The China Chronicles

Update on Chinese Hacking into U.S. Personnel Info

What if a team of Chinese spies had broken into the Pentagon or the U.S. Office of Personnel Man­agement (OPM) and carted out boxes of classified information? Would we see redundant news and many pictures on our TV screens? Would pundits be saying "this was an act of war"?

Somehow, we didn't hear those words of outrage despite the fact that the Communist Chinese stole millions of personnel files and moun­tains of background-check informa­tion from the U.S. Government, so much that experts say the damage is hard to exaggerate.

Joel Brenner, one of America's top counterintelligence experts, says that the stolen data are the "crown jewels" of American intelligence. "This tells the Chinese the identities of about everybody who has a U.S. security clearance. Many are calling this theft a "cyber Pearl Harbor."

One of the results of this hacking theft is that it makes hundreds of current and past federal employees extremely vulnerable to blackmail and even recruitment by the Com­munist Chinese. New York Times, 2015

Update on the Pretense that China is a Trade Partner

For many years, the people who think they are running our country have spread the delusion that Communist China is really our friend, and that it's in our inter­est to help them develop a work­ing economy so they will buy our products. The fact is that, despite our facilitating China's joining the World Trade Organization, China has not proved to be our friend.

The WTO makes international rules for trade between nations in the hope that "free trade" will pro­duce fair trade among nations. The result has been just the opposite. The United States obeys the rules, but China pays no attention to any rules; China adopts and follows policies that benefit only China.

When the U.S. builds a manu­facturing plant in China, the U.S. is required to give China all the U.S. company's trade secrets and patents so that China can take over production in the next round of manufacturing.

Update on the Risks of Chinese Students in U.S. Colleges

The U.S. Government has charged three Chinese professors and three other Chinese nationals with economic espionage and steal­ing trade secrets from two com­panies that develop our military technology. Three professors from Tianjin University were charged with stealing source code and other proprietary information from Avago Technologies Ltd. California and Skyworks Solutions Inc. in Massachusetts. This was a decade-long scheme to steal microelectron­ics designs from American com­panies and give it to the Chinese government. This was in­sider theft, not hacking. The thieves first studied engineering at universi­ties in California, and then hatched the scheme to steal from us. New York Times, 5-19-2015

Some 8,000 Chinese students were expelled from American universities last year. The main reasons were poor grades and cheating. The survey was made by WholeRen Education, a U.S. company that caters to Chinese students. One development officer said the reputation of Chinese students has changed; they are now seen as wealthy kids who cheat. Wall Street Journal, 5-29-2015