2015, Beijing promised that it would stop governmentdirected cyber-enabled theft of trade secrets for commercial gain, reiterating that same promise in 2017 and 2018. Later in 2018, the United States and a dozen other countries attributed global computer intrusion campaigns, targeting intellectual property and confidential business information, to operators affiliated with the PRC’s Ministry of State Security – a contravention of Beijing’s 2015 commitment. Since the 1980s, Beijing has signed multiple international agreements to protect intellectual property. Despite this, more than 63 percent of the world’s counterfeits originate in China, inflicting hundreds of billions of dollars of damage on legitimate businesses around the world.

While Beijing acknowledges that China is now a “mature economy,” the PRC continues to argue in its dealings with international bodies, including the WTO, that it is still a “developing country.” Despite being the top importer of high technology products and ranking second only to the United States in terms of gross domestic product, defense spending, and outward investment, China self-designates as a developing country to justify policies and practices that systematically distort multiple sectors globally, harming the United States and other countries.

One Belt One Road (OBOR) is Beijing’s umbrella term to describe a variety of initiatives, many of which appear designed to reshape international norms, standards, and networks to advance Beijing’s global interests and vision, while also serving China’s domestic economic requirements. Through OBOR and other initiatives, the PRC is expanding the use of Chinese industrial standards in key technology sectors, part of an effort to strengthen its own companies’ position in the global marketplace at the expense of non-Chinese firms. Projects that Beijing has labeled OBOR include: transportation, information and communications technology and energy infrastructure; industrial parks; media collaboration; science and technology exchanges; programs on culture and religion; and even military and security cooperation. Beijing is also seeking to arbitrate OBOR-related commercial disputes through its own specialized courts, which answer to the CCP. The United States welcomes contributions by China to sustainable, high-quality development that accords with international best practices, but OBOR projects frequently operate well outside of these standards and are characterized by poor quality, corruption, environmental degradation, a lack of public oversight or community involvement, opaque loans, and contracts generating or exacerbating governance and fiscal problems in host nations.

Given Beijing’s increasing use of economic leverage to extract political concessions from or exact retribution against other countries, the United States judges that Beijing will attempt to convert OBOR projects into undue political influence and military access. Beijing uses a combination of threat and inducement to pressure governments, elites, corporations, think tanks, and others – often in an opaque manner – to toe the CCP line and censor free expression. Beijing has restricted trade and tourism with Australia, Canada, South Korea, Japan, Norway, the Philippines, and others, and has detained Canadian citizens, in an effort to interfere in these countries’ internal political and judicial processes. After the Dalai Lama visited Mongolia in 2016, the PRC government imposed new tariffs on land-locked Mongolia’s mineral exports passing through China, temporarily paralyzing Mongolia’s economy.

Beijing seeks global recognition for its environmental efforts and claims to promote “green development.” China, however, has been the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter by a wide margin for more than a decade. Beijing has put forward vague and unenforceable emissions reduction commitments that allow China’s emissions to keep growing until “around 2030.” China’s planned growing emissions will outweigh the reductions from the rest of the world combined. Chinese firms also export polluting coal-fired power plants to developing countries by the hundreds. The PRC is also the world’s largest source of marine plastic pollution, discharging over 3.5 million metric tons into the ocean each year. The PRC ranks first in the world for illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing in coastal nations’ waters around the world, threatening local economies and harming the marine environment. Chinese leaders’ unwillingness to rein in these globally harmful practices does not match their rhetorical promises of environmental stewardship.

  • Challenges to Our Values
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The CCP promotes globally a value proposition that challenges the bedrock American belief in the unalienable right of every person to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Under the current generation of leadership, the CCP has accelerated its efforts to portray its governance system as functioning better than those of what it refers to as “developed, western countries.” Beijing is clear that it sees itself as engaged in an ideological competition with the West. In 2013, General Secretary Xi called on the CCP to prepare for a “long-term period of cooperation and conflict” between two competing systems and declared that “capitalism is bound to die out and socialism is bound to win.”

The CCP aims to make China a “global leader in terms of comprehensive national power and international influence,” as General Secretary Xi expressed in 2017, by strengthening what it refers to as “the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics.” This system is rooted in Beijing’s interpretation of Marxist-Leninist ideology and combines a nationalistic, singleparty dictatorship; a state-directed economy; deployment of science and technology in the service of the state; and the subordination of individual rights to serve CCP ends. This runs counter to principles shared by the United States and many likeminded countries of representative government, free enterprise, and the inherent dignity and worth of every individual.

Internationally, the CCP promotes General Secretary Xi’s vision for global governance under the banner of “building a community of common destiny for mankind.” Beijing’s efforts to compel ideological conformity at home, however, present an unsettling picture of what a CCP-led “community” looks like in practice: (1) an anticorruption campaign that has purged political opposition; (2) unjust prosecutions of bloggers, activists, and lawyers; (3) algorithmically determined arrests of ethnic and religious minorities; (4) stringent controls over and censorship of information, media, universities, businesses, and non-governmental organizations; (5) surveillance and social credit scoring of citizens, corporations, and organizations; and (6) and arbitrary detention, torture, and abuse of people perceived to be dissidents. In a stark example of domestic conformity, local officials publicized a book burning event at a community library to demonstrate their ideological alignment to “Xi Jinping Thought.”

One disastrous outgrowth of such an approach to governance is Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang, where since 2017, authorities have detained more than a million Uighurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in indoctrination camps, where many endure forced labor, ideological indoctrination, and physical and psychological abuse. Outside these camps, the regime has instituted a police state employing emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and biogenetics to monitor ethnic minorities’ activities to ensure allegiance to the CCP. Widespread religious persecution – of Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Muslims, and members of Falun Gong – includes the demolition and desecration of places of worship, arrests of peaceful believers, forced renunciations of faith, and prohibitions on raising children in traditions of faith.

The CCP’s campaign to compel ideological conformity does not stop at China’s borders. In recent years, Beijing has intervened in sovereign nations’ internal affairs to engineer consent for its policies. PRC authorities have attempted to extend CCP influence over discourse and behavior around the world, with recent examples including companies and sports teams in the United States and the United Kingdom and politicians in Australia and Europe. PRC actors are exporting the tools of the CCP’s techno-authoritarian model to countries around the world, enabling authoritarian states to exert control over their citizens and surveil opposition, training foreign partners in propaganda and censorship techniques, and using bulk data collection to shape public sentiment.

China’s party-state controls the world’s most heavily resourced set of propaganda tools. Beijing communicates its narrative through state-run television, print, radio, and online organizations whose presence is proliferating in the United States and around the world. The CCP often conceals its investments in foreign media entities. In 2015, China Radio International was revealed to control 33 radio stations in 14 countries via shell entities, and to subsidize multiple intermediaries through providing free, pro-Beijing content.

Beyond the media, the CCP uses a range of actors to advance its interests in the United States and other open democracies. CCP United Front organizations and agents target businesses, universities, think tanks, scholars, journalists, and local, state, and Federal officials in the United States and around the world, attempting to influence discourse and restrict external influence inside the PRC.

Beijing regularly attempts to compel or persuade Chinese nationals and others to undertake a range of malign behaviors that threaten United States national and economic security, and undermine academic freedom and the integrity of the United States research and development enterprise. These behaviors include misappropriation of technology and intellectual property, failure to appropriately disclose relationships with foreign government sponsored entities, breaches of contract and confidentiality, and manipulation of processes for fair and merit-based allocation of Federal research and development funding. Beijing also attempts to compel Chinese nationals to report on and threaten fellow Chinese students, protest against events that run counter to Beijing’s political narrative, and otherwise restrict the academic freedom that is the hallmark and strength of the American education system.

PRC media entities, journalists, academics, and diplomats are free to operate in the United States, but Beijing denies reciprocal access to American counterpart institutions and officials. The PRC government routinely denies United States officials, including the United States Ambassador to the PRC, access to Department of State-funded American Cultural Centers, which are hosted in Chinese universities to share American culture with the Chinese people. Foreign reporters working in the PRC often face harassment and intimidation.

  • Security Challenges

As China has grown in strength, so has the willingness and capacity of the CCP to employ intimidation and coercion in its attempts to eliminate perceived threats to its interests and advance its strategic objectives globally. Beijing’s actions belie Chinese leaders’ proclamations that they oppose the threat or use of force, do not intervene in other countries’ internal affairs, or are committed to resolving disputes through peaceful dialogue. Beijing contradicts its rhetoric and flouts its commitments to its neighbors by engaging in provocative and coercive military and paramilitary activities in the Yellow Sea, the East and South China Seas, the Taiwan Strait, and Sino-Indian border areas.

In May 2019, the Department of Defense issued its annual report to the Congress, Military and Security Developments Involving the PRC, assessing current and future trajectories of China’s military-technological development, security and military strategies, and People’s Liberation Army (PLA) organizational and operational concepts. In July 2019, the PRC Minister of Defense publicly acknowledged that OBOR is linked to the PRC’s aspirational expansion of PLA presence overseas, including locations such as the Pacific Islands and the Caribbean.

Beijing’s military buildup threatens United States and allied national security interests and poses complex challenges for global commerce and supply chains. Beijing’s Military-Civil Fusion (MCF) strategy gives the PLA unfettered access into civil entities developing and acquiring advanced technologies, including state-owned and private firms, universities, and research programs. Through non-transparent MCF linkages, United States and other foreign companies are unwittingly feeding dual-use technologies into PRC military research and development programs, strengthening the CCP’s coercive ability to suppress domestic opposition and threaten foreign countries, including United States allies and partners.

The PRC’s attempts to dominate the global information and communications technology industry through unfair practices is reflected in discriminatory regulations like the PRC National Cyber Security Law, which requires companies to comply with Chinese data localization measures that enable CCP access to foreign data. Other PRC laws compel companies like Huawei and ZTE to cooperate with Chinese security services, even when they do business abroad, creating security vulnerabilities for foreign countries and enterprises utilizing Chinese vendors’ equipment and services.

The PRC’s attempts to dominate the global information and communications technology industry through unfair practices is reflected in discriminatory regulations like the PRC National Cyber Security Law, which requires companies to comply with Chinese data localization measures that enable CCP access to foreign data. Other PRC laws compel companies like Huawei and ZTE to cooperate with Chinese security services, even when they do business abroad, creating security vulnerabilities for foreign countries and enterprises utilizing Chinese vendors’ equipment and services.

The Report concludes tomorrow.

        Photo: PLA Heavy Armor (eng.chinamil.com.cn/)

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Strategic Approach to China

The White House has released a comprehensive examination of the strategic relationship with China. The New York Analysis of Policy and Government presents, in three parts, the complete document.

Introduction

Since the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) established diplomatic relations in 1979, United States policy toward the PRC was largely premised on a hope that deepening engagement would spur fundamental economic and political opening in the PRC and lead to its emergence as a constructive and responsible global stakeholder, with a more open society. More than 40 years later, it has become evident that this approach underestimated the will of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to constrain the scope of economic and political reform in China. Over the past two decades, reforms have slowed, stalled, or reversed. The PRC’s rapid economic development and increased engagement with the world did not lead to convergence with the citizen-centric, free and open order as the United States had hoped. The CCP has chosen instead to exploit the free and open rulesbased order and attempt to reshape the international system in its favor. Beijing openly acknowledges that it seeks to transform the international order to align with CCP interests and ideology. The CCP’s expanding use of economic, political, and military power to compel acquiescence from nation states harms vital American interests and undermines the sovereignty and dignity of countries and individuals around the world.

To respond to Beijing’s challenge, the Administration has adopted a competitive approach to the PRC, based on a clear-eyed assessment of the CCP’s intentions and actions, a reappraisal of the United States’ many strategic advantages and shortfalls, and a tolerance of greater bilateral friction. Our approach is not premised on determining a particular end state for China. Rather, our goal is to protect United States vital national interests, as articulated in the four pillars of the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS). We aim to: (1) protect the American people, homeland, and way of life; (2) promote American prosperity; (3) preserve peace through strength; and (4) advance American influence.

Our competitive approach to the PRC has two objectives: first, to improve the resiliency of our institutions, alliances, and partnerships to prevail against the challenges the PRC presents; and second, to compel Beijing to cease or reduce actions harmful to the United States’ vital, national interests and those of our allies and partners. Even as we compete with the PRC, we welcome cooperation where our interests align. Competition need not lead to confrontation or conflict. The United States has a deep and abiding respect for the Chinese people and enjoys longstanding ties to the country. We do not seek to contain China’s development, nor do we wish to disengage from the Chinese people. The United States expects to engage in fair competition with the PRC, whereby both of our nations, businesses, and individuals can enjoy security and prosperity.

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Prevailing in strategic competition with the PRC requires cooperative engagement with multiple stakeholders, and the Administration is committed to building partnerships to United States Strategic Approach to The People’s Republic of China 2 protect our shared interests and values. Vital partners of this Administration include the Congress, state and local governments, the private sector, civil society, and academia. The Congress has been speaking out through hearings, statements, and reports that shed light on the CCP’s malign behavior. The Congress also provides legal authorities and resources for the United States Government to take the actions to achieve our strategic objectives. The Administration also recognizes the steps allies and partners have taken to develop more clear-eyed and robust approaches toward the PRC, including the European Union’s publication in March 2019 of EU-China: A Strategic Outlook, among others.

The United States is also building cooperative partnerships and developing positive alternatives with foreign allies, partners, and international organizations to support the shared principles of a free and open order. Specific to the Indo-Pacific region, many of these initiatives are described in documents such as the Department of Defense June 2019 IndoPacific Strategy Report and the Department of State November 2019 report on A Free and Open Indo-Pacific: Advancing a Shared Vision. The United States is working in concert with mutually aligned visions and approaches such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nation’s Outlook on the Indo-Pacific, Japan’s free and open Indo-Pacific vision, India’s Security and Growth for All in the Region policy, Australia’s Indo-Pacific concept, the Republic of Korea’s New Southern Policy, and Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy.

This report does not attempt to detail the comprehensive range of actions and policy initiatives the Administration is carrying out across the globe as part of our strategic competition. Rather, this report focuses on the implementation of the NSS as it applies most directly to the PRC.

The Report continues tomorrow

Photo:PLA Navy Destroyer on Training Maneuver(eng.chinamil.com.cn/)

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Sham Candidacy

A disturbing picture is beginning to emerge about what has essentially become a sham candidacy by the Democrats, and the coverup of that strategy and that candidate both by much of the media and the party’s bureaucrat allies.

While most Americans are exercising caution in the face of the COVID crisis, Joe Biden’s refusal to leave his home to face the American people in the midst of a presidential campaign should raise extensive alarm bells. It is more than just avoiding crowds. His few basement broadcasts raise doubts about his presence of mind.

Even his admirers have taken note.  The New York Times has written: “…the former vice president is in a distinctive kind of lockdown, walled off from voters, separated from his top strategists and yet leading in the polls.”

Even within the confines of his isolation and despite the existence of numerous ways to remotely connect with the public through means such as Skype or Zoom, Biden has been bizarrely reclusive, leaving tough interviews to his wife and other spokespersons.

You don’t hear much about this, thanks to the phalanx of increasingly biased and untruthful traditional and internet-based media.  Here’s an experiment that reveals how extensive this coverup is. Google the phrase, “Biden refuses to leave home.” These are the entries that come up on that search engine: “Biden absolutely convinced military would escort Trump from the White House (CNN); Military will remove Trump from the White House (Daily Beast). Similar results go on for pages.

Biden’s struggles with mental clarity make it necessary for him to avoid rigorous discussion, and his campaign, despite a stated willingness to debate, is moving to limit or even not participate in any presidential debates. They have already successfully lobbied the Commission on Presidential Debates to not have a debate in September.

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The Biden campaign has prodigiously sought to portray Biden as a traditional Democrat, an experienced hand who served 47 years in Washington. But it struggles to define him, an understandable difficulty given that he has reversed himself repeatedly over the years on key issues, depending on how the political winds of the moment were blowing. This chameleon-like tendency has become even more pronounced recently. Business Insider reports that “Joe Biden is making a habit of reversing stances on key policy areas — even positions he has held for decades — since the launch of his presidential campaign in April.”

While politicians do evolve, the question surrounding Biden is what is he evolving into? Given the extremist nature of the current Democrat Party, the answer is deeply disturbing.

Little is discussed about Biden’s adoption of the radical positions of the most extreme elements of his increasingly hard-left, socialist oriented party.  He has been endorsed by, to cite just a few examples, Castro-fan Karen Bass, radical Congressional leaders such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Illhan Omar, and by Communists such as Bob Avakian (chairman of the Communist Revolutionary Party of the USA) and many others.

In foreign affairs, Biden has taken dangerously mistaken positions. He counseled President Obama against taking out Osama Bin Laden. Even as China has caused mass devastation throughout the globe, he has been soft on America’s most dangerous adversary. He has stated “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man…I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us…”

Which brings up the issue of how the media has covered up what may be the most significant act of corruption in U.S. politics: the fortune made by the Biden family from questionable dealings with China while Biden was serving as Vice President.

Photo: Official portrait of Joe Biden

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Foreign Policy Update

SLOVENIA

Secretary of State Michael Pompeo during his visit to Ljubljana was asked about the realignment of troops in Europe and if any would be headed to Slovenia. He said the military relationship with the US is “very powerful” and that Washington is committed to ensuring Europe is secure. It is not just about tanks, he added, but cyber threats, space, aircraft, counter terrorism, and other elements to create the right defensive posture.

CHINA

In response to Chinese aggression, the US this week declared China’s Confucius Institute US Center a foreign mission due to its propaganda activities. The change in designation means that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) funded organization will have to provide the US Government with more information on its activities, source of funding, and personnel.

The US-China relationship is not one of the US against China, according to Pompeo, but one of a conflict between freedom and tyranny. “The Chinese do not intend well for Western ideas. They have a different model, “ he noted. Things have become “more dangerous” and insecure for the West. “The Chinese are engaged in a global fundamental commercial espionage effort the likes of which the world has never seen, and it’s something the United States simply doesn’t do. We don’t do commercial espionage.  We don’t come steal secrets for the purpose of making our companies more productive and more powerful,” he said. 

CUBA

The State Department announced that Secretary Pompeo has requested that the Department of Transportation suspend private charter flights to all Cuban airports, including Havana. It said this action will suspend all charter flights between the United States and Cuba over which the Department of Transportation exercises jurisdiction, except for authorized public charter flights to and from Havana and other authorized private charter flights for emergency medical purposes, search and rescue, and other travel deemed in the interest of the United States.

The Trump Administration plans to continue to target and cut the revenue the Cuban government earns from landing fees, stays in regime-owned hotels, and other travel-related income because the Cuban military and intelligence services own and operate the great majority of hotels and tourism infrastructure in Cuba. This will deny economic resources to the Castro regime and inhibit its capacity to carry out abuses, according to Pompeo’s statement.

“Our message to the Castro regime has been clear:  The United States will continue to stand up for the Cuban people and against the regime’s abuses and its interference in Venezuela to prop up Maduro’s illegitimate hold on power,” it said.

The Castro regime has not changed its repressive and undemocratic behavior and continues to imprison journalists and democracy activists, to oversee horrific physical abuse, to perpetuate the de facto dictatorship in Venezuela, to repress freedom of religion or belief, and to silence and intimidate those who speak truth about the reality in Cuba, according to the Department.

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ISRAEL / UAE

In an August 13, 2020 statement released by the Secretary of State, he called the normalization of relations between Israel and the UAE “an historic day and a significant step forward for peace in the Middle East.” He said that after vigorous diplomatic outreach, President Trump, along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Emirati Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed, signed an agreement to “fully normalize relations.”

“This is a remarkable achievement for two of the world’s most forward leaning, technologically advanced states, and reflects their shared regional vision of an economically integrated region,” according to Pompeo. This may be a first step in ending 72 years of hostilities in the region.  

TAIWAN

US HHS Secretary Alex Azar traveled to Taiwan to talk about the Covid-19 pandemic in the highest-level official visit since the US normalized relations with the PRC. The Chinese reacted as expected, falsely calling the visit a betrayal of a US promise not to deal with Taiwan.

Secretary Pompeo, when asked about last week’s visit said: “Secretary Azar is there for the singular purpose of working with the Taiwanese Government on something that’s important to everyone in the world – making sure we come to understand this Wuhan virus, to make sure we understand the threat, to make sure we know how Taiwan so successfully dealt with this issue in their own country.  We want to share with them what we’ve learned, what we know too.  We know an awful lot about this.  That was the purpose of his visit.” 

He added he was surprised China would feel so threatened by someone on a “noble humanitarian” trip with the purpose of reducing risk to citizens all across the world, including Chinese citizens. In a swipe at the communist giant, Pompeo quipped that he thinks it “tells you a lot about the weakness of the Chinese Communist Party and the fact that it could feel threatened from such a visit.”

DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government.  Each Saturday, she presents key updates on U.S. foreign policy from the State Department.

Illustration: Pixabay

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China’s Temper Tantrum

For the past four decades China has gone unchecked by the international community of nations. It openly violates internationally-accepted standards for human rights, steals intellectual property from the West, threatens its neighbors in Asia, limits the right of free passage in and above the South China Sea, and imperils the people and security of Taiwan. The list is almost endless. Like a spoiled child not given its way for the first time, China is throwing a “hissy fit” now that the Trump Administration is holding it accountable for its past actions and future threats to the stability of the region and global commerce.

Attempts to commandeer the South China Sea through the building of artificial and heavily-armed islands is only one example of China’s hegemonic effort to exert its influence beyond its shores. This past week the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership in Beijing literally fumed when US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar spent four days in Taiwan meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and other government officials in the highest US Cabinet-level visit to the island in 40 years. 

In a tit-for-tat response to the US-Taiwan meetings, Beijing created military exercises close to the north and south ends of the island. Senior PLA Colonel Zhang Chunlian of the Eastern Theatre Command said the drills were to “safeguard the national security situation” in the Taiwan Strait. Secretary Azar was in Taiwan to talk about the pandemic and to convey Washington’s “admiration for Taiwan and to learn about how our shared democratic values have driven success in healthcare,” he said. 

In a tantrum befitting a hellbent toddler, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesman Zhao Lijian, demanded the US stop any form of official exchanges with Taiwan and called for Washington to “stop enhancing the substantive relationship between the US and Taiwan.” He went as far as to falsely call the visit a violation of a US promise on the Taiwan issue. On Thursday Taiwan’s cabinet voted to increase its military budget by more than 10% to US $15.43 billion to help deter China’s aggressive behavior toward the island further upsetting Beijing.

While the “hot peace” was playing out in Asia things also heated up in Washington this week as the US held China accountable for its US-based propaganda operation run by the Confucius Institute US Center (CIUS) by naming it a “foreign mission.” By declaring CIUS a diplomatic mission the US can require more transparency about its personnel and origins of funding. The CCP’s malign influence campaign spends millions each year establishing and supporting centers on US university campuses, in American K-12 schools and as stand-alone offices. 

It uses coercion to push its agenda and has intensified its operations in recent years. When the University of California – San Diego invited the Dalai Lama to give its commencement address China actively pressured the school to disinvite him. At Savannah State University, at the demand of the co-director of the Confucius Institute, a keynote speaker had her introduction edited to eliminate the fact that she previously studied in Taiwan. 

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Dozens of US schools, finally, are delinking from the Confucius Institute and its extensive donation operation. Many US schools, however, continue their relationship unimpeded although they are aware it is funded by the PRC and the Chinese Communist Party. The US Government knows of over 500 Confucius K-12 classrooms in the US. Each is linked directly with a Confucius Center on a nearby college campus and funded by the CCP. The government also is tracking 75 of the Centers, of which 65 are active on university campuses. This is a large, multi-million dollar propaganda campaign which Beijing uses to actively pursue its global agenda.

If the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t like Americans exercising free speech in America it acts aggressively to stop it and counter with its own point of view. These types of incidents are increasing in recent months. Not long ago, Cambridge University Press was “told” to delete 250 articles the CCP found offensive. It threatened the Press with economic reprisals if it failed to comply. 

In the West free speech, individual freedom, private property, and the right to assemble make up only a few of the differences from what one finds in China today. Dreams in the West of a non-belligerent giant have dimmed to a faint memory while Beijing’s leadership continues attempting to extinguish the western rules-based international system. It leaders employ a grand strategy with the end goal of remaking the world in its image. It is up to the West in 2020 to decide if it wants to kowtow to the communist giant or if it is ready to join the United States in holding China accountable.

DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government.  Each Friday, she presents key updates on China.

Picture: Tianamen (Pixabay)

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The Danger of Bias

In a nation ruled by the people, the media and educators play a vital role.  Voters need unbiased reporting. and the historic knowledge to place news into context.

That reality makes the leftist bias of most news, academic, and entertainment outlets deeply troubling.  It’s not just bias that is disturbing.  Major stories that do not fit in with progressive views are frequently ignored. 

Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s recent bizarre statement that blacks who vote Republican aren’t really black is a prime example.  The media didn’t make much of the comment, despite the fact that both the historic and current record of the Democratic Party is hardly conducive to black interests. It’s hardly mentioned that it is the party that started a Civil War to protect slavery, then pursued segregation in the Reconstruction era.  It is the party that idolized Margaret Sanger, who staunchly advocated abortion explicitly to reduce the number of black babies being born.  Its “Great Society” economic policies, perhaps inadvertently, created economic conditions that delayed blacks from moving into the middle class. An educational system overwhelmingly dominated by Democrats refuses to teach those facts to students.

The bias makes reasonable debate politically risky; conservative viewpoints are inevitably portrayed as cruel.  Consider the new third rail of political discourse: Those who criticize any spending program produced in the name of COVID, no matter how pointless, ineffective, excessive, corrupt, or even wholly ridiculous, will be castigated as heartless.

America urgently required quick, clean legislation that simply provided cash to those in dire need.  But Democrats loaded Covid bills with items that benefited them politically. The media ignored the scandal, the same way they continue to ignore the inexcusable refusal of Nancy Pelosi to allow the House to return to work on a timely basis at a time of dire national need.

Consider the debate over how to distribute COVID relief funds.  For America to return to economic normalcy, businesses need to be able to reopen and hire back employees. Federal legislation provides $600 weekly benefits to those who are out of work, in addition to state unemployment funds.  It’s a generous benefit.  Some out of work recipients are now making more than they did when they were working. 

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But those benefits are unaffordable for the nation in the long run.  Our grandchildren will be paying off that debt.  Businesses that have been forced to close need to be able to reopen, rehire, and pay taxes.  But attempts to funnel assistance to them is portrayed as tilting towards capitalists at the expense of workers—sheer nonsense. That logic doesn’t fit the progressive preconceptions of the media elites, so discussion of it is not widely covered.

President Trump campaigned in 2016 against China’s growing monopoly on vital industries and its increasing hostility.  He was prophetic, but the media ignores that.  In January of 2020, he shut down travel to the U.S. from China.  Democrats portrayed him as “racist and xenophobic.”

In large, progressive-run cities, a failure to timely acknowledge the COVID threat led to disaster. New York became the worldwide epicenter of the disease, due to the refusal of the hard-left mayor and his clueless health commissioner to acknowledge the threat.  On an almost a daily basis, the city’s mayor and his state’s governor absurdly blame the White House for the mistakes made by city hall and the governor’s mansion.  The reality that Governor Cuomo’s deadly decision to place COVID patients in nursing home, causing vast numbers of needless deaths, receives little more than a shrug from the national media.

As the 2020 presidential campaign moves forward, Democrats nonsensically seek to place blame on the White House for the spread of COVID.  They ignore explicit evidence that China maliciously, negligently, or both is solely responsible. They take that position because to not do so would be to admit that they have been wrong all along, and that candidate and then President Trump made the right call.

You will rarely see that analysis reported.

Illustration: Pixabay

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The Threat Posed by China to America, Part 3

FBI Director Christopher Wray outlines the threat China poses to U.S. economic and national security. He delivered the review during a meeting with the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

Threats to the Rule of Law

All the while, China’s government and Communist Party have brazenly violated well-settled norms and the rule of law.

Since 2014, Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping has spearheaded a program known as “Fox Hunt.” Now, China describes Fox Hunt as some kind of international anti-corruption campaign—it is not. Instead, Fox Hunt is a sweeping bid by General Secretary Xi to target Chinese nationals whom he sees as threats and who live outside China, across the world. We’re talking about political rivals, dissidents, and critics seeking to expose China’s extensive human rights violations.

Hundreds of the Fox Hunt victims that they target live right here in the United States, and many are American citizens or green card holders. The Chinese government wants to force them to return to China, and China’s tactics to accomplish that are shocking. For example, when it couldn’t locate one Fox Hunt target, the Chinese government sent an emissary to visit the target’s family here in the United States. The message they said to pass on? The target had two options: return to China promptly, or commit suicide. And what happens when Fox Hunt targets refuse to return to China? In the past, their family members both here in the United States and in China have been threatened and coerced, and those back in China have even been arrested for leverage.

I’ll take this opportunity to note that if you believe the Chinese government is targeting you—that you’re a potential Fox Hunt victim—please reach out to your local FBI field office.

Exploiting Our Openness

Understanding how a nation could engage in these tactics brings me to the third thing the American people need to remember: that China has a fundamentally different system than ours—and it’s doing all it can to exploit the openness of ours while taking advantage of its own closed system.

Many of the distinctions that mean a lot here in the United States are blurry or almost nonexistent in China—I’m talking about distinctions between the government and the Chinese Communist Party, between the civilian and military sectors, and between the state and the “private” sector.

For one thing, an awful lot of large Chinese businesses are state-owned enterprises—literally owned by the government, and thus the Party. And even if they aren’t, China’s laws allow its government to compel any Chinese company to provide any information it requests—including American citizens’ data.

On top of that, Chinese companies of any real size are legally required to have Communist Party “cells” inside them to keep them in line. Even more alarmingly, Communist Party cells have reportedly been established in some American companies operating in China as a cost of doing business there.

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These kinds of features should give U.S. companies pause when they consider working with Chinese corporations like Huawei—and should give all Americans pause, too, when relying on such a company’s devices and networks. As the world’s largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer, Huawei has broad access to much that American companies do in China. It’s also been charged in the United States with racketeering conspiracy and has, as alleged in the indictment, repeatedly stolen intellectual property from U.S. companies, obstructed justice, and lied to the U.S. government and its commercial partners, including banks.

The allegations are clear: Huawei is a serial intellectual property thief, with a pattern and practice of disregarding both the rule of law and the rights of its victims. I have to tell you, it certainly caught my attention to read a recent article describing the words of Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, about the company’s mindset. At a Huawei research and development center, he reportedly told employees that to ensure the company’s survival, they need to—and I quote—“surge forward, killing as you go, to blaze us a trail of blood.” He’s also reportedly told employees that Huawei has entered, to quote, “a state of war.” I certainly hope he couldn’t have meant that literally, but it’s hardly an encouraging tone, given the company’s repeated criminal behavior.

In our modern world, there is perhaps no more ominous prospect than a hostile foreign government’s ability to compromise our country’s infrastructure and devices. If Chinese companies like Huawei are given unfettered access to our telecommunications infrastructure, they could collect any of your information that traverses their devices or networks. Worse still: They’d have no choice but to hand it over to the Chinese government if asked—the privacy and due process protections that are sacrosanct in the United States are simply non-existent in China.

Responding Effectively to the Threat

The Chinese government is engaged in a broad, diverse campaign of theft and malign influence, and it can execute that campaign with authoritarian efficiency. They’re calculating. They’re persistent. They’re patient. And they’re not subject to the righteous constraints of an open, democratic society or the rule of law.

China, as led by the Chinese Communist Party, is going to continue to try to misappropriate our ideas, influence our policymakers, manipulate our public opinion, and steal our data. They will use an all-tools and all-sectors approach—and that demands our own all-tools and all-sectors approach in response.

Our folks at the FBI are working their tails off every day to protect our nation’s companies, our universities, our computer networks, and our ideas and innovation. To do that, we’re using a broad set of techniques—from our traditional law enforcement authorities to our intelligence capabilities.

And I will briefly note that we’re having real success. With the help of our many foreign partners, we’ve arrested targets all over the globe. Our investigations and the resulting prosecutions have exposed the tradecraft and techniques the Chinese use, raising awareness of the threat and our industries’ defenses. They also show our resolve and our ability to attribute these crimes to those responsible. It’s one thing to make assertions—but in our justice system, when a person, or a corporation, is investigated and then charged with a crime, we have to prove the truth of the allegation beyond a reasonable doubt. The truth matters—and so, these criminal indictments matter. And we’ve seen how our criminal indictments have rallied other nations to our cause—which is crucial to persuading the Chinese government to change its behavior.

We’re also working more closely than ever with partner agencies here in the U.S. and our partners abroad. We can’t do it on our own; we need a whole-of-society response. That’s why we in the intelligence and law enforcement communities are working harder than ever to give companies, universities, and the American people themselves the information they need to make their own informed decisions and protect their most valuable assets.

Confronting this threat effectively does not mean we shouldn’t do business with the Chinese. It does not mean we shouldn’t host Chinese visitors. It does not mean we shouldn’t welcome Chinese students or coexist with China on the world stage. But it does mean that when China violates our criminal laws and international norms, we are not going to tolerate it, much less enable it. The FBI and our partners throughout the U.S. government will hold China accountable and protect our nation’s innovation, ideas, and way of life—with the help and vigilance of the American people.

Photo: China’s first home-built aircraft carrier leaves Dalian in Northeast China’s Liaoning province for sea trials (China Defence Ministry)

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The Threat Posed by China to America, Part 2

FBI Director Christopher Wray outlines the threat China poses to U.S. economic and national security. He delivered the review during a meeting with the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

Clandestine Efforts

As National Security Advisor O’Brien discussed in his June remarks, the Chinese government is also making liberal use of hacking to steal our corporate and personal data—and they’re using both military and non-state hackers to do it. The Equifax intrusion I mentioned just a few moments ago, which led to the indictment of Chinese military personnel, was hardly the only time China stole the sensitive personal information of huge numbers of the American public.

For example, did any of you have health insurance through Anthem or one of its associated insurers? In 2015, China’s hackers stole the personal data of 80 million of that company’s current and former customers.

Or maybe you’re a federal employee—or you used to be one, or you applied for a government job once, or a family member or roommate did. Well, in 2014, China’s hackers stole more than 21 million records from OPM, the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management.

Why are they doing this? First, China has made becoming an artificial intelligence world leader a priority, and these kinds of thefts feed right into China’s development of artificial intelligence tools.

Compounding the threat, the data China stole is of obvious value as they attempt to identify people for secret intelligence gathering. On that front, China is using social media platforms—the same ones Americans use to stay connected or find jobs—to identify people with access to our government’s sensitive information and then target those people to try to steal it.

Just to pick one example, a Chinese intelligence officer posing as a headhunter on a popular social media platform recently offered an American citizen a sizeable sum of money in exchange for so-called “consulting” services. That sounds benign enough until you realize those “consulting” services were related to sensitive information the American target had access to as a U.S. military intelligence specialist.

Now that particular tale has a happy ending: The American citizen did the right thing and reported the suspicious contact, and the FBI, working together with our armed forces, took it from there. I wish I could say that all such incidents ended that way.

Threats to Academia

It’s a troublingly similar story in academia.

Through talent recruitment programs like the Thousand Talents Program I mentioned just a few moments ago, China pays scientists at American universities to secretly bring our knowledge and innovation back to China—including valuable, federally funded research. To put it bluntly, this means American taxpayers are effectively footing the bill for China’s own technological development. China then leverages its ill-gotten gains to undercut U.S. research institutions and companies, blunting our nation’s advancement and costing American jobs. And we are seeing more and more of these cases.

In May alone, we arrested both Qing Wang, a former researcher with the Cleveland Clinic who worked on molecular medicine and the genetics of cardiovascular disease, and Simon Saw-Teong Ang, a University of Arkansas scientist doing research for NASA. Both of these guys were allegedly committing fraud by concealing their participation in Chinese talent recruitment programs while accepting millions of dollars in American federal grant funding.

That same month, former Emory University professor Xiao-Jiang Li pled guilty to filing a false tax return for failing to report the income he’d received through China’s Thousand Talents Program. Our investigation found that while Li was researching Huntington’s disease at Emory, he was also pocketing half a million unreported dollars from China.

In a similar vein, Charles Lieber, chair of Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, was indicted just last month for making false statements to federal authorities about his Thousand Talents participation. The United States has alleged that Lieber concealed from both Harvard and the NIH his position as a strategic scientist at a Chinese university—and the fact that the Chinese government was paying him, through the Wuhan Institute of Technology, a $50,000 monthly stipend, more than $150,000 in living expenses, and more than $1.5 million to establish a laboratory back in China.

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Malign Foreign Influence

There’s more. Another tool China and the Chinese Communist Party use to manipulate Americans is what we call malign foreign influence.

Now, traditional foreign influence is a normal, legal diplomatic activity typically conducted through diplomatic channels. But malign foreign influence efforts are subversive, undeclared, criminal, or coercive attempts to sway our government’s policies, distort our country’s public discourse, and undermine confidence in our democratic processes and values.

China is engaged in a highly sophisticated malign foreign influence campaign, and its methods include bribery, blackmail, and covert deals. Chinese diplomats also use both open, naked economic pressure and seemingly independent middlemen to push China’s preferences on American officials.

Just take one all-too-common illustration: Let’s say China gets wind that some American official is planning to travel to Taiwan—think a governor, a state senator, a member of Congress. China does not want that to happen, because that travel might appear to legitimize Taiwanese independence from China—and legitimizing Taiwan would, of course, be contrary to China’s “One China” policy.

So what does China do? Well, China has leverage over the American official’s constituents—American companies, academics, and members of the media all have legitimate and understandable reasons to want access to Chinese partners and markets. And because of the authoritarian nature of the Chinese Communist Party, China has immense power over those same partners and markets. So, China will sometimes start by trying to influence the American official overtly and directly. China might openly warn that if the American official goes ahead and takes that trip to Taiwan, China will take it out on a company from that official’s home state by withholding the company’s license to manufacture in China. That could be economically ruinous for the company, would directly pressure the American official to alter his travel plans, and the official would know that China was trying to influence him.

That would be bad enough. But the Chinese Communist Party often doesn’t stop there; it can’t stop there if it wants to stay in power—so it uses its leverage even more perniciously. If China’s more direct, overt influence campaign doesn’t do the trick, they sometimes turn to indirect, covert, deceptive influence efforts.

To continue with the illustration of the American official with travel plans that the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t like, China will work relentlessly to identify the people closest to that official—the people that official trusts most. China will then work to influence those people to act on China’s behalf as middlemen to influence the official. The co-opted middlemen may then whisper in the official’s ear and try to sway the official’s travel plans or public positions on Chinese policy. These intermediaries, of course, aren’t telling the American official that they’re Chinese Communist Party pawns—and worse still, some of these intermediaries may not even realize they’re being used as pawns, because they, too, have been deceived.

Ultimately, China doesn’t hesitate to use smoke, mirrors, and misdirection to influence Americans.

Similarly, China often pushes academics and journalists to self-censor if they want to travel into China. And we’ve seen the Chinese Communist Party pressure American media and sporting giants to ignore or suppress criticism of China’s ambitions regarding Hong Kong or Taiwan. This kind of thing is happening over and over, across the United States.

And I will note that the pandemic has unfortunately not stopped any of this—in fact, we have heard from federal, state, and even local officials that Chinese diplomats are aggressively urging support for China’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis. Yes, this is happening at both the federal and state levels. Not that long ago, we had a state senator who was recently even asked to introduce a resolution supporting China’s response to the pandemic.

The punchline is this: All of these seemingly inconsequential pressures add up to a policymaking environment in which Americans find themselves held over a barrel by the Chinese Communist Party.

The Report Concludes Tomorrow.

Photo: Chinese Fighter Jets (China Defence Ministry photo)

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Quick Analysis

The Threat Posed by China to America

FBI Director Christopher Wray outlined the threat China poses to U.S. economic and national security. He delivered the review during a meeting with the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

The greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality, is the counterintelligence and economic espionage threat from China. It’s a threat to our economic security—and by extension, to our national security.

As National Security Advisor O’Brien said in his recent remarks, we cannot close our eyes and ears to what China is doing—and today, in light of the importance of this threat, I will provide more detail on the Chinese threat than the FBI has ever presented in an open forum. This threat is so significant that the attorney general and secretary of state will also be addressing a lot of these issues in the next few weeks. But if you think these issues are just an intelligence issue, or a government problem, or a nuisance largely just for big corporations who can take care of themselves—you could not be more wrong.

It’s the people of the United States who are the victims of what amounts to Chinese theft on a scale so massive that it represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history.

If you are an American adult, it is more likely than not that China has stolen your personal data.

In 2017, the Chinese military conspired to hack Equifax and made off with the sensitive personal information of 150 million Americans—we’re talking nearly half of the American population and most American adults—and as I’ll discuss in a few moments, this was hardly a standalone incident.

Our data isn’t the only thing at stake here—so are our health, our livelihoods, and our security.

We’ve now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours. Of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China. And at this very moment, China is working to compromise American health care organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and academic institutions conducting essential COVID-19 research.

But before I go on, let me be clear: This is not about the Chinese people, and it’s certainly not about Chinese Americans. Every year, the United States welcomes more than 100,000 Chinese students and researchers into this country. For generations, people have journeyed from China to the United States to secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their families—and our society is better for their contributions. So, when I speak of the threat from China, I mean the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party.

The Chinese Regime and the Scope of Its Ambitions

To understand this threat and how we must act to respond to it, the American people should remember three things.

First: We need to be clear-eyed about the scope of the Chinese government’s ambition. China—the Chinese Communist Party—believes it is in a generational fight to surpass our country in economic and technological leadership.

That is sobering enough. But it’s waging this fight not through legitimate innovation, not through fair and lawful competition, and not by giving their citizens the freedom of thought and speech and creativity that we treasure here in the United States. Instead, China is engaged in a whole-of-state effort to become the world’s only superpower by any means necessary.

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A Diverse and Multi-Layered Approach

The second thing the American people need to understand is that China uses a diverse range of sophisticated techniques—everything from cyber intrusions to corrupting trusted insiders. They’ve even engaged in outright physical theft. And they’ve pioneered an expansive approach to stealing innovation through a wide range of actors—including not just Chinese intelligence services but state-owned enterprises, ostensibly private companies, certain kinds of graduate students and researchers, and a whole variety of other actors working on their behalf.

Economic Espionage

To achieve its goals and surpass America, China recognizes it needs to make leaps in cutting-edge technologies. But the sad fact is that instead of engaging in the hard slog of innovation, China often steals American intellectual property and then uses it to compete against the very American companies it victimized—in effect, cheating twice over. They’re targeting research on everything from military equipment to wind turbines to rice and corn seeds.

Through its talent recruitment programs, like the so-called Thousand Talents Program, the Chinese government tries to entice scientists to secretly bring our knowledge and innovation back to China—even if that means stealing proprietary information or violating our export controls and conflict-of-interest rules.

Take the case of scientist Hongjin Tan, for example, a Chinese national and American lawful permanent resident. He applied to China’s Thousand Talents Program and stole more than $1 billion—that’s with a “b”—worth of trade secrets from his former employer, an Oklahoma-based petroleum company, and got caught. A few months ago, he was convicted and sent to prison.

Or there’s the case of Shan Shi, a Texas-based scientist, also sentenced to prison earlier this year. Shi stole trade secrets regarding syntactic foam, an important naval technology used in submarines. Shi, too, had applied to China’s Thousand Talents Program, and specifically pledged to “digest” and “absorb” the relevant technology in the United States. He did this on behalf of Chinese state-owned enterprises, which ultimately planned to put the American company out of business and take over the market.

In one of the more galling and egregious aspects of the scheme, the conspirators actually patented in China the very manufacturing process they’d stolen, and then offered their victim American company a joint venture using its own stolen technology. We’re talking about an American company that spent years and millions of dollars developing that technology, and China couldn’t replicate it—so, instead, it paid to have it stolen.

And just two weeks ago, Hao Zhang was convicted of economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, and conspiracy for stealing proprietary information about wireless devices from two U.S. companies. One of those companies had spent over 20 years developing the technology Zhang stole.

These cases were among more than a thousand investigations the FBI has into China’s actual and attempted theft of American technology—which is to say nothing of over a thousand more ongoing counterintelligence investigations of other kinds related to China. We’re conducting these kinds of investigations in all 56 of our field offices. And over the past decade, we’ve seen economic espionage cases with a link to China increase by approximately 1,300 percent.

The stakes could not be higher, and the potential economic harm to American businesses and the economy as a whole almost defies calculation.

The Report Continues Tomorrow.

Photo: Chinese troops engage in artillery training (PLA photo)

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Foreign Policy Update

RUSSIA/CHINA

It appears America’s adversaries are sowing presidential election discontent. The Russians, according to US Government sources in the intelligence community (IC), want to see President Trump re-elected, while the Chinese favor Biden. Beijing is concerned about stability and its inability to predict the President’s next policy moves and his staunch insistence that China abide by the rules-based international order. Moscow views Biden as part of an anti-Putin clique and prefers the current Administration. In the 2016 election cycle the IC supported Hillary Clinton and sought to undo the Trump campaign as it was viewed as less sympathetic toward Russia. The CIA, DDHS and the FBI are working together to assure that this election cycle is free from foreign interference. 

In addition to attempted election interference, Russia is disseminating false information about the Covid-19 virus. In a special briefing at the State Department, US Special Envoy Lea Gabrielle, provided the  first-ever comprehensive analysis of Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.  She said that COVID-19 is not the only topic that Russia is spreading false information about. Proxy sites are only part of a “much larger ecosystem of disinformation.” She said that the motivations are the typical motivations that one sees from the Russian Federation, which is undermining democratic institutions, undermining the U.S. and the West, looking to spread fear and confusion, and to essentially publish or push out narratives that create division among Western and democratic audiences.

HONG KONG

“The Chinese Communist Party has made clear that Hong Kong will never again enjoy the high degree of autonomy that Beijing itself promised to the Hong Kong people and the United Kingdom for 50 years,” according to a written statement on Friday by Secretary of State Michael Pompeo. He stated that President Trump has made clear that the US will treat Hong Kong as “one country, one system,” and take action against individuals who have crushed the Hong Kong people’s freedoms.

The US government decided to sanction 11 individuals in Hong Kong who are abusing their power by “coercing, arresting, detaining, or imprisoning individuals under the authority of, or having been responsible for or involved in developing, adopting, or implementing, the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in Hong Kong. The designated leaders include Carrie Lam, Beijing’s de facto surrogate administrator and a tool of CCP repression.

IRAN

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In a press briefing on Wednesday Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said that the US will not be rescinding sanctions against Iran on October 18. He called the US mission set “unambiguous” and added that one of the central failings of the JCPOA, which is a bad thing for the world, is that it allows Iran to buy and sell, including the recent Iran-China agreement. Pompeo noted that China’s entry into the Middle will further destabilize the region and put Israel at risk. 

EQUADOR

The Ecuadorian government is raising the alarm about hundreds of PRC-flagged vessels fishing near Ecuador’s important Galápagos marine reserve over concerns it is harvesting endangered sharks for their fins, along with many other protected species. The State Department Spokesperson said the US firmly supports Ecuador’s efforts to ensure PRC-flagged vessels do not engage in illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing and stand with those whose economies and natural resources are “threatened by PRC-flagged vessels’ disregard for the rule of law and responsible fishing practices.”

China subsidizes the world’s largest commercial fishing fleet. It routinely violates the sovereign rights and jurisdiction of coastal states, fishes without permission, and overfishes licensing agreements.  China’s record of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, rule-breaking, and willful environmental degradation calls for the international community stands together for the rule of law and insists on better environmental stewardship from Beijing, according to the Administration.

DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government.  Each Saturday, she presents key updates on U.S. foreign policy from the State Department.

Illustration: Pixabay