“Is China preparing for war?” CBS’s Scott Pelley asked General Tim Haugh last Sunday on 60 Minutes.
“There was no other reason to target those systems. There’s no advantage to be gained economically. There was no foreign intelligence-collection value,” replied the general. “The only value would be for use in a crisis or a conflict.”
Systems? The segment featured Chinese infiltration into the computer system controlling electricity and the water supply for Littleton, a town of 10,000 residents in Massachusetts.
Littleton’s manager, Nick Lawler, pointed to how disastrous losing control of the computer system could become, noting that with that control an evil force — in this case, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — “can poison the water.”
Literally as well as figuratively.
Once head of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, Haugh explained that the CCP is “certainly attempting every single day to be able to target telecommunications, to be able to target critical infrastructure.”
Even in little bitty Littleton. Talk about “unrestricted warfare”!
We have known for years that China’s Communists were tyrants; responsible for arguably a hundred million deaths due to murder, torture and starvation; subjugating Tibet; harvesting organs from political prisoners; placing more than a million Uyghurs in concentration camps; canceling all political rights in Hong Kong. These totalitarians also threaten to invade Taiwan and lay claim, ridiculously, to 90 percent of the South China Sea … which they are policing.
Then we discovered the Chinese had opened police stations in the United States and other countries to harass and silence Chinese dissidents who had managed to escape to our shores.
Now, it is hardly a surprise that the CCP has intruded into our electrical grids and water systems, while buying up farmland near American military bases.
Xi Jinping and the Chicoms are far worse than our rivals. While a far starker problem for those living in Asia, we are not safe from the Chinese State.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Krea and Firefly
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4 replies on “China’s Long Reach”
The United States and Americans more generally can act to harden themselves against attack by the Chinese state, but the only thing that will prevent that attack is a collapse of the Chinese economy.
The Chinese economy is certainly headed towards collapse. Unfortunately, as collapse looms, and the Chinese Communist Party is more threatened by domestic revolt, it is very likely to use war both to excuse still greater domestic repression and to redirect popular anger. So what comes will be qualitatively determined by just how rapidly the Chinese economy implodes.
Also unfortunately, the interval in which China might have transitioned to a liberal order guided by a living memory of pre-Communist China has passed, and the Chinese people have only experience of a social order of oppression and grift. A removal of the Chinese Communist Party will not usher-in a golden age for China.
“Now, it is hardly a surprise that the CCP has intruded into our electrical grids and water systems, while buying up farmland”
The link to that claim doesn’t even mention the Chinese Communist Party, simply “Chinese entities.”
There’s a simple solution to the “problem” of Chinese purchases of farmland: If you own farmland and don’t want it to be Chinese-owned, don’t sell it to “Chinese entities.”
Thanks to the internet, people around the world can access systems anywhere in the US. Those responsible for securing physical infrastructure are on the internet and are vulnerable to cyber thieves. A hacker can gain access to a user id and password and thus acquire access to critical infrastructure and cause great damage if systems are interconnected. It can happen anywhere in the US if systems aren’t secured. It can happen in big cities as well as rural areas. Disruption of civil society can be done from afar. Cyber warfare is here to stay.
Curious if this was part of the enabling of China that they received in exchange gif their million dollar payoff to the Bidens.