The Chinese government’s ‘vacuum cleaner’ approach to espionage is worrying foreign governments, companies and overseas dissidents. They’re right to be concerned.
Phi Beta Iota: China graduates more honors students from high school than the USA graduates from high school across the board. China has also made the leap away from English toward all the other languages that the US refuses to be serious about. China is further along toward being a “Smart Nation,” aided by its outposts in Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, as well as Diasphora, while the US diddles around not even understanding its own preconditions of revolution. There is only one non-zero solution, and the US government, two-party tyranny, and Wall Street have absolutely no interest in going there.
Koko Signs: Secrecy–when it is pervasive–cannot be micro-managed. As governments decline in legitimacy, and personal technologies become more pervasive than the instruments of secrecy, a tipping point is reached. We're there.
A remarkable YouTube video shows how hard it is to maintain control in a wired world.
By David WiseLos Angeles Times, September 6, 2011
Maj. Gen. Jin Yinan of the People's Liberation Army, in what he apparently thought was an internal briefing, revealed half a dozen cases of Chinese officials who had spied for Britain, the United States and other countries. Somehow, the video of his sensational disclosures leaked out. Clips of his hours-long talk appeared on at least two Chinese websites, Youku.com and Tudou.com, but were quickly removed by government censors.
Phi Beta Iota: Colin Gray teaches us in Modern Strategy that time is the one thing that cannot be purchased nor replaced. The USA has blown a quarter century in its continuing corrupt quest for secrecy and its exploitation of secrecy and other information pathologies to further programs that are neither needed nor affordable. America, like China, is at a tipping point. The ability of the few to impose secrecy against the interests of the many is now done–expanding the Open Source revolution must be our highest priority, to include a year of paid retraining for every person now unemployed and every contractor about to become unemployed.
Last week, China quietly launched the aircraft carrier Varyag from the port of Dalian. The ship is expected to be deployed to Hainan province in close proximity to the strategic regions of Taiwan and the South China Sea. Amidst an atmosphere of existential gloom triggered by the debt-ceiling debacle and the deeper economic crisis, the reaction in the United States was dominated by the fear of a rising, militarist China challenging America’s global superiority. What few in the United States bothered to mention, however, is that the new Chinese carrier was built from an unfinished Ukrainian hull purchased in 1998 – and is the first and only aircraft carrier China has ever had. The United States, meanwhile, has eleven.
The real problem with the U.S. response was not, however, that it exaggerated the Chinese threat. It is that it greatly overestimates the benefits, to America, of the country’s continuing quest for global supremacy – politically, economically and militarily.
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Six numbers tell the story of empire’s price in stark terms: federal deficits, gross debt, military spending, infrastructure investment, income inequality and now endemic joblessness:
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From Brazil to Indonesia, Turkey to South Africa, the rising pivotal powers are not looking to replace U.S. hegemony with Chinese dependency. In fact, as they focus on strategies of inclusive growth that sustain accountability and legitimacy, the mobile networked younger generations of these countries will continue to look to America as a model in many respects. A new partnership with a right-sized America disciplined by limitations and constraints is there to be forged – if only U.S. political leaders are willing to rethink the value of empire.
In an Archipelago World defined by the fragmentation of power, capital and ideas where the winners will be those states able to vertically integrate public and private interests, America’s present global posture is more a curse than a blessing.
In gaining a better understanding of the future nature of conflict, it is therefore of the utmost importance to go beyond the traditional Western (English) language domain experts, and include views from regions across the world. The main purpose of the Future Nature of Conflict project is therefore to map and analyze global perspectives about the future nature of conflict published over the last two decades across four language domains – Arabic, Chinese, English and Slavic.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Phi Beta Iota: Finally! For years we have talked about the need to do multi-lingual perspectives and statements (e.g. charting Chinese, Vietnamese, Philippine, and Australian statements on the Spratley Islands going back 200 years). The protocol developed by this team must be –along with M4IS2–the future of strategic dialog, policy, acquisition, and operations. Any intelligence community that is unable to do this for any issue, any question, may as well go out of business.
Reading through the report is a real pleasure, with all sources being spelled out in footnotes that are actively linked to the original sources. This is a marvelous gift to scholars and practitioners at multiple levels.
Despite budget woes, the military is preparing for a conflict with our biggest rival — and we should be worried
This summer, despite America’s continuing financial crisis, the Pentagon is effectively considering trading two military quagmires for the possibility of a third. Reducing its commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan as it refocuses on Asia, Washington is not so much withdrawing forces from the Persian Gulf as it is redeploying them for a prospective war with its largest creditor, China.
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AirSea Battle, developed in the early 1990s and most recently codified in a 2009 Navy-Air Force classified memo, is a vehicle for conforming U.S. military power to address asymmetrical threats in the Western Pacific and the Persian Gulf — code for China and Iran. (This alone raises a crucial point: If the U.S. has had nothing but trouble with asymmetrical warfare for the last 45 years, why should a war with China, or Iran for that matter, be any different?) It complements the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, a government white paper that precluded the rise of any “peer competitor” that might challenge U.S. dominance worldwide.
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For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government has encountered the practical limits of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance.
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Here is a noble appeal for Washington to match its commitments with the resources needed to sustain them, the absence of which has fueled the debt crisis that nearly reduced the United States to a mendicant state. Such are the crippling costs of a defense policy that makes global hegemony a mindless imperative.
Phi Beta Iota:Intelligence Online is the one subscription we cannot live without. See their other offerings as well. Reading between the lines, it would appear the Chinese no longer feel “behind” the English-language world, and are doing what the English-language world should have been doing since 1988: focusing on reality as it is depicted in all other languages.
