China: The Brave New World

The Chinese counterintelligence threat is more deep, more diverse, more vexing, more challenging, more comprehensive, and more concerning than any counterintelligence threat I can think of," declared FBI Director Christian Wray before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee in early February.

This intelligence threat reflects a goal of the Chinese Communist leadership for China to become the world's leading economic, financial, military and political power. In fulfilling this mission, Chinese Communist leadership has developed an extensive intelligence network to steal Western intellectual property. Essential to the regime is ensuring stability at home. This has meant the repression of dissent by religious and ethnic groups, especially Muslims and Christians. The Vatican appears to have appeased the government's demand for cultural control.

China is a one-party state with one goal in mind: maintaining power. Maintaining power means weakening external threats from other nations and eliminating internal threats. The ruling party professes its faith in communism while placing itself within an ancient tradition of dynastic history. The founder of the modern Chinese Communist state, Mao Zedong, spent as much time reading classical dynastic histories as he did the writings of Lenin or Stalin. Especially worrisome were domestic religious uprisings that ignited rebellion and civil disorder.

Grafted to this traditional imperial outlook is a communist ideology based on the Leninist theory of the vanguard party. The Chinese Communist government is one of the few communist governments other than North Korea that never repudiated Stalinism. Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, has anointed himself as the heir to Mao.

Communist princelings who have become wealthy and powerful under the regime have been warned about the failings of the Manchu and Ming dynasties. Dissension within these dynasties' imperial court – the Red Mansion – resulted in the failure of these regimes to confront fatal external and internal threats. As a consequence, Xi Ping is determined to purify the party through criticism, self-criticism and party purges. He is intent on unifying the party as a necessary step toward unifying the country through propaganda and repression.

This unification campaign includes ideological attacks on Western liberalism, constitutionalism, democracy, and decadent European and American culture. Chinese socialism and one party rule are counterpoised to the West. As Xi proclaimed at a recent party congress, "Among the core values of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the deepest, most basic and most enduring is patriotism. Our modern art and literature needs to take patriotism as its muse, guiding the people to establish and adhere to correct views of history, the nation, the country and culture."

Stealing Western secrets
The Chinese Communist regime understands that it needs economic growth to maintain its power. This means catching up with and surpassing Western technology. What better means to do this than the tried-and-true Stalinist method of espionage, updated for the cyber age? As Michael Fuchs, senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, succinctly put it, "China sees this cyber espionage for economic purposes as a necessary component of its national strategy to grow economically to become a more powerful country."

President Trump's administration is currently in negotiations over China's unfair trade practices, currency manipulation and intellectual property theft. Intellectual property theft and Chinese cyber espionage are central to these negotiations.

In late 2018, two Chinese nationals were arrested for a global hacking campaign to steal a tech company's secrets and intellectual property. They were also accused of stealing the personal information of more than 100,000 members of the U.S. Navy. In announcing the charges, FBI Director Christopher Wray told a press conference that "China's goal, simply put, is to replace the U.S. as the world's largest global superpower". Only a few months earlier a Chinese citizen in Chicago was indicted for working with Chinese intelligence agencies to recruit scientists and engineers from U.S. contractors.

American negotiators are clearly trying to apply pressure to the apparently intransigent Chinese government in trade negotiations. In early December, U.S. officials announced charges against the technological giant Huawei's chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou. She was detained in Canada at the request of Washington for violating sanctions on Iran, obstructing a criminal investigation and stealing American industrial secrets. Meng is the daughter of Huawei's founder and chief executive, Ren Zhengfei, a former People's Liberation Army official. The broad language of the indictment of Meng suggests that Huawei corporate leaders should be cautious in traveling to foreign nations that have extradition treaties with the U.S.

The indictment charges Meng and Huawei with misleading federal investigators about the company's dealings with four companies involved in financial investments in Iran. The indictment references a file found on an electronic device that Meng was carrying when she arrived in New York in 2014. When she first arrived, officials at New York's Kennedy International Airport briefly confiscated her electronic devices. One of the files contained suggested talking points about Huawei's relationship with Skycom, a company allegedly set up by Huawei as an unofficial subsidiary to obtain Americansourced goods, technology and services for its Iranian business.

The indictment states that Skycom employed at least one U.S. citizen in Iran, in violation of American law. When officials at Huawei discovered in 2017 that U.S. prosecutors were pursuing a criminal investigation, the company ordered the destruction of all evidence and tried to move witnesses who knew about the Iranian deal back to China.

The indictment further charges Huawei with stealing trade secrets from the multinational mobile telephone company T-Mobile, specifically a plot to steal testing equipment from its Bellevue laboratory in Washington state. As if this were not enough, the indictment also cites a Huawei program begun in 2013 to reward employees for stealing confidential information from competitors. Bonuses were allegedly apportioned to those employees who stole the most valuable information.

Access to Western corporate data
When these events were unfolding, the Chinese government was pursuing means of securing technology legally by securing access to data from Western companies in China. The National Cybersecurity Law, which went into effect in China last November, confirmed many of the worst fears of foreign corporations doing business in China. The law allows government officials to physically inspect and remotely access private networks, ostensibly in search of material that might "endanger national security, public safety and social order".

Furthermore, these new regulations allow operators of critical infrastructure platforms to store their data locally and to provide undefined "technical support" to security agencies and officials. The law allows the Cyberspace Administration, the Chinese agency charged with overseeing the law, to demand from operators of such platforms full access to source code and other technical materials as proof that their equipment is "secure".

On top of all that, the obligations of this regulation apply not only to internet operators but to all companies that use data as a vital part of their international operations. In other words, China's message to foreign companies is: Provide access to your codes to a government already charged with cyber-spying in Western countries, in order to ensure that the codes are "safe".

What does all this mean? For example, Apple has agreed to store all its Chinese iCloud user data at a centre in China, under the supervision of a Chinese joint venture partner. Apple has agreed to transfer cryptographic keys for unlocking accounts to comply with Beijing's regulations. Remember that Apple was the same company that refused a request by the Justice Department to unhelp unlock terrorist iPhones.

The developing 'social credit' system
At home, China is advancing its potential for cyber spying on its own people through its "social credit score" system, previously described in the Nov. 2018 Mindszenty Report. This data-driven system is not fully in place, but it has the potential to provide a ubiquitous, invasive surveillance capability for the Chinese ruling class. U.S. Vice President Mike Pence described the system as "an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life".

Jamie Horsley, a senior fellow at Yale University's Paul Tsai China Center and a visiting lecturer in law, as well as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, dismisses Pence's description as a fantasy. In his dismissal, however, he reveals that Pence's concerns should be taken quite seriously—even if, as he puts it, "blacklists and monitoring systems are nowhere close to Black Mirror fantasies". (Black Mirror refers to a Netflix television series in which the internet is used for social control.)

While arguing that the social credit system is not fully in place, and is not really about controlling individuals, he acknowledges that the Chinese Communist Party is seeking to apply big data and artificial intelligence to publicly rate individuals, companies, social organisations, government departments and the judiciary.

By gathering data, the social credit system proposes to place "serious" offenders on an integrated national platform called Credit China. Once placed on the list, offenders will be subjected to a range of government-imposed inconveniences and exclusions to be enforced by multiple government agencies. Areas included for oversight include taxation, the environment, transportation, e-commerce, food safety and foreign economic cooperation. These punishments, Horsley maintains, are intended to "incentivise legal and regulatory compliance".

He finds that the social credit system, already in place among some trade and professional associations, does not produce specific scores, although some individuals and companies are blacklisted for "relatively" serious offenses like fraud and excessive pollution that would generally be offenses anywhere. He adds, "To be sure, China does regulate speech, association and other civil rights in ways that many disagree with, and use of the social credit system to further curtail such rights deserves monitoring."

Horsley concludes that the social credit system is not collecting data on every citizen, but seeks only to prioritise compiling and sharing public record-type data such as licensing, other regulatory information and adverse court decisions. The system does not issue social credit ratings based on social behaviour, consumption habits or political loyalty. Some individuals have faced restrictions after their debt was not repaid. Yet this information is limited to a small group of companies providing credit reports to micro-lenders through peer-to-peer lending platforms.

The takeaway from Horsley's essay is that the social credit program is not Orwellian, and it is being promoted by the Chinese government in an attempt to restore people's trust in governmental institutions and private business. The social credit system is a kind of public shaming instrument for unscrupulous governmental agencies and private businesses. (He does note that problems might arise because of a lack of overarching privacy law or a system of due process allowing targets to contest being placed on a blacklist.) Worth noting are surveys that show most Chinese welcome the social credit system.

Human rights violations
We know that American corporations are collecting hard data on American consumer and voting behaviour; and we know that finance corporations provide credit scores for those seeking loans. These activities raise issues of privacy in our own country. But China's development of a social credit system needs to be placed in the context of a ruthless crackdown on religious and cultural dissidents currently occurring under Xi Jinping's regime. There are wholesale violations of human rights in China today that cannot be ignored, notwithstanding sanguine claims that the social credit system is designed to promote trust in government.

The fact is that in China today a war is being waged on all religions. Religious believers must, as Rep. Chris Smith (Republican, New Jersey) wrote recently in a Washington Post op-ed, "comport with and aggressively promote communist ideology – or else". The Chinese government is specifically targeting Christians and Muslims. In the government's crusade to instil uniformity of thought, Bibles are being burned, churches destroyed, and religious leaders are required to install facialrecognition cameras in their places of worship. A five-year "Sinicisation" plan for Chinese Protestants has been launched.

In this religious war, Christians, Muslim Uighurs, Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners have been harassed, arrested and persecuted. A reported one million Uighurs have been detained, tortured and forced to renounce their faith. China has experienced Muslim terrorist attacks in some of its major cities, but the egregious human rights abuses have revealed the dark side of the Communist regime.

Recent reports have leaked out that an extensive internment system has been erected to "re-educate" Uighurs. The official government line is that these are occupational retraining centres, but human rights groups contest this. A United Nations human rights committee was given credible reports from eyewitnesses that the government has "turned the Uighur autonomous region into something that resembles a massive internment camp".

The New York Times reported on February 22 that Chinese authorities have collected 36 million human blood samples in the Uighur region Xinjiang, under the guise of mandatory health check-ups, apparently for the purpose of creating a giant database of Uighur DNA that can be used for surveillance. At the same time, China's best-known Protestant pastor, Wang Yi, and a hundred of his followers have been detained. Their church of 500 members has been closed.

The Roman Catholic Church in China is being Sinicised as well, with the accommodation of the Vatican in Rome. The European Parliament issued a report in late January of this year detailing how Chinese Catholics are under attack. For "security reasons", last Christmas in some provinces police were ordered to attend services and young people under the age of 18 were banned from attending Mass. In primary and secondary schools in Anhui, Henan and Inner Mongolia, the Ministry of Education has forbidden students to celebrate Christmas or the Chinese New Year, or to exchange gifts. Christmas celebrations and decorations were forbidden in many cities as an attack on Chinese culture and a submission to Western "spiritual pollution".

Even worse, evidence continues to mount that many prisoners of conscience in China have been subjected to medical testing and had their organs forcibly removed and sold for organ transplants into large numbers of Chinese and foreign patients. (Earlier evidence of this ghoulish trade in organs was described in the Nov. 2014 Mindszenty Report.)

The United States is not in a shooting war with China. We want peace with China. China is, however, in a cyberwar and a trade war with the United States and the West, and it is waging war on its own religious and ethnic minorities. Much like Soviet leaders of the past, Chinese leaders dream of a new world dominated by communism. They seek to create the new socialist man subservient to the state. Their dream will fail; the brave new world will not be created. How much damage is done in the meanwhile remains uncertain. Venerable Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty showed us that communism can be defeated by determined truth-tellers.

This article is published by the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in St Louis, Missouri, USA. The original article, complete with references and footnotes, is available from the foundation's website: www.mindszenty.org. The Mindszenty Report is not copyrighted, and readers are invited to forward copies to their local bishops, priests and pastors.

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