Vic Socotra

01 August 2008

Porcelain Smile

It is “seasonally appropriate” here in DC, which is to say it is tolerable, transitioning to miserable in the long afternoon of a long working week. We should all be at the shore, or someplace other than in the moist heat. The gas prices are keeping us pinned down, hopeful that the air conditioning will stay functional. I imagine it was pretty hot in Detroit, when the Finance guys had to trop out a quarterly loss that amount ed to over sixteen billion dollars. You can imagine the drops of chill water rolling down the inside of the wilting Brooks Brothers shirts high up in the RenCen in downtown Detroit.

It is hot in Beijing, too, and with the impending spectacle of the Summer Olympiad, you can imagine that people are sweating for a variety of reasons. Some of them are climatic, of course, and others have to do with ensuring that everything is just right for the re-emergence of the Middle Kingdom as a major player on the world stage. The public face of China is as smooth as a porcelain doll, cool and expressionless, even if there is frantic motion behind the smooth façade.

I view the whole thing with a certain resigned equanimity. The Fall of Rome did not mean that the Italians lost their taste for wine, or good food. Or that the vistas lost that magical luminous quality that soothes the soul. It was just a difference in attitude.

We are going to have to adjust. We are, in fact, doing just that. We are changing what we drive, and the destination. We are doing it with an American shrug and moving on with life as we must live it. We are a phlegmatic bunch, for the most part, and tougher than you would think, given the media coverage. I mentioned in passing yesterday on the end of the careers of two telecommunications executives at the company where I used to work. They will suffer a little public humiliation, but with an attitude adjustment, they will be fine. In the meantime, a smooth porcelain smile will have to do.

The End of the Cold War profoundly changed the nature of the uni-polar threat to US national security. Famously, Intelligence Community officials proclaimed thereafter that there were many perils in the dark woods of international relations. Global rivalries now center on technology development and intellectual capital rather than ideology, and compete with religious fundamentalism. Almost unnoticed, the rise of China’s soft power paved with surplus dollars, began to ease the West out of its accustomed position in South Asia and Africa.

You really need to watch local television in Australia to get a sense for what is coming. It requires an attitude adjustment, and the adoption of a porcelain smile.

Terror networks utilize the Internet as a de facto command and control system; how could we have known we would develop and field the communications of the enemy?

The zone of potential conflict has also widened to include private companies and corporate spies. In fact, the infrastructure at stake is overwhelmingly in private hands, with the Government only able to command at the margins. That is why companies like Huawei are inexorably changing the balance of influence in the private sector around the world.

At the height of the Cold War, no other nation could match the desire and ability of the Soviet Union’s KGB to steal American corporate and military secrets, particularly technology secrets. That has since changed. In today’s information age, China has replaced and even improved upon the KGB’s methods of industrial espionage. The PRC now presents one of the most capable threat to U.S. technology leadership and by extension its national security.

China’s espionage activities against U.S. weapons laboratories and other technology development programs has significantly advanced its nuclear weapons program, enabling it to focus on critical paths already proven successful and speeding development time.

Space launch technology acquired through participation in the Iridium satellite communications program provided bus and multiple ejection technologies to assist design of space vehicles, and the W88 nuclear warhead design developed for the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile.

China has a significant advantage in penetration of American networks that was denied the Cold War KGB: access.

There are more than 100,000 PRC nationals in the United States attending universities and working throughout U.S. industries. This is not a blanket indictment of Chinese citizens,nor an a prioriassertion that they are engaged in conduct inappropriate to their status. The whole matter requires an adjustment of attitude, since the target is different than the one we would ordinarily expect. This massive presence is against the intellectual property of the industries in which they work. This penetration dwarfs the activities of the sanctioned state security operatives. Scientists, students, business executives and front companies are used as part of a comprehensive approach to the systematic appropriation of dual use technology.

In 1997, Beijing adopted the “Sixteen Character Policy.” This established a linked relationship between the commercial and military structures of the state. Literally translated, the characters state the following objectives:

Jun-min jiehe (Combine the military and civil);
Ping-zhan jiehe (Combine peace and war);
Jun-pin youxian (Give priority to military products);
Yi min yan jun (Let the civil support the military).

The large pool of Chinese nationals in the US are used as a pool of potential agents by the PRC Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the Military Intelligence Department (MID) of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The professionals rely on amateurs in the ranks of the research scientists and others, employed outside of intelligence circles, to collect information of intelligence value. In fact, some ostensibly commercial research organizations and other non-intelligence arms of the PRC government direct their own autonomous collection programs.

The FBI estimates there are currently more than 3,000 corporations operating in the United States that have ties to the PRC and its government technology collection program. It should be no surprise to anyone what is going on. The time is long past for us to change it. We have to=2 0recognize the inexorable pressure of the sixteen characters, and the anaconda-like strength that coils quietly behind it.

We ought to begin to adjust our attitude to cope with it. I, for one, have adopted a porcelain smile about the whole thing.

It is like summer in DC. Everything is fine. The heat is simply seasonably appropriate.

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