How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies
politico.com
politico.com
> ...
> Most brazenly, said former intelligence agents, Chinese officials bussed in 6,000-8,000 J-Visa holding students—threatening them with the loss of Chinese government funding—from across California to disrupt Falun Gong, Tibetan, Uighur and pro-democracy protesters. (They even provided these students with a box lunch.) “I’m not sure they would have pulled out these stops in any other city, but San Francisco is special” to China, said a former senior U.S. official.
It's wild, but the same thing happened in Canberra, Australia. The CCP organised thousands of Chinese students to support Beijing and counter-protest pro-Tibet protesters.
This was around 2004 or so. I don't remember the political climate being very charged, or at least not at my engineering school. There were blogs but major social networks hadn't yet taken off.
So at this international student event, a guy goes up and says he's going to do a song from his home country, Taiwan. He doesn't get much farther before a Chinese student runs onstage, grabs the microphone away from him and yells into it "Taiwan is not a country!"
Sounds like battery to me. Should have had this student arrested, charges pressed, and ooops - criminality makes you lose your student visa.
Fuck anyone who abuses America's hospitality to try to take away someone's 1st Amendment rights.
How does one efficiently solve this problem however? If we, in a case like the pro-china counterprotest described in the article, decide to nab the guys off the street on counts of suspected espionage what is the repercussion we should all fear? Bad press? Chinese students and engineers pulling out of the US tech sector? While I feel terribly conflicted about a government that exerts such fear on their people as someone who wants to believe in the individuality of a person, surely the repercussions of countering Chinese espionage aren't any worse than say...investigating Russian social media influence?
I'm sure the ones who were coerced into participating in the counter-protest wouldn't care enough to hop on the next plane home.
Has to be kind of disheartening, minding your own business when all of a sudden you get a knock on the door and a "request" to trample all over the civil rights of the citizens of your host country "or else."
My impression is that most Chinese students wouldn't have a problem doing this. "Civil rights" aren't really a thing in Chinese thinking, and the "patriotic education" in China does an excellent job at convincing them that the Dalai Lama and Falun Gong are evil, and Tibet and Hong Kong and Taiwan are indisputably part of China.
I doubt china would let thousands of foreigners organize into a protest in China at their governments behest
Authoritarian states stealing advanced technology will be multigenerational challenge, but it's a solvable problem. But we must stick our values while we solve it.
The first thing to change the cost/benefit analysis of theft. This means evidence based prosecutions conducted transparently with real jail sentences.
Technical solutions can help. All business producing innovation need long term high quality logs for all activity (you need to know who downloaded what software source code and when)
Perhaps the most difficult to overcome problem comes from Patriotic Education, which is state sponsored brainwashing starting from kindergarten (since 1990) leaving a potentially indelible effect on the psyche of graduates of the Chinese education system. A well rounded study of history and understanding of national strategies is needed to see through any government's propaganda (but the propaganda from the government of China in particular). This study is something we all can benefit from.
Every culture agrees stealing is wrong. Threats and coercion are wrong. On this issue the moral high ground clearly belongs to the US. But we need to be careful to always keep the moral high ground and never alienate people who have done no wrong.
The centuries old idea of letting people into our country to work and by adopting a few values become accepted as as American as any other is a powerful global piece of soft power. But powerful nations will always try to exploit to cheat America out of the technology it develops.
We must understand China's long term strategy and fight back using our moral high ground, which includes a transparent legal system. We must see through China's propaganda (it says it is not a perpetrator but instead a victim of hacking. The truth is, it is both.)
Even so, just as a store can survive some shoplifters, surely American industry can survive some IP misappropriation, perhaps with some light assistance from a tariff system or deduction against foreign aid payments?
We need to make sure everyone - whether they are international students spending 4 years studying, immigrants in the workforce, or locals who have been here their whole lives - feel welcomed in this country and develop a strong positive affinity to their new home (whether or not they stay forever), and especially the values we try and represent.
We can make people feel more welcomed and included as individuals: we can try and include more newcomers and students in our own social circles.
I'm a bit skeptical of trying to reverse brainwash people with a western patriotic civics education, but a mandated program to teach newcomers their rights and how the (in principle) mostly fair and transparent legal system works is probably a good thing.
Each student or immigrant from Russia or China are individuals with their own unique motivations, personality and temperaments. It's absolutely unfair to paint them all with the same brush but they are clearly still vulnerable to a powerful authoritarian government which can threaten and coerce them to act against the US.
Also, for every strategy the west develops, the government of China will have a counter strategy. Fortunately, I think we can win this fight.
> Even so, just as a store can survive some shoplifters, surely American industry can survive some IP misappropriation, perhaps with some light assistance from a tariff system or deduction against foreign aid payments?
I suspect a systematic, state sponsored attack on US IP (particularly future technology) from a competent government is greater threat than you think. Remember that a strong economy funds all other parts of government.
True.
On the one hand, there needs to be more awareness in the West about the threat of an illiberal and powerful China. It's not so much about China making money with dodgy trade practices, but that it's pressuring the entire world to abide by CCP party lines. For example, it's made many airlines treat Taiwan as part of China, made Mercedes apologise for using the Dalai Lama in advertising, prevented at least one book from being published, and it froze relations with Norway, harming Norwegian businesses, when the Nobel Peace Prize was given to Liu Xiaobo.
On the other hand, opposition to the Chinese Communist Party must not devolve into "Chinese people are bad" racism. Some politicians will be too willing to fan the flames of racism, and the CCP will welcome this, for it loves to portray all opposition as being based on racism.
Now, of course, nothing keeps you from spying on your employees, but what you learn about your employees (that you would not have known if you didn't snoop on them) could cost you more than the IP theft itself.
The above is manageable by large cos, but smaller cos may not be able to absorb those incidental liabilities.
Other nations can't pull it off. They don't have 1.4B people (India is friendly and won't be an able oppressive centrally-run state anytime soon). Russia could never send that many students to the US. There is no historical comparison to make. This is a new phenomenon.