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  • #16
    Originally posted by Double Edge View Post
    So let's see what fat guy has to say. Tried to summarise, see the link for the full version

    Communist China and the Free World’s Future | State | Jul 23 2020

    Still think this show is only for the election ?

    There is that strategic document they released recently about competition.
    Big fat guy talks like the big fat guy, lol. In China, Pompeo is called the 'evil' dude. :D

    China's foreign ministry accuses US of improperly entering its consulate in Houston

    Singapore man admits being Chinese spy in US

    So the Chinese lady holed up in the SF consulate have been arrested.

    South China Sea dispute: Australia says Beijing's claims have no legal basis

    Getting interesting.
    Politicians are elected to serve...far too many don't see it that way - Albany Rifles! || Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it - Mark Twain! || I am a far left millennial!

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    • #17
      How a Chinese agent used LinkedIn to hunt for targets

      Jun Wei Yeo, an ambitious and freshly enrolled Singaporean PhD student, was no doubt delighted when he was invited to give a presentation to Chinese academics in Beijing in 2015.

      His doctorate research was about Chinese foreign policy and he was about to discover firsthand how the rising superpower seeks to attain influence.

      After his presentation, Jun Wei, also known as Dickson, was, according to US court documents, approached by several people who said they worked for Chinese think tanks. They said they wanted to pay him to provide "political reports and information". They would later specify exactly what they wanted: "scuttlebutt" - rumours and insider knowledge.

      He soon realised they were Chinese intelligence agents but remained in contact with them, a sworn statement says. He was first asked to focus on countries in South East Asia but later, their interest turned to the US government.

      That was how Dickson Yeo set off on a path to becoming a Chinese agent - one who would end up using the professional networking website LinkedIn, a fake consulting company and cover as a curious academic to lure in American targets.

      Five years later, on Friday, amid deep tensions between the US and China and a determined crackdown from Washington on Beijing's spies, Yeo pleaded guilty in a US court to being an "illegal agent of a foreign power". The 39-year-old faces up to 10 years in prison.

      Alumni at Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP), which trains some of Asia's top civil servants and government officials, were left shocked by the news that their former peer had confessed to being a Chinese agent.

      "He was a very active student in class. I always viewed him as a very intelligent person," said one former postgraduate student who did not wish to be named
      She said he often talked about social inequality - and that his family struggled financially when he was a child. She said she found it difficult to reconcile the person she knew with his guilty plea.

      A former member of staff at the institution painted a different picture, saying Yeo seemed to have "an inflated sense of his own importance".

      Yeo's PhD supervisor had been Huang Jing, a high-profile Chinese-American professor who was expelled from Singapore in 2017 for being an "agent of influence of a foreign country" that was not identified.

      Huang Jing always denied those allegations. After leaving Singapore, he first worked in Washington DC, and now Beijing.

      According to the court documents released with Yeo's guilty plea, the student met his Chinese handlers on dozens of occasions in different locations in China.

      During one meeting he was asked to specifically obtain information about the US Department of Commerce, artificial intelligence and the Sino-US trade war.

      Bilahari Kausikan, the former permanent secretary at Singapore's foreign ministry, said he had "no doubt that Dickson knew he was working for the Chinese intelligence services".
      He was not, he said, "an unwitting useful fool".

      Yeo made his crucial contacts using LinkedIn, the job and careers networking site used by more than 700 million people. The platform was described only as a "professional networking website" in the court documents, but its use was confirmed to the Washington Post.

      Former government and military employees and contractors are not shy about publicly posting details of their work histories on the website in order to obtain lucrative jobs in the private sector.

      This presents a potential goldmine to foreign intelligence agencies. In 2018, US counter-intelligence chief William Evanina warned of "super aggressive" action by Beijing on the Microsoft-owned platform, which is one of few Western social media sites not blocked in China.

      Kevin Mallory, a former CIA officer jailed for 20 years last May for disclosing military secrets to a Chinese agent, was first targeted on LinkedIn.

      In 2017, Germany's intelligence agency said Chinese agents had used LinkedIn to target at least 10,000 Germans. LinkedIn has not responded to a request for comment for this story but has previously said it takes a range of measures to stop nefarious activity.

      Some of the targets that Yeo found by trawling through LinkedIn were commissioned to write reports for his "consultancy", which had the same name as an already prominent firm. These were then sent to his Chinese contacts.

      One of the individuals he contacted worked on the US Air Force's F-35 fighter jet programme and admitted he had money problems. Another was a US army officer assigned to the Pentagon, who was paid at least $2,000 (£1,500) to write a report on how the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan would impact China.

      In finding such contacts, Yeo, who was based in Washington DC for part of 2019, was aided by an invisible ally - the LinkedIn algorithm. Each time Yeo looked at someone's profile it would suggest a new slate of contacts with similar experience that he might be interested in. Yeo described it as "relentless".

      According to the court documents, his handlers advised him to ask targets if they "were dissatisfied with work" or "were having financial troubles".

      William Nguyen, an American former student at the Lee Kuan Yew school who was arrested at a protest in Vietnam in 2018 and later deported, said in a Facebook post on Saturday that Yeo had tried to contact him "multiple times" after he was released from prison and his case made headlines around the world.

      In 2018, Yeo also posted fake online job ads for his consulting company. He told investigators he received more than 400 CVs with 90% of them coming from "US military and government personnel with security clearances". Some were passed to his Chinese handlers.

      The use of LinkedIn is brazen, but not surprising, said Matthew Brazil, the co-author of Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer.

      "I think lots of worldwide intelligence agencies probably use it to seek out sources of information," he said. "Because it's in everybody's interest who is on LinkedIn to put their whole career on there for everybody to see - it's an unusually valuable tool in that regard."

      He said that commissioning consultant reports is a way for agents to get "a hook" into a potentially valuable source who might later be convinced to supply classified information.

      "It's a modern version of classic tradecraft, really."

      US Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers said the case was an example of how China exploits "the openness of American society" and uses "non-Chinese nationals to target Americans who never leave the United States".

      Singapore, a multicultural society of 5.8 million where ethnic Chinese make up the majority of the population, has long enjoyed close links with the United States, which uses its air and naval bases. But it has also sought and maintained positive relations with China.

      Mr Kausikan said that he did not believe the spying case - the first known to involve a Singaporean - would hurt the country's reputation with the American government but he feared that Singaporeans could face greater suspicion in American society.

      On Sunday, Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs said investigations had not revealed any direct threat to the country's security stemming from the case.

      LKYSPP's dean, Danny Quah, wrote in an email to faculty and students quoted by the Straits Times newspaper that "no faculty or other students at our school are known to be involved" with the Yeo case.

      A spokesperson at the school told the BBC that Yeo had been granted a leave of absence from his PhD in 2019 and his candidature had now been terminated.

      Dickson Yeo does not appear to have got as far with his contacts as his handlers would have liked. But in November 2019, he travelled to the US with instructions to turn the army officer into a "permanent conduit of information", his signed statement says.

      He was arrested before he could ask.
      Politicians are elected to serve...far too many don't see it that way - Albany Rifles! || Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it - Mark Twain! || I am a far left millennial!

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      • #18
        The spying game: China's global network

        The latest controversy to swirl around the Chinese telecoms company Huawei has shone a spotlight on the murky world of Chinese espionage, agent-recruitment and an ambitious programme of extending its influence across the globe.

        So how extensive is it, how does it work and who runs it?

        A dossier reportedly compiled with the help of a former MI6 spy has accused China of trying to manipulate key UK figures, including politicians, to back the telecom giant's business in Britain.

        Every major Chinese enterprise anywhere in the world allegedly has an internal "cell" answerable to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to drive the political agenda and ensure that the company is compliant with political directives.

        This is why China experts assert that the CCP does operate here in Britain, often under the natural cover of business. "The Party machine is everywhere", says one, adding: "For China, business is inseparable from politics."

        The CCP has 93 million members, with many of them placed or hidden in organisations abroad. This allows them to be tasked with gathering secrets, especially in the technology sphere, including telecoms.

        Experts say these "agents", as well as targeted individuals in important positions in foreign companies, can be recruited or persuaded using a number of different methods.

        Setting honeytraps

        The first approach is usually what is known as "a positive incentive", especially if the targeted individual is a non-Chinese national.

        In the West this can take the form of a tempting invitation to an important business meeting in China, an offer of financial help for a company facing difficulties, or the offer of a (sometimes meaningless) seat on a board as a non-executive director or even in some cases a life-changing sum of money.

        In the last 10 to 15 years there has been an increasing readiness to target well-placed foreigners with positive incentives.

        Inside China though, recruitment methods can, according to people familiar with them, take on a far more sinister form. This can include putting pressure on Chinese family members - essentially blackmail - to honeytraps set for unwary western businessmen.

        This usually entails a "chance" encounter with an attractive woman which is then covertly recorded and used as "kompromat" - compromising material to be used as a lever.

        "The Chinese state is very good at setting honeytraps on their own territory," says a British businessman who has worked in China. These are normally run by China's Ministry of State Security.

        Rather than being run centrally, these targeting operations tend to be run out of provincial State Security bureau, each of which deals with a different geographic area of the world. So the Shanghai bureau, for example, covers the US, Beijing covers Russia and the former Soviet republics, Tianjin covers Japan and Korea, and so on.

        "The Chinese state uses the full spectrum of government levers to acquire information," says someone very familiar with its operations. "This ranges from targeted and large-scale cyber espionage and theft to co-opting industry experts, both knowingly and unknowingly."

        "Along with Russia," he adds, "China is the biggest espionage threat to the UK".
        Politicians are elected to serve...far too many don't see it that way - Albany Rifles! || Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it - Mark Twain! || I am a far left millennial!

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        • #19
          Frustrations about China run too deep in US, it can’t buy its way out this time, says US scholar

          Jeff Smith is an Indophile, isn't it?
          Politicians are elected to serve...far too many don't see it that way - Albany Rifles! || Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it - Mark Twain! || I am a far left millennial!

          Comment


          • #20
            America's top tech CEOs can't agree on whether China steals from them

            San Francisco (CNN Business)It's a question that gets to the heart of escalating tensions between the United States and China: "Do you believe that the Chinese government steals technology from US companies?"

            And it was put to the CEOs of Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOGL) by Rep. Greg Steube, more than four hours into Wednesday's five-and-a-half hour Congressional antitrust hearing.

            The answers were somewhat varied.

            "I don't know of specific cases where we have been stolen from by the government," Apple CEO Tim Cook said. "I know of no case [of] ours where it occurred ... I can only speak to firsthand knowledge," he added.

            Google CEO Sundar Pichai initially followed his lead.

            "I have no firsthand knowledge of any information stolen from Google in this regard," he said. (Pichai later issued a correction, acknowledging a China-linked cyberattack on Google in 2009 in which the company said some of its intellectual property was stolen.)

            Amazon's Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, said he had "heard many reports of that," though he added that "I haven't seen it personally."

            Mark Zuckerberg was far more unequivocal.

            "I think it's well documented that the Chinese government steals technology from American companies," the Facebook CEO said.

            Steube's question carries enormous significance in the United States. The issue of intellectual property theft is central to the geopolitical dispute between the United States and China, and protecting IP has been one of Washington's core demands throughout the trade war.

            The United States has long said that intellectual property theft has cost the US economy billions of dollars in revenue and thousands of jobs. Chinese officials, meanwhile, have repeatedly rejected accusations that foreign companies are treated unfairly, arguing any tech secrets handed over were part of deals that had been mutually agreed upon.

            Zuckerberg's remark, meanwhile, marked a notable shift in tone for one of America's foremost tech executives. In previous years, the Facebook CEO has made plenty of overtures to the Chinese government, which at the time drew widespread criticism.

            On Wednesday, presenting Facebook as an American champion against China's tech industry was a key part of Zuckerberg's testimony.

            "If you look at where the top technology companies come from, a decade ago the vast majority were American," the Facebook CEO said. "Today, almost half are Chinese."

            The Trump administration has already largely blocked Chinese telecom giant Huawei from working with American suppliers, and says it's "looking at" banning the hugely popular short form video app TikTok. Zuckerberg on Wednesday labeled that app, which is owned by Chinese tech firm ByteDance, one of Facebook's main competitors.

            But when Steube followed up his initial question by asking for recommendations on how Congress could "better protect" American companies from "aggression and government intervention abroad" in places such as China and Europe — neither Zuckerberg nor any of his peers had an answer.

            Steube waited for around 15 seconds of awkward silence before yielding the rest of his time.
            Politicians are elected to serve...far too many don't see it that way - Albany Rifles! || Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it - Mark Twain! || I am a far left millennial!

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            • #21
              He's a watcher of the region.

              Pretty good one too : )

              An advocate for better US India relations. He can do that because he does not watch the trade desk.
              Last edited by Double Edge; 03 Aug 20,, 11:40.

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              • #22
                The way to deal with China is to stop giving them four things

                Innovation, Technology, Talent & Capital otherwise democracies will lose



                Pretty frank & sobering discussion with General Spalding

                If you rely on China experts to understand China you will be getting the CCP direct as those experts depend on visas to visit China. Stop doing as they say and you become PNG soon after.

                If the US spent 15 years moving factories over to China it will take at least another ten to move them out of China.
                Last edited by Double Edge; 08 Aug 20,, 21:22.

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                • #23
                  The technology transfers from the US to China that started in the 1990’s and continues through Chinese Students in US universities was definitely a mistake despite the good intentions of raising China out of communism.

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                  • #24
                    How fast did everybody forget that we were trying to buy China into tying down her share of the USSR. That tech transfer? We did China no favours. They were selling at bargin basement prices and that was why we set up shop there. Not to raise Chinese standards. Those Chinese students who came over? We wanted them here right after Tienamen Square to show our support for their democratic movement. Nobody foreseen that they would abandon their anti-CCP rant for CCP dollars.

                    Yes, China stealed, borrowed, begged, cheated anything and everything they can but they were a 19th Century Country in the 1980s. You don't jump 200 years in development by being a Mr Nice Guy. How could anyone foreseen this, especially when we had the meanest and toughest tank army in history staring at both of us.

                    We, the West, made mistakes with China. No questions about those but getting them on our side ain't one of them.
                    Chimo

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                    • #25
                      Tying down the USSR became less important in the 90s. So why still continue ?

                      Because the overriding justification was the richer China became the more likely it would be they would transition into a democracy.

                      This is the main reason to continue as is. After thirty years it was dawning this would not be the case.

                      Rather than China integrating into the system it turns out China wants to change the system to do their bidding to the detriment of others.

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                      • #26
                        Originally posted by Double Edge View Post
                        Tying down the USSR became less important in the 90s. So why still continue ?

                        Because the overriding justification was the richer China became the more likely it would be they would transition into a democracy
                        Hell no. We knew what China was the day tanks rolled into Tienamen Square. The over-riding justification to this day is the bargin basement prices.
                        Chimo

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                        • #27
                          Originally posted by WABs_OOE View Post
                          Hell no. We knew what China was the day tanks rolled into Tienamen Square. The over-riding justification to this day is the bargin basement prices.
                          Bargain basement prices driven by such a large a labor cost advantage that it overcame worker productivity differences. The relaxed environmental and safety regulations also drove manufacturing to offshore. How much of the increased air and water quality in the West is the result of moving heavy manufacturing to the third world? Rare earth mining and refining being a prime example.

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                          • #28
                            Originally posted by Double Edge View Post
                            The way to deal with China is to stop giving them four things

                            Innovation, Technology, Talent & Capital otherwise democracies will lose



                            Pretty frank & sobering discussion with General Spalding

                            If you rely on China experts to understand China you will be getting the CCP direct as those experts depend on visas to visit China. Stop doing as they say and you become PNG soon after.

                            If the US spent 15 years moving factories over to China it will take at least another ten to move them out of China.
                            Everyone does, and the same applies to India experts, Australia experts, and Taiwan experts.
                            Trust me?
                            I'm an economist!

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                            • #29
                              Originally posted by WABs_OOE View Post
                              Hell no. We knew what China was the day tanks rolled into Tienamen Square. The over-riding justification to this day is the bargin basement prices.
                              Letting them into the WTO in 2001 was not with that aim in mind ?

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                              • #30
                                Originally posted by Double Edge View Post

                                Because the overriding justification was the richer China became the more likely it would be they would transition into a democracy.

                                This is the main reason to continue as is. After thirty years it was dawning this would not be the case.
                                Originally posted by WABs_OOE View Post
                                Hell no. We knew what China was the day tanks rolled into Tienamen Square. The over-riding justification to this day is the bargin basement prices.
                                I actually think this is fairly succinct when you span the last 30 years. I definitely agree that the last 10 years or so americans view has been driven by two things. The first being that there is alot of momentum behind the dominant policy and the perspective that china will become more democratic, lets just stick with the current strategy, things are going well in america, dont rock the boat, that ended in 2007 and the boat is an oil tanker and its been slowly turning.

                                I definitely agree with OOE on prices. American companies became hooked on China, and with both sides in Washington in bed with the corporate lobbysists there were and still are alot of forces that will slow and resist america coming to terms with China.

                                That spell was breaking during the later period of the obama admin but the pandemic has broken any exisitng illusions and both sides of america have a rare topic they agree on.

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