Would you believe that we’ve almost made it to the end of 2023? As the year closes, we turn our attention from the past few days’ focus on the Republican primaries to maybe the biggest, most varied, and most far-reaching threat that the U.S. faces: military aggression by China in the Pacific. During the low-attention period around the holidays, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and NBC News all offered ominous scoops about the far-reaching abilities of Chinese intelligence, the challenges that U.S. intelligence has in figuring out what Xi Jinping and other top officials in Beijing are really thinking, and the role of artificial intelligence in all this.
Recent Scoops: Chinese Intelligence Is Stealing Everything but Our Lunch Money
The day after Christmas, the Wall Street Journal’s Warren Strobel offered a scoop that was the opposite of reassuring. From the assessments of current and former U.S. officials, we still don’t have a good sense of what China’s top defense and political officials are thinking and planning.
Beijing’s spycatchers all but blinded the U.S. in China a decade ago when they systematically rounded up a network of Chinese agents working for the CIA. As many as two dozen assets providing information to the U.S. were executed or imprisoned, among them high-ranking Chinese officials.
The CIA is still struggling to rebuild its human espionage capabilities in China, the agency’s top intelligence target, according to interviews with current and former U.S. officials. The gaps leave the U.S. with limited understanding of secret deliberations among Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his inner circle on key security issues such as Taiwan and other topics, the officials said.
“We have no real insight into leadership plans and intentions in China at all,” said a former senior intelligence official who, until recently, read classified reporting.
Some would argue that we already have some clear indications of the “leadership plans and intentions in China,” as China’s Xi Jinping seemed awfully direct about this during that summit in San Francisco in November. NBC News had the scoop:
Chinese President Xi Jinping bluntly told President Joe Biden during their recent summit in San Francisco that Beijing will reunify Taiwan with mainland China but that the timing has not yet been decided, according to three current and former U.S. officials.
Xi told Biden in a group meeting attended by a dozen American and Chinese officials that China’s preference is to take Taiwan peacefully, not by force, the officials said.
The Chinese leader also referenced public predictions by U.S. military leaders who say that Xi plans to take Taiwan in 2025 or 2027, telling Biden that they were wrong because he has not set a time frame, according to the two current and one former official briefed on the meeting.
Now, maybe Xi is bluffing. But as I wrote when I was in Taiwan earlier this year, if you are the Taiwanese, you have to treat that rumored timeline as a realistic, or even likely, scenario.
On Christmas Day — traditionally a low-readership day, for obvious reasons — the Journal delivered a separate scoop about how the Chinese government wanted to use artificial intelligence to enhance its ability to analyze all of the data that they have stolen from U.S. institutions over the years. (Maybe that’s our inadvertent best defense; our secrets are so poorly guarded that we allow our enemies to steal so much that it takes them a long time to determine what’s important and what isn’t.)
Artificial intelligence has been on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s list of critical U.S. technologies to protect, just as China placed it on a list of technologies it wanted its scientists to achieve breakthroughs on by 2025. China’s AI capabilities are already believed to be formidable, but U.S. intelligence authorities have lately made new warnings beyond the threat of intellectual-property theft.
Instead of just stealing trade secrets, the FBI and other agencies believe China could use AI to gather and stockpile data on Americans at a scale that was never before possible.
China has been linked to a number of significant thefts of personal data over the years, and artificial intelligence could be used as an “amplifier” to support further hacking operations, FBI Director Christopher Wray said, speaking at a press conference in Silicon Valley earlier this year.
“Now they are working to use AI to improve their already-massive hacking operations using our own technology against us,” Wray said.
. . . China was so good at stealing private information—billions of pieces of data in all, according to U.S. officials, criminal indictments and cyber-threat researchers—that its hackers had likely collected too much of a good thing: an informational treasure trove so vast that humans would be incapable of locating the right patterns. Artificial intelligence, however, would have no such limitations.
Meanwhile, the New York Times offered its own deeply reported piece about the rise of China’s Ministry of State Security, with its own details about how that spy agency intended to use artificial intelligence.
The Chinese spies wanted more. In meetings during the pandemic with Chinese technology contractors, they complained that surveillance cameras tracking foreign diplomats, military officers and intelligence operatives in Beijing’s embassy district fell short of their needs.
The spies asked for an artificial intelligence program that would create instant dossiers on every person of interest in the area and analyze their behavior patterns. They proposed feeding the A.I. program information from databases and scores of cameras that would include car license plates, cellphone data, contacts and more.
The A.I.-generated profiles would allow the Chinese spies to select targets and pinpoint their networks and vulnerabilities, according to internal meeting memos obtained by The New York Times.
Strobel’s report noted that China is building the ultimate Orwellian surveillance state, which makes it really tough for our case officers to meet, initiate contact with, recruit, and collect information from Chinese government officials. And while the signal intercepts and data-collection work of the National Security Agency are indeed spectacular, veterans of the intelligence community will point out that nothing gives you a better sense of another government’s real thinking, plans, philosophies, and intentions than human intelligence.
During the Cold War, the CIA used the acronym ‘MICE’ for the primary motivations of spies: money, ideology, coercion or compromise, and ego or excitement. (A 2013 paper suggested a replacement acronym, RASCLS — Reciprocation, Authority, Scarcity, Commitment and Consistency, Liking, and Social Proof.)
You might think that money would be an effective tool for recruiting Chinese spies because “China’s defense budgets benefit from a lower standard and cost of living among its troops” — I’d argue a much lower standard, judging from this 2021 article:
One Chinese yuan is worth approximately 16 cents in American currency. That means a colonel in China’s People’s Liberation Army makes around $3,105 per month, or about $37,260 per year. In another report penned by Dr. Marcus Clay at China Aerospace Studies Institute, he explained how the Chinese equivalent of a Brigadier General in the U.S. Army makes under $42,000 per year.
“In 2018, a division-leader grade PLA officer, roughly equivalent to a U.S. O-7, makes roughly ¥264,000 ($41,969) annually in total compensation.”
. . . That means a brand new Marine with a spouse, stationed aboard one of the nation’s largest military installations, makes more money per year than a General in the Chinese military.
This also doesn’t take into account other personnel costs, such as veterans’ benefits. To date, the Chinese government has no veterans administration or similar organization to offer such benefits, though retired service members do receive pensions.
You would think that a major nuclear-armed country not having anything akin to the Department of Veterans Affairs would be a weakness we could exploit.
The problem is that even if an American spy can put a giant wad of yuan into a Chinese general’s pocket, the Chinese general needs to find a way to spend that money without arousing attention or suspicion. If he suddenly buys a much nicer-than-expected car or moves into a much nicer-than-expected house, he probably rockets to the top of the Ministry of State Security’s list of suspected spies.
My lone encounter with the Chinese military came during my days in Ankara, Turkey, in 2005–2007; I got invited to a lot of embassy parties in the capital city. Every embassy from major countries would throw some big formalwear party on their national Independence Day or whatever their biggest national holiday was, either in the embassy or in a ballroom at one of the downtown hotels, and invite just about everybody. During one — I can’t even remember which country was hosting the party — I turned to some middle-aged Chinese-looking woman and started making some small talk in English. After a moment or two, she realized I was an American and quickly took a few steps to get her husband’s attention; he was wearing a Chinese military uniform, and I assume he was either the military attaché or worked in that office. He glared at me, and I got the feeling that she was going to have to, at minimum, fill out paperwork that some American had approached her at the party.
If Chinese officials and their spouses are that paranoid about somebody like me talking about the weather, I suspect everyone in China’s foreign and defense ministries is extremely skittish about even having a conversation with an American, much less sustained contact.
ADDENDUM: From Rich’s column today:
Francis Collins, again: “So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.”
True and well said, but that’s an awful lot of very important things to attach “zero value” to.
He also admitted to having an urban bias, driven by working out of Washington, D.C., and thinking almost exclusively about New York City and other major cities.
If Francis Collins and his cohort got it wrong, the likes of Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Georgia governor Brian Kemp — and the renegade scientists and doctors who supported their more modulated approach to the pandemic — got it right.
See you in 2024.