|
Quotes of the Day:
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all."
- Hypatia
"A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody."
- Thomas Paine
"A nation that is afraid to let people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of is people."
- John F. Kennedy
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 30
2. How China Sees the World
3. Hacked Russian Files Reveal Propaganda Agreement With China
4. America Is on the Verge of a Power Grid Crisis
5. Japan's Submarine Force Is One Of the Best on Earth
6. Ukraine run by ‘f****d up people’ – US instructor
7. Special Operations News Update - Dec 30, 2022 | SOF News
8. Will China Lead the End of Globalization?
9. Hard-Line Positions by Russia and Ukraine Dim Hope for Peace Talks
10. The Illusion of Controls
11. Spy vs. spy: Dept. of Defense analyst’s treasonous trail detailed in new book
12. Putin Can't Fix This Disaster: Is Russia Running Out of Troops in Ukraine?
13. The Chinese Communist Party Has Surrendered to COVID-19
14. How America Wins (Book review)
15. Why did the US just ban TikTok from government-issued cellphones?
16. How TikTok Became a Diplomatic Crisis
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 30
Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-30
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces targeted Kyiv using Iranian-made drones on the night of December 29 to 30.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin opened the door for further institutionalized corruption in the Russian Federation.
- Russian forces continued to conduct counterattacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
- Ukrainian forces struck Russian concentration areas in Luhansk Oblast.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Avdiivka area as well as in Bakhmut, where the pace of Russian offensive operations may have slowed compared to previous days.
- A Russian source claimed that Russian forces conducted ground attacks in Zaporizhia Oblast.
- Russian and Ukrainian sources continued to discuss whether and when an imminent second wave of mobilization in Russia will occur.
- Russian officials continue to pursue the integration of occupied territories into the Russian Federation.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, DECEMBER 30
understandingwar.org
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 30
Riley Bailey, Karolina Hird, Madison Williams, Layne Philipson, and Frederick W. Kagan
December 30, 5:30 pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Russian forces targeted Kyiv using Iranian-made drones on the night of December 29 to 30, a continuation of an increased pace of drone attacks in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Air Force Command stated that Russian forces launched 16 Shahed-131 and -136 drones at targets in Ukraine on the night of December 29 to 30 and that Ukrainian air defenses shot down all of them.[1] Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces launched seven of the drones at targets in Kyiv and that Ukrainian air defenses shot down all of them, but one of the drones’ munitions hit an administrative building.[2] The Russian drone attacks follow a massive series of Russian missile and drone strikes against Ukrainian critical infrastructure on December 29 during which Russian forces launched 23 drones, the majority of which were Shaheds.[3] The Russian military’s use of 39 drones in the past two days, its use of 30 Shahed 131 and -136 drones on the night of December 18 and 19, and its use of 13 Shahed drones on December 14 represent a significant increase in its recent use of these systems in Ukraine.[4] ISW assessed on December 10 that an increased pace of Russian drone attacks may indicate that Russian forces accumulated more Iranian-made drones after a three-week period (November 17 to December 7) of not using them or that Russia received or expected to receive a new shipment of drones from Iran.[5] Russian forces have likely further increased their pace of drone attacks in an effort to sustain their campaign against Ukrainian critical infrastructure given their likely depleted stock of precision missiles.[6] Ukrainian air defenses have recently proven to be highly effective at shooting down Shahed drones and the Russian military’s use of these systems in attacks against civilian targets in rear areas is having diminishing impacts.[7] The Russian military will likely continue to commit an increased number of these systems to attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine in its misguided attempt to break the Ukrainian will to fight.
Russian President Vladimir Putin opened the door for further institutionalized corruption through the manipulation of the Russian domestic legal sphere. Putin approved a decree on December 29 that exempts all Russian officials, including members of the military and law enforcement services, from the requirement to make income declarations public.[8] The decree extends to military officials, employees of Russian internal affairs organs, those serving in Rosgvardia and law enforcement positions, employees of the Russian penitentiary system and Investigative System, and individuals seconded to positions in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia oblasts.[9] The decree also notably lifts the ban on military officials receiving “charitable” gifts in connection with their participation in hostilities in Ukraine.[10] Russian independent newspaper The Insider noted that this decree could theoretically allow Russian officials involved in the war to seize the private property of Ukrainian residents of occupied areas because such property could be legally classed as “charitable gifts.”[11] ISW continues to report on Putin’s manipulations of domestic law to quash domestic opposition to the war and enable those who support it.[12]
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces targeted Kyiv using Iranian-made drones on the night of December 29 to 30.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin opened the door for further institutionalized corruption in the Russian Federation.
- Russian forces continued to conduct counterattacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
- Ukrainian forces struck Russian concentration areas in Luhansk Oblast.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Avdiivka area as well as in Bakhmut, where the pace of Russian offensive operations may have slowed compared to previous days.
- A Russian source claimed that Russian forces conducted ground attacks in Zaporizhia Oblast.
- Russian and Ukrainian sources continued to discuss whether and when an imminent second wave of mobilization in Russia will occur.
- Russian officials continue to pursue the integration of occupied territories into the Russian Federation.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Eastern Ukraine
- Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and one supporting effort);
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
- Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)
Eastern Ukraine: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)
Russian forces continued limited counterattacks to regain lost positions along the Svatove-Kreminna line on December 30. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled a Russian attack on Stelmakhivka, 15km west of Svatove.[13] Russian milbloggers also reported that Russian troops conducted attacks near Stelmakhivka and Dzherelne (10km west of Svatove).[14] A Russian milblogger also claimed that elements of the 76th Airborne Division (VDV) and elements of the 74th Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 41st Combined Arms Army of the Central Military District advanced northwest of Kreminna from Ploshchanka (16km northwest of Kreminna) towards Makiivka (22km northwest of Kreminna).[15] Geolocated footage posted on December 29 additionally shows Russian soldiers on tactically significant heights near Bilohorivka (10km south of Kreminna), where fighting is reportedly ongoing.[16]
Ukrainian forces struck Russian concentration areas in occupied Luhansk Oblast on December 30. The Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) posted images of the aftermath of a reported Ukrainian HIMARS strike on Alchevsk, Kadiivka, and Bryanka, all settlements about 50km west of Luhansk City along the T0504 Luhansk City-Bakhmut highway.[17] A Ukrainian military source confirmed that the strikes hit a Russian barracks in Alchevsk and equipment warehouses in Kadiivka and Bryanka.[18] Ukrainian sources also reported that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian base in Hirske (about 40km southeast of Kreminna).[19]
Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut on December 30, albeit at a slower pace than over the past few days. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks near Soledar (10km northeast of Bakhmut), Ivanivske (5km west of Bakhmut), and Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[20] The Ukrainian General Staff typically names more settlements around Bakhmut as the targets of Russian attacks in its daily report, and this inflection may indicate that the pace of Russian attacks around Bakhmut is slowing, possibly supporting ISW’s forecast that the Russian offensive around Bakhmut may be culminating.[21] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian troops took control of certain strongholds near Pidhorodne, 5km northeast of Bakhmut.[22] Geolocated combat footage posted on December 29 shows Wagner Group positions in the Opytnenska Zosh school about 2km south of Bakhmut.[23] Russian milbloggers notably reported that Ukrainian troops launched counterattacks to regain positions south and east of Bakhmut.[24] Geolocated footage from December 29 shows Ukrainian forces conducting a counterattack south of Bakhmut and entering the northwestern sector of Kurdyumivka, about 12km southwest of Bakhmut.[25]
Russian forces continued ground attacks north of Avdiivka and along the western outskirts of Donetsk City on December 30. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks on Avdiivka, Kamyanka (5km north of Avdiivka), and Vesele, Vodiane, Krasnohorivka, and Marinka (all ranging from the northwestern to southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City).[26] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian troops continued attacks along the western outskirts of Donetsk City, including on Vodiane, Pervomaiske, Nevelske, and Opytne, and that Ukrainian troops unsuccessfully tried to counterattack in Marinka.[27] Russian forces continued routine fire along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line of contact and in western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts.[28]
Ukrainian forces struck a Russian concentration area in Donetsk City on December 30. Russian and Ukrainian sources posted pictures of the aftermath of a reported Ukrainian strike on the Viktoriya Hotel in Donetsk City, which was reportedly frequented by prominent Russian figures and military personnel.[29] Russian media reported that the Head of the Control and Investigation Department of the Military Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Joint Grouping of Troops, Yevgeny Ryabkov, died in the strike.[30]
Supporting Effort—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
A Russian source claimed that Russian forces conducted limited ground assaults in Zaporizhia Oblast on December 30. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are conducting local offensives on certain sectors of the front in Zaporizhia Oblast.[31] The Russian milblogger claimed that Russian assault detachments broke through the first line of Ukrainian defenses west of Dorozhnianka, Zaporizhia Oblast (8km south of Hulyaipole).[32] The Zaporizhia Oblast Administration reported that Russian forces remain focused on defending their positions in Zaporizhia Oblast, however.[33] ISW has not observed any indicators that Russian forces are preparing for or conducting offensive operations in Zaporizhia Oblast.[34] Russian forces may be conducting limited operations to improve their tactical positions in Zaporizhia Oblast, but such tactical actions do not suggest that Russian forces are preparing for future offensives on the operational level in this section of the frontline.
Russian forces continued routine artillery and missile strikes west of Huyaipole, on the west (right) bank of the Dnipro River in Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson oblasts, and in Mykolaiv Oblast.[35] Ukrainian sources reported that Russian forces struck Kherson City, Nikopol, and Ochakiv.[36] Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Head Valentyn Reznichenko reported that Russian forces conducted five drone attacks in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and that Ukrainian air defenses shot all the drones down.[37]
Russian air defenses in Russian-occupied Crimea were activated on December 30. Russian-occupied Sevastopol Governor Mikhail Razvozhaev stated that Russian air defenses activated over Sevastopol, and Russian and Ukrainian sources posted footage showing those air defenses operating.[38] A Russian milblogger claimed that there were explosions in Dzhankoi, Crimea, but ISW cannot independently verify whether any explosions occurred.[39]
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Russian and Ukrainian sources continued to discuss a likely and imminent second wave of mobilization. Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov inadvertently confirmed an upcoming second wave of mobilization during a December 29 press conference about mobilization in which he stated that Chechnya overfulfilled its mobilization requirements by 254% and therefore Chechen residents will not be mobilized in the second wave of mobilization.[40] Chief of the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Kyrylo Budanov stated in an interview with BBC that Russian authorities have made the decision to start another wave of mobilization on January 5, or potentially January 9, because they lack manpower.[41] Senior Kremlin officials have denied claims of a second wave of mobilization as recently as December 21, as ISW has previously reported.[42] ISW assesses that a second wave of mobilization would not fix the shortcomings of the Russian military as the Kremlin’s force generation efforts are contingent on its ability to invest time and supplies in its personnel, requirements that are fundamentally at odds with the Kremlin’s failures of long-term strategic planning.[43]
Russian authorities continued efforts to crack down on military personnel who refuse to fight. BBC’s Russian service reported on December 29 that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) developed and published a draft presidential decree that would legalize extreme punishment of Russian personnel who have committed offenses against the Russian military by creating “field guardhouses.”[44] The report stated that the Russian military would place the misbehaving personnel into isolated field guardhouses designed to be worse than other military holding cells.[45] The decree reportedly forbids the creation of guardhouses in dungeons, basements that do not have windows or adequate ventilation, various containers, and pits "with the exception of cases due to the preservation of the lives of military personnel.”[46] This decree does yet appear to have been signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. ISW has been unable to locate the originally published draft of this presidential decree.
The Russian government has not prepared itself for the consequences of its soldiers returning to Russian society. Independent Russian news outlet The Moscow Times reported in early December that Russian soldiers who are trickling back to Russia after time on the Ukrainian front are struggling to reintegrate into Russian society.[47] The Moscow Times reported that many Russian veterans have not received proper mental health support, despite the government’s claims of providing up to thirty days of medical and psychological rehabilitation after demobilization.[48] A Russian grass-roots support group called War Veterans told The Washington Post “there are no rehabilitation programs” for veterans in Russia.[49] The Russian Federation government has reportedly abandoned and forgotten its veterans of other recent wars and it appears that veterans of the current war are unlikely to be better off.[50] ISW previously reported on the failures of the Russian government to pay its troops, provide land plots to veterans of the conflict in Ukraine, and meet the basic needs of Russian troops.[51] The Washington Post noted that reports of violent altercations in Russia involving returned soldiers have already increased.[52] A Russian milblogger reported on December 29 that a Russian veteran in Petrozavodsk shot his wife upon his return to Russia from Ukraine and called the police on himself.[53] Although issues with the reintegration of combat veterans are by no means unique to the Russian case, it is likely that the lack of material support and attention by Russian officials to this issue will serve as yet another point of domestic friction as the war continues.
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)
Russian officials and Russian-appointed occupation authorities continued to take measures to integrate occupied territories into the Russian Federation on December 30. Russian-appointed officials of the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) stated that the LNR People’s Council unanimously adopted the Constitution of the Luhansk People’s Republic of the Russian Federation on December 30, codifying the formal recognition of occupied Luhansk Oblast as part of the Russian Federation.[54] Russian-appointed Head of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Denis Pushilin stated that the DNR People’s Council adopted the Constitution of the Donetsk People’s Republic of the Russian Federation on December 30, also codifying the formal recognition of occupied Donetsk Oblast as part of Russia.[55] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated on December 30 that integrating occupied territories into the Russian legal, economic, social, and security space is in full swing.[56]
Russian occupation authorities are continuing efforts to consolidate social control in occupied territories. Zaporizhia Oblast Military Administration Head Oleksander Starukh stated on December 30 that Russian occupation officials are ordering Ukrainian teachers to work in schools and doctors to work in hospitals in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[57] Starukh also stated that Russian occupation authorities are intimidating Ukrainian parents who are refusing to send their children to Russian schools in Russian-occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[58]
ISW will continue to report daily observed indicators consistent with the current assessed most dangerous course of action (MDCOA): a renewed invasion of northern Ukraine possibly aimed at Kyiv.
ISW’s December 15 MDCOA warning forecast about a potential Russian offensive against northern Ukraine in winter 2023 remains a worst-case scenario within the forecast cone. ISW currently assesses the risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine from Belarus as low, but possible, and the risk of Belarusian direct involvement as very low. This new section in the daily update is not in itself a forecast or assessment. It lays out the daily observed indicators we are using to refine our assessments and forecasts, which we expect to update regularly. Our assessment that the MDCOA remains unlikely has not changed. We will update this header if the assessment changes.
Observed indicators for the MDCOA in the past 24 hours:
- Nothing significant to report.
Observed ambiguous indicators for MDCOA in the past 24 hours:
- Belarusian Security Council Head Alexander Volfovich stated on DEC 30 that Russian and Belarusian forces can now create a combined grouping of troops of any composition or size per amendments to the 1997 interstate agreement that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin approved during their December 3 meeting in Minsk.[59] ISW previously assessed that Russia pursued efforts to integrate the Belarusian military into Russian-led structures in joint military exercises and permanent joint combined combat training centers before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.[60] The formation of combined military groupings would therefore not be novel, but the removal of restrictions on their size and composition could mark a notable increase in the Belarusian and Russian ability to form more or larger combined military formations. This change does not necessarily indicate that Belarusian and Russian officials intend to do so, however. The Russian military is currently leveraging its participation in the combined Regional Grouping of Forces to augment the training of recently mobilized Russian military personnel, and any potentially new or larger formations of combined groupings of forces may serve similar purposes.[61]
- The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) posted a video on December 30 showing unspecified tank units of the Western Military District (WMD) that are a part of the combined Regional Grouping of Forces at an unspecified training ground in Belarus.[62]
Observed counter-indicators for the MDCOA in the past 24 hours:
- The Ukrainian General Staff reiterated that it has not observed Russian forces in Belarus forming a strike group as of December 30.[63]
Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.
[2] https://t.me/VA_Kyiv/591; https://suspilne dot media/349134-rosiani-obstrilali-vnoci-kiiv-sahedami-e-vlucanna-kmva/; https://t.me/OleksiyKuleba/3186 ; https://t.me/vitaliy_klitschko/1723
[8] http://publication.pravo dot gov.ru/Document/View/0001202212290095?index=0&rangeSize=1; https://theins dot ru/news/258252
[9] http://publication.pravo dot gov.ru/Document/View/0001202212290095?index=0&rangeSize=1; https://theins dot ru/news/258252
[10] http://publication.pravo dot gov.ru/Document/View/0001202212290095?index=0&rangeSize=1; https://theins dot ru/news/258252
[11] https://theins dot ru/news/258252
[24]
[42] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass... https://t.me/news_sirena/8946; https://www.kommersant dot ru/doc/5735295; https://ria.ru/20221221/mobilizatsiya-1840197549.html; https://www.un... https://www dot rbc.ru/politics/06/12/2022/638f0c609a794738da2ca5ef
[48] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/12/05/scarred-by-war-returning-russi... mil.ru/files/morf/45834.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/10/russia-trauma-veterans-w...
[55] https://denis-pushilin dot ru/news/poslanie-vrio-glavy-dnr-narodnomu-sovetu-donetskoj-narodnoj-respubliki/
[56] https://tass dot com/politics/1557903
[59] https://sputnik dot by/20221230/casus-belli-polskaya-ugroza-i-vyzovy-dlya-belarusi-intervyu-aleksandra-volfovicha-1070763867.html
understandingwar.org
2. How China Sees the World
From the next PRC Foreign Minister (current Ambassador to the US). I suppose he is trying to say it is not democracy versus authoritarianism and that Americans are wrong to think so and such thinking is what is causing the division and friction in the international community. If anyone reads the US NSS and NDS I think it makes clear that it is not zero sum competition and that the US believes everyone can live and prosper in the rules based in international order. It is just a question whether countries like China are going to follow the rules of the rule based international order.
But I admire his effective influence operation. Surely there are those in America and other countries who will use this to blame America.
Excerpt:
If people choose to see the world from a “democracy vs. authoritarianism” perspective, they will very likely usher in a world of division, competition, and conflict; but if they view the world as a community with a shared future, then openness, cooperation, and win-win outcomes will be the fruits of their choice. As President Xi Jinping stressed in his meeting with President Joe Biden in Bali last month, the world is big enough for the two countries to develop themselves and prosper together. China-U.S. relations should not be a zero-sum game where one side out-competes the other or thrives at the expense of the other. China and the United States now share more common interests, not less. This is how the notion of a community with a shared future for mankind mirrors in China-U.S. relations.
How China Sees the World
As residents of the same world, we should and can listen to each other, narrow our gap in perceptions of the world, and explore a way to get along based on mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation.
by Qin Gang
The National Interest · by Qin Gang · December 26, 2022
The 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) was held in October. The CPC has thus started on a new journey, and so has China’s development. The thinking of Chinese Communists, as stated at this Party Congress, not only determines China’s direction but also has a sure impact on the world’s future.
Just as people’s worldviews fundamentally shape the ways they choose to engage with the world, the same holds true for countries and political parties. It has been reaffirmed at the Party Congress that China is committed to its foreign policy goals of upholding world peace and promoting common development, and it remains dedicated to building a community with a shared future for mankind. Such an official, open declaration of the CPC’s worldview sheds light on the way it engages with the world.
Looking at the world as a community with a shared future naturally leads to a path of reform, opening up, and win-win cooperation. In the past decade, China has established twenty-one pilot free trade zones and increased the Free Trade Agreements (FTA) it has signed from ten to nineteen, which include the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the biggest FTA in the world. Pre-establishment national treatment has been given to foreign investors across the board, and the items on the negative list for their investment have been curtailed to thirty-one from the original ninety-three. China’s market entities have soared to over 160 million. According to the World Bank, China ranks thirty-first globally in the Ease of Doing Business Ranking, up by sixty-five spots in ten years. Given this record, people should think twice about the veracity and true intentions when they hear grumblings about China “moving backwards” in reform and opening up, or “having lost America.”
Looking at the world as a community with a shared future naturally leads to the path of peaceful development. China’s development means a stronger force for peace, not a growing power poised to “break the status quo,” as some call it. The tension across the Taiwan Strait was not created by the Chinese mainland breaking the status quo, but by “Taiwan independence” separatists and external forces continually challenging the status quo of “one China.” In the case of the East China Sea, it was Japan who attempted to “nationalize” Diaoyu Dao ten years ago, altering the “status quo” between China and Japan of agreeing to put aside differences. In the South China Sea, the status quo is that regional countries are consulting on a code of conduct that will lead to meaningful and effective rules for the region. As to the border issues between China and India, the status quo is that both sides are willing to ease the situation and jointly protect peace along their borders.
China is highly concerned about the situation in Ukraine. Though deeply saddening, what has been happening there reveals some important lessons: conflicts and wars produce no winner; there is no simple solution to a complex issue; confrontation between major countries must be avoided. The most urgent task for the moment is to promote peace talks between Russia and Ukraine as well as dialogue between the United States, the EU, NATO, and Russia. In the long term, people must realize that grounding one’s own security on other countries’ insecurity won’t work; it is necessary to establish a balanced, effective, and sustainable European security framework. There is no choice other than this.
Mankind went through multiple crossroads in the twentieth century. Now we have come to the first crossroads of the twenty-first century: the pandemic has not been over after three years; global economic, financial, and energy crises emerge one after another; an economic recession is looming large; and more conflicts seem impending. At such a juncture, will the world continue to embrace a brave new century, or will it succumb to the beaten path of the last century? This depends on the choice of people of all countries, including the American people.
If people choose to see the world from a “democracy vs. authoritarianism” perspective, they will very likely usher in a world of division, competition, and conflict; but if they view the world as a community with a shared future, then openness, cooperation, and win-win outcomes will be the fruits of their choice. As President Xi Jinping stressed in his meeting with President Joe Biden in Bali last month, the world is big enough for the two countries to develop themselves and prosper together. China-U.S. relations should not be a zero-sum game where one side out-competes the other or thrives at the expense of the other. China and the United States now share more common interests, not less. This is how the notion of a community with a shared future for mankind mirrors in China-U.S. relations.
The differences between China and the United States—in history, culture, social system, and development path—will most probably remain in 100 years. But as residents of the same world, we should and can listen to each other, narrow our gap in perceptions of the world, and explore a way to get along based on mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation.
The Chinese people are looking to the American people to make the right choice.
Qin Gang is Ambassador Extraordinary & Plenipotentiary of the People’s Republic of China to the United States.
Image: Reuters.
The National Interest · by Qin Gang · December 26, 2022
3. Hacked Russian Files Reveal Propaganda Agreement With China
Credit to the Intercept for reporting this.
Hacked Russian Files Reveal Propaganda Agreement With China
In 2021, government officials and media executives from Russia and China discussed the exchange of news and social content.
Mara Hvistendahl, Alexey Kovalev
December 30 2022, 8:27 a.m.
The Intercept · by Mara Hvistendahl · December 30, 2022
Russian officials pushed the lies first.
Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, a Russian defense ministry spokesperson resuscitated debunked claims about a U.S.-funded bioweapons program in the region, accusing Ukrainian labs of experimenting with bat coronaviruses in an attempt to spark “the covert spread of deadliest pathogens.”
Disinformation is an old Russian government tactic. But this time Russia had help. Within days, Chinese officials and media outlets had picked up the lies and were amplifying and expanding on the biolabs yarn. The Chinese Communist Party tabloid Global Times created two splashy spreads, one sourced in part to Sputnik News, the other featuring a quote from Russian President Vladimir Putin. “What is the U.S. hiding in the biolabs discovered in Ukraine?” it screamed.
“China jumped on the biolabs conspiracy theory,” said Katja Drinhausen, an analyst with the Mercator Institute of China Studies in Berlin. Chinese officials and media outlets had spent the preceding months pushing the notion that the pandemic might have originated in a lab accident outside China. “It was like, here’s the perfect conspiracy theory coming out of Russia to support our ‘everywhere but China’ main talking point of the last year,” she said.
Since the war broke out in February, experts have been struck by a convergence in Russian and Chinese media narratives. While some of the convergence was likely happenstance, occurring when storylines aided both governments’ goals, documents found in a trove of hacked emails from Russia state broadcaster VGTRK show that China and Russia have pledged to join forces in media content by inking cooperation agreements at the ministerial level.
A bilateral agreement signed July 2021 makes clear that cooperating on news coverage and narratives is a big goal for both governments. At a virtual summit that month, leading Russian and Chinese government and media figures discussed dozens of news products and cooperative ventures, including exchanging news content, trading digital media strategies, and co-producing television shows. The effort was led by Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development, Communication and Mass Media, and by China’s National Radio and Television Administration.
In the propaganda agreement, the two sides pledged to “further cooperate in the field of information exchange, promoting objective, comprehensive and accurate coverage of the most important world events.” They also laid out plans to cooperate on online and social media, a space that both countries have used to seed disinformation, pledging to strengthen “mutually beneficial cooperation in such issues as integration, the application of new technologies, and industry regulation.”
A bilateral agreement signed July 2021 makes clear that cooperating on news coverage and narratives is a big goal for both Russian and Chinese governments.
“This is a master document of cooperation on media between the countries,” said David Bandurski, director of China Media Project, an independent organization that researches Chinese-language media. “The document allows us to see the process behind the scenes of how cooperation is planned and discussed by these particular ministries.”
In 2020, the independent Russian-language news outlet Meduza reported the existence of such propaganda agreements, which have resulted in a proliferation of pro-Beijing stories in Russian media. But this is the first time that the text of an agreement has been published. The Ministry of Digital Development did not respond to a request for comment, and the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request for comment.
VGTRK’s email system was hacked earlier this year when, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hackers targeted more than 50 Russian companies and government agencies. The transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets has published more than 13 terabytes of documents from the hacks on its website. The Intercept and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project formed a consortium of news organizations to examine the files; previous stories that emerged from the documents include articles on Putin associate Evgeny Prigozhin, who founded and runs the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary organization that is fighting in Ukraine.
People walk past the Moscow headquarters of Russia’s Rossiya Segodnya state media group, on Nov. 12, 2017.
Photo: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
The signatories to the 2021 agreement include large state media outlets as well as online media companies and businesses in the private sector. Among those who signed were the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, which has a streaming service; Migu Video, a gaming company under the state-run China Mobile; and SPB TV, a streaming service headquartered in Switzerland and owned by a Russian national.
The agreement lists 64 joint media projects that had either been launched or were in development. Some of these are lighthearted. In early 2021, CCTV and Riki Group launched a saccharine cartoon called “Panda and Krash,” about a panda and a rabbit in a toy store who zip off on adventures with a robot and an elephant in tow. “I encourage you and you help me,” they sing.
Other projects were more substantial. State news agencies TASS and Xinhua pledged to exchange reporting, and other state outlets agreed to publish supplements promoting the other country.
Chinese and Russian news reports suggest that the two countries have held annual media cooperation meetings since 2008. The partnership appears largely aimed at domestic audiences. But both China and Russia have massively expanded their overseas media presence in the past decade, and the agreement names outlets with a large international presence, including BRICS TV, RT, and Sputnik (all headquartered in Moscow), and the state-run Chinese outlets China Daily, Global Times, and CGTN. “The ambition is certainly global,” said Drinhausen, who added that despite notable differences in their foreign policies, both countries share a common cause. “In terms of an ideological pushback against the U.S. as the joint enemy, they are brothers in arms.”
Sources say that such agreements are inked partly for show, and that China has the upper hand in the partnership. “The Chinese control all the big projects,” said a Russian source with knowledge of the meetings, who declined to be named because of possible repercussions from their employer. “So far, they haven’t even figured out some basic issues like broadcasting our channels on Chinese cable.”
Indeed, some of the products discussed appear to be mainly of interest to China. TASS agreed to run interviews with Chinese leaders Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang and to organize events commemorating the 100th year anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. “What possible real interest can Russian audiences have in a photography exhibition to celebrate the CCP’s centennial?” said Bandurski. “What the Chinese government seems to be doing here is throwing a bunch of external propaganda products onto a giant wish list, hoping that Russia will help it tell its story.”
Meduza earlier reported that Russian state media, including the government paper of record Rossiyskaya Gazeta, was publishing more than 100 articles a month sourced from China Media Group, a state-owned media conglomerate whose coverage is mentioned several times in the agreement.
“In terms of an ideological pushback against the U.S. as the joint enemy, they are brothers in arms.”
Some of those articles, such as a rote defense of the Chinese government’s actions in Xinjiang, appear out of place in the Russian media landscape. Russian state media coverage is generally less censored and more sophisticated than its Chinese counterpart, said Maria Repnikova, director of the Center for Global Information Studies at Georgia State University. “The propaganda genre is more dynamic in Russian state media, especially on TV, with a sophisticated play on emotions and disinformation appealing to many average Russian viewers,” she wrote in an email.
A month after the 2021 agreement was signed, a journalist from China Media Group wrote VGTRK’s general email address to pitch a partnership. “We can conduct corresponding interviews or reports according to your needs,” the journalist wrote in English, in one of the hacked documents. “At the same time, we can also transform your content accordingly and spread it widely in China.”
Hacked emails show that some journalists working for Russian state media helped amplify Chinese narratives. In March 2021, Alexander Balitskiy, Beijing bureau chief for RTR, VGTRK’s international service, sent a script for an upcoming segment on how people in China were boycotting foreign brands that had taken stances on forced labor in Xinjiang. “Global companies played on the same team with Western politicians, accusing China of the genocide of Uyghurs,” the script reads. Then, in parentheses, is a production note: “ZOOM OUT TO BEAUTIFUL VIEWS OF COTTON FIELDS BEING HARVESTED.” The script also outlines plans to include a quote from an earlier interview with Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, who has denied Russian atrocities in Ukraine in Xinjiang; a quote from him did not make to the final cut of the news item available on VGTRK’s flagship news site Vesti.ru.
In an email, Balitskiy said he could not comment on the news segment because he doesn’t control how segments are edited when they are broadcast in different regions.
The payoff for Russia may have come after the invasion of Ukraine, when Chinese media echoed Russian government talking points on the war. “The coverage oftentimes didn’t even mention that it was Russia carrying out the attacks,” said Repnikova. Chinese outlets, she added, “adapted slogans directly from the Russian discourse.”
The hacked emails end in the spring of 2022. But over the past few months, the Russian government repeatedly brought the biolabs conspiracy theory to the United Nations Security Council, asking it to establish a commission to investigate. Amplifying its efforts was the Chinese press.
That may have been merely because the biolabs story aided China’s goals. The agreement does not chart detailed plans for sophisticated information operations. Such documents “are signed to publicly bolster the partnership, but the actual particulars are not worked out,” said Repnikova. “The vague wording might be deliberate, as it makes it harder to track the projects and to hold anyone accountable.”
The Intercept · by Mara Hvistendahl · December 30, 2022
4. America Is on the Verge of a Power Grid Crisis
Were the attacks in Moore Country, NC and Pierce County, Washington confidence targets for some extremists groups, copy cat vandalism, or the beginning of a campaign to disrupt the power grid on a large scale? What are we doing to anticipate the latter and mitigate the effects of the transformer shortage?
America Is on the Verge of a Power Grid Crisis
A high-voltage transformer shortage leaves parts of America at risk of being left without power for years.
by Siddhartha Kazi
The National Interest · by Siddhartha Kazi · December 29, 2022
Over Christmas, four power substations in Pierce County, Washington were attacked, leaving 14,000 without power. Earlier in the month, on December 5, an unknown assailant opened fire at two power substations in North Carolina, leaving 40,000 people without electricity for several days. According to the local sheriff, the saboteur(s) “knew exactly what they were doing.”
These incidents, unnerving as they may be, are not isolated cases. Electrical grids in Oregon and Washington have been attacked six times since mid-November. All of these incidents share an uncanny similarity to the one in North Carolina. Furthermore, a notably well-coordinated attack on a San Jose, California substation in 2013 left seventeen out of twenty-one transformers there destroyed, causing $15 million worth of damage and coming “close to taking Silicon Valley off the grid.” As of the time of writing, none of the perpetrators behind these incidents have been brought to justice: the perpetrators simply had to shoot high-caliber rifles from a distance at the substation, leaving very little evidence behind that could be used to track them down.
These acts highlight a glaring structural vulnerability: the critical infrastructure needed to keep modern society running is far easier to destroy than to build. More specifically, high voltage (HV) transformers are a particularly weak link in America’s power grid.
Simply put, a transformer is a device that changes the voltage between two circuits. In the case of the HV transformers, they take the massive voltages generated by power plants and convert them into something usable by homes and businesses. Though these HV transformers make up less than 3 percent of transformers in the United States, they carry 60–70 percent of the nation’s electricity. According to a study by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), thirty such HV transformers are critical to basic national functioning. If only nine of these thirty transformers were to be disabled during a time of peak electricity demand, the result could be a coast-to-coast blackout. In other words, a particularly well-coordinated group of individuals could effectively disable the entire United States’ power grid within a matter of hours if they simply located and sabotaged these critical transformers. Even outside a “worst case” scenario, the destruction of more than three transmission substations would cause long-term blackouts in many areas of the country. Given that many of these substations are located in the same geographical region, it is entirely possible that a natural disaster, rather than human sabotage, could effectively knock out a regional grid.
What is most concerning, however, is that the United States lacks the capacity to quickly replace HV transformers. Due to the complex nature of these devices, most HV transformers are bespoke, requiring “three to four months” for engineering design alone. In practice, this translates to an average lead time between order and delivery of one to two years, not including installation times. Notably, this number comes from a 2010 study supposing ideal conditions—it certainly does not account for COVID-induced component shortages, or for emergency conditions where multiple transformers have gone offline.
Worst of all, the United States has almost no HV transformers manufacturing capability. There are only five facilities that state they can produce HV transformers, but it is unclear how many of these units they have actually produced. As a result, 85 percent of U.S.-bought HV transformers are imported from South Korea and Germany, which are the only countries that produce them for export. As of 2008, the delivery time on these units is nearly three years, according to a report by the EMP Commission. Considering Germany’s current energy crisis and its effect on domestic industrial capacity, plus various supply chain issues caused by the COVID pandemic, three years may be rosily optimistic. Compounding the direness of the situation is the fact that there is no spare stockpile of HV transformers, due to their high costs and lack of interchangeability.
Ensuring America’s long-term security will require rebuilding our HV transformer industrial capacity, engineering a more resilient power grid, adding adequate protection to existing substations, building a modest national stockpile, and establishing a protocol for when severe “incidents” occur.
This is certainly not impossible. After all, the United States has the capability to build HV transformers. According to the study from the CRS, “from 1950 to 1970, utility construction of large generation plants and associated transmission networks fueled a robust U.S. manufacturing market for large transformers. During this period, the United States (and Canada) accounted for approximately 40% of global demand for such units.”
Moreover, in 2008, the Department of Homeland Security successfully engineered a new type of transformer called RecX (short for “Recovery Transformer”), which could “enable recovery from transformer failure within days.” RecX was also lighter, adaptable to several different grid specifications, and easier to transport and install than conventional transformers. In fact, it was specifically designed to replace the most common HV transformers used in the U.S. power grid at a lower competitive cost ($7.5 million, compared to the industry standard of around $10 million). Yet despite meeting or exceeding their service requirements, only three prototype RecX units were installed in a power substation in Texas—funding for the program was cut after successfully demonstrating the concept.
Though the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has ordered a review of power grid security standards, it is imperative that the U.S. government step up and address the HV transformation situation. The Biden administration should issue an executive order defining HV transformers, especially RecX units, as being “essential to natural defense,” the standard required by the Defense Production Act (DPA). From there, the president should invoke the DPA to compel manufacturers to produce RecX units and simultaneously pass an executive order creating a national HV transformer stockpile in case of national emergencies. Finally, Congress should pass a law that both mandates and funds adequate protection measures for vulnerable links in America’s energy grid, especially substations Though some critics may balk at these measures, they ultimately amount to a rather affordable insurance policy, especially when compared to the over $2 trillion already being spent on national defense. Given the evident risk to the nation’s power grid—if not the country’s very modern survival—it is better to be safe than sorry.
Siddhartha Kazi is an undergraduate studying Industrial Distribution at Texas A&M University.
Image: Reuters.
The National Interest · by Siddhartha Kazi · December 29, 2022
5. Japan's Submarine Force Is One Of the Best on Earth
An important and overlooked capability.
Japan's Submarine Force Is One Of the Best on Earth
19fortyfive.com · by Christian Orr · December 30, 2022
One good 19FortyFive article on East Asian nations’ submarine forces deserves another … and another … and now yet another.
After having examined the submarine capabilities of USINDOPACOM region allies Taiwan and South Korea along with adversary North Korea, we shall once again look at the subs of one of America’s key Pacific Rim allies, Japan. As with Japan’s military as a whole, her submarines have not seen combat since the I-boats and RO-boats of WWII.
(Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here. Check out More 19FortyFive Videos Here)
Nonetheless, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces (JMSDF) maintain a high-tech and highly capable undersea fleet just in case North Korean and/or Red Chinese aggression forces Japan’s hand into breaking from the longstanding pacifistic policy.
Sōryū (16SS) Class
Most naval history buffs, upon hearing or reading the word “Sōryū” (蒼龍 / “Blue or Green Dragon”), will immediately think of the ill-fated WWII Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) aircraft carrier that was among the four IJN carriers sunk at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. However, thanks to JMSDF, the Sōryū maritime military moniker lives on, this time in the form of a submarine class.
As noted in an article written a year ago by Raymond McConoly of Naval Post, the 16SS-class “is a diesel-electric assault submarine that is one of the best. These incredibly quiet and capable submarines are the backbone of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s submarine forces and one of the most crucial chess pieces on the chessboard in the East Pacific … The Soryu-Class is simply a modified version of the Oyashio-class with air-independent propulsion, shortly AIP. The first vessel of this class, JS Sōryū, was laid down in 2005, launched in 2007, and commissioned in 2009. The complement of the Sōryū-class is 65-person. The submarine has 84 meters [275 feet], a beam of 9.1 meters [30 feet], and a draught of 8.5 meters [28 feet]. Its surfaced displacement is 2,900 tons, while its submerged displacement is 4,200 tons.”
The Oyashio (親潮, “Parental Tide”) class diesel-electric attack boats, incidentally, were commissioned between 1998 and 2008, with nine remaining in active service and two converted to training platforms.
A total of 12 Sōryū boats have been built, all bearing a name with a variant of the root word ryū (‘dragon”). The newest in the fleet is SS-512, the JS Tōryū (“Fighting Dragon”), whose keel was laid down on January 27, 2017, was launched on November 6, 2019, and commissioned on March 24, 2021. Maximum speed whilst surfaced is 13 knots (24 kph/ 15 mph), max submerged speed is 20 knots (37 kph/23 mph), and max diving depth is 650 meters (2,132 feet). Armament consists of six 533mm torpedo tubes, capable of firing homegrown Type 89 torpedoes and American-made UGM-84 Harpoon missiles.
Taigei-(29SS) Class
The Taigei-(たいげい, “Big Whale”) class boats are the latest and greatest addition to the JMSDF sub fleet. These “Big Whales” are the direct successor to the “Blue (Green) Dragons,” with a total of seven such boats planned. Thus far, only one, the JS Taigei, (SS-513) is in active service, having been laid down on March 16, 2018, launched on October 14, 2020 – even COVID couldn’t stop this Big Whale – and commissioned on March 9, 2022. The next ship in line is the SS-514, Hakugei (はくげい,“White Sperm Whale”), launched exactly one year after the Taigei and currently undergoing sea trials, with an expected commissioning date sometime in March 2023.
The Taigei-class subs boast the same hull length and beam width as their Sōryū predecessors, but with a slightly larger draught at 10.4 meters (34 feet). Displacement will be slightly heavier at 3,000 tons and crew complement will be upped to 70 officers and enlisted seamen. Speed and max operational depth are unknown as of this writing, whilst armament consists of equipped with six HU-606 533 mm torpedo tubes wielding the same Type 89s torps and Harpoon missiles as the Sōryūs.
What really stands out about the “Big Whales” are their lithium-ion batteries. As Mr, McConoly points out, “Lithium-ion batteries have a higher energy density and thus a higher power output. If all other factors remain constant, the lithium battery-powered Taigei submarines should go farther and maintain more incredible submerged speeds than equivalent diesel-electric submarines … Currently, the JMSDF is the only naval service in the world to have this equipment deployed on a submarine. Lithium-ion batteries have nearly twice the capacity of lead-acid batteries.”
Looking forward
The last of the Taigeis is expected to be commissioned in March 2027. Between them, the Sōryūs, and the Oyashios, the JMSDF submarine fleet appear to be quite well-equipped, from a technological capability standpoint, to take on their Chinese and North Korean adversaries’ boats, even if the Japanese numbers don’t match those of the Communist navies.
Bonus: Meet the Seawolf-Class Submarine
The U.S. Navy’s newest attack submarine, USS Seawolf (SSN 21), conducts Bravo sea trials off the coast of Connecticut in preparation for its scheduled commissioning in July 1997.
The Seawolf-class fast-attack submarine USS Connecticut transits the Pacific Ocean during Annual Exercise. ANNUALEX is a yearly bilateral exercise with the U.S. Navy and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force.
The first of a revolutionary new class of fast attack submarine, the Seawolf (SSN-21). Shown during construction at the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics Corporation in Groton, Conn. She was christened by Margaret Dalton, wife of Secretary of the Navy John H. Dalton, on June 24, 1995.
Seawolf-Class Submarine USS Seawolf. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Christian D. Orr is a former Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He has also been published in The Daily Torch and The Journal of Intelligence and Cyber Security. Last but not least, he is a Companion of the Order of the Naval Order of the United States (NOUS). In his spare time, he enjoys shooting, dining out, cigars, Irish and British pubs, travel, USC Trojans college football, and Washington DC professional sports.
19fortyfive.com · by Christian Orr · December 30, 2022
6. Ukraine run by ‘f****d up people’ – US instructor
No surprise that RUssian propaganda (RT) would pick up on the comments that were in the podcast by the Mozart Group.
Ukraine run by ‘f****d up people’ – US instructor
rt.com
Ukraine should not be placed on a pedestal in the West’s attempts to support the country in its conflict with Russia. That's according to Andrew Milburn, founder of the ‘Mozart Group’, which has been providing training for Kiev’s forces.
The retired Marine commander shared his experience and conclusions from working in Ukraine during an appearance on the Team House podcast last month. Attention to the video, which had only amassed some 20,000 views since it was posted, was drawn by Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal on Monday.
During the podcast, Milburn stated that Ukraine is a “corrupt, f****d-up society.” While he stressed that continued Western support for the country was important and justified by the need to uphold “global norms,” he suggested that the whole point was “not about Ukraine.”
“I have a Ukrainian flag tied to my bag, but I’m not like ‘oh my God, Ukraine is so awesome,’ because I understand that there are plenty of f****d up people running Ukraine,” Milburn said, admitting that he’s really “not a big fan” of the country.
He also stated that “a number of things” that Kiev’s forces do with Russian POWs violate the Hague convention on the laws of armed conflict, especially when it comes to filming interrogations of captured Russian soldiers and posting them online.
Milburn noted that the trainers from Mozart Group don’t condone such acts and have always tried to distance themselves from any unit that showed them videos of killing Russian POWs. “We’ve been shown those videos plenty of times,” he said, adding that “there were plenty” of atrocities being committed by Ukrainian forces and “all kinds of atrocities to go around.”
After months in Ukraine training soldiers, Ret Col Andrew Milburn of @TheMozartGroup mercenary firm gets sauced on camera & spills the beans:Ukraine is a "corrupt, fucked-up society" run by "fucked-up people"Ukrainian soldiers "kill dudes who surrendered," commit "atrocities" pic.twitter.com/MhKljQwQpq
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 26, 2022
He did stress, however, that most of the groups his trainers have dealt with were “very professional” and did not resort to such acts.
Read more
American instructor reveals Ukrainian frontline death rates
While Milburn’s Mozart Group claims charity status, it is considered to be among the largest private military companies currently working in Ukraine and has been providing military training to Ukrainian soldiers since the early days of the conflict. However, it has also been the source of several damning reports on the dark underbelly of Kiev’s armed forces.
Back in August, Milburn was quoted by CBS news in a since-deleted report that revealed how Western-supplied weapons were disappearing in Ukraine and popping up on the black market. Recently, he was also quoted by Newsweek in a report revealing that the Ukrainian military was seeing casualty rates of 70% or more, contrary to official Kiev’s claims.
rt.com
7. Special Operations News Update - Dec 30, 2022 | SOF News
Special Operations News Update - Dec 30, 2022 | SOF News
sof.news · by SOF News · December 30, 2022
Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.
Photo: U.S. Marine Corps Pfc. Jeffrey Profitt Jr., a rifleman, and Lance Cpl. Ethan Sheffey, a mortarman, both with 3rd Battalion, 2d Marine Regiment (3/2), 2d Marine Division, patrol through technical terrain during Exercise Raven in Nashville, Tenn., May 29, 2021. Exercise Raven is an integrated training exercise with Marines from 3/2 and Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command simulating real-life tactical scenarios to enhance overall unit interoperability, effectiveness and lethality against an adversarial force. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Patrick King)
Do you receive our daily newsletter? If not, you can sign up here and enjoy it five (almost) days a week with your morning coffee (or afternoon tea depending on where in the world you are).
SOF News
AC-130J Crews Recognized. Two U.S. gunship crews were able to provide situational awareness and armed overwatch to U.S. and other international forces taking part in the Kabul non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO) of August 2021. The AC-130J crews, “Shadow 77” and “Shadow 78”, were based at Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates when they were called upon for the NEO. Over 2,000 diplomats from the U.S. Embassy were evacuated. In addition, contractors and other personnel from various U.S. and international organizations were evacuated as well as American citizens, lawful permanent residents (LPRs with a Green Card), Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) holders, and many others. More than 79,000 people left the country on approximately 330 U.S. military flights from August 11-31, 2021. “AC-130J crews honored for being ‘eyes in the sky’ over Kabul in 2021”, Air Force Times, December 22, 2022.
FARP Support to SOF MQ-9. The 26th Expeditionary Rescue Squadron set up a Forward Arming and Refueling Point (FARP) at an undisclosed location in Southwest Asia to refuel and relaunch a combat MQ-9 Reaper flown by the 65th Special Operations Squadron. “MQ-9 FARP in a Combat Area”, U.S. Central Command, December 28, 2022.
Marine Receives PSYOP Award. The U.S. Army’s Psychological Operations Proponents Office announced the recipients of the Major General Robert A. McClure Medallion Awards on December 19, 2022. The awards are presented for meritorious contributions in support of the U.S. Army Special Forces, Civil Affairs, and Psychological Operations Regiments. “MICIOC Marine Receives 2022 Major General Robert A. McClure Medallion Award”, DVIDS, December 28, 2022.
Benghazi SEALs Recognized by Congress. On September 11, 2012, four members of a security detail were killed while defending the United State’s consulate in Benghazi, Libya. This past year they were recognized by Congress for their sacrifice. “Brian Mast Helps Get Bill Honoring Americans Killed in Benghazi Signed Into Law”, Florida Daily, December 28, 2022.
SOF and Cybersecurity. One cybersecurity expert says that the cyber war is 24 x 7 and the fight is happening on the battlefield, in our workplaces, and in our homes. “Bringing Special Operations Values to Cybersecurity”, Forbes, December 29, 2022.
Navy SEAL Training. Cole Black provides a detailed look at the training that SEAL officer candidates endure to reach ‘the teams’. “Navy SEAL Training Pipeline Pathways”, SOFREP, December 29, 2022.
ARSOF Force Structure Changes? The Army is looking at new ways to integrate technical expertise at the tactical level in some special operations units. SFODA’s may soon go from 12 to 16 men on an operational detachment. “Army special operations rethinking force structure, tech”, Army Times, December 28, 2022.
Medical Center Named for CST KIA. Army Captain Jennifer Moreno died in Afghanistan in 2013 while coming to the aid of fellow soldiers injured in an explosives attack. She was a member of a Cultural Support Team (CST) assigned to a unit of the 75th Ranger Regiment at the time of her death. Moreno was a nurse, so the naming of the VA medical center in her honor is especially fitting. “VA Medical Center in La Jolla is renamed in honor of Army nurse killed in Afghanistan”, La Jolla Light, December 21, 2022.
Norway’s Female SOF. The Jegertroppen, or Hunter Troop, is an first all-female special forces unit. It is part of the Special Operations Commando (FSK) and falls under the Norwegian Special Operations Forces (NORSOF). “Jegertroppen: Norway’s All Female Special Operation Forces”, Grey Dynamics, December 29, 2022.
Ukraine Conflict
Ukraine Counteroffensive. The retaking of territory in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions has changed the course of the war. Read more in “Inside the Ukrainian counteroffensive that shocked Putin and reshaped the war”, The Washington Post, December 29, 2022. (subscription)
Ukraine’s Jaeger Brigades. David Axe writes about three ‘hunter’ brigades that specialize as infantry. “The Ukrainian Army’s Jaeger Brigades Are Its Middleweight Forest Troops”, Forbes, December 26, 2022.
Ukraine’s Quest for High Tech Weapons. Thus far the provision of advanced weapons to Ukraine by other nations has helped to change the course of the war. Javelins, 155-mm howitzers, and HIMARS have been essential to the recent Ukrainian counteroffensives and the blunting of Russia attacks. But Ukraine wants more – weapons like longer-range missiles, advanced aircraft, and modern battle tanks. “First Javelins. Then HIMARS. Now Patriot. What’s next?”, Politico, December 29, 2022.
National Security
Biometrics For Sale on eBay. German security researchers studying biometric capture devices popular with the U.S. military got more than they expected for $68 on eBay. The metadata on the Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit (SEEK II) was last used in the summer of 2012 in Kandahar, Afghanistan. It contained a couple of thousand files on insurgents and ordinary Afghans. “For Sale on eBay: A Military Database of Fingerprints and Iris Scans”, The New York Times, December 27, 2022.
CENTCOM’s War Against ISIS. A total of 313 operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were conducted in 2022. These operations resulted in the death or detention of more than one thousand ISIS operatives. “CENTCOM killed more than 650 ISIS operatives in 2022, but their ideology lives on”, Washington Examiner, December 29, 2022.
Germany and the VJTF. NATO’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF) was created in 2014 following Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and a series of crisis in the Middle East. Several NATO countries have taken turns at leading the force. In January 2023 Germany will be in charge of the over 11,000 troops. Germany’s Panzergrenadierbrigade 37 will form the core of the force in 2023. Germany will also lead the VJTF’s designated Special Forces command. “Germany takes the lead for NATO’s high readiness force”, NATO, December 28, 2022.
Arrow Security & Training, LLC is a corporate sponsor of SOF News. AST offers a wide range of training and instruction courses and programs to include language and cultural services, training, role playing, and software and simulation. https://arrowsecuritytraining.com/
Afghanistan
Video – Ahmad Massoud Interview. The head of the National Resistance Front (NRF) is hosted on this podcast (video) by Scott Mann. Also in the discussion ‘Legend’ and Representative Mike Waltz (R-FL). Waltz did two tours with Army Special Forces in Afghanistan. Rooftop Leadership, YouTube, December 29, 2022, 90 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u0oXQCiWD0
How Congress Failed Our Afghan Allies. The Senate has not been able to create a path to residency for Afghan who worked alongside the U.S. during the 20-year U.S. involvement in the Afghan conflict. “Afghan refugees in US face uncertainty as legislation stalls”, Associated Press, December 30, 2022.
Immigration Paths and Afghan Evacuees. Many thousands of Afghans have resettled in the U.S. since August 2021. They have found their way here through different immigration methods. “Tens of Thousands of Afghans Work Their Way Through US Immigration System”, Voice of America, December 25, 2022.
Africa
Somali Clans in the Fight. Somalia’s al-Shabab problem has been enduring through three U.S. presidential administrations. The group continues to be a terrorist threat within Somalia and in regional countries as well. One strategy the Somali government is pursuing is a government-led alliance with clans. President Biden has reversed a previous administration to withdraw military personnel in December 2020. Once again, the U.S. has a small special operations footprint in Somalia. With the renewed U.S. commitment and the prospect of clans assisting the Somalia government there may be hope that the terrorist / insurgent group can be degraded, if not defeated. Christopher P. Costa provides his perspective on the current security situation in Somalia. “Somali clans battling al Qaeda-linked terrorists represent the future of the fight”, The Hill, December 28, 2022.
Upcoming Events
January 12, 2023
2022 National Security Strategy and Interagency Cooperation
Joint Special Operations University
January 17-20, 2023. Las Vegas, Nevada
Shot Show
NSSF Firearm Industry Trade Association
May, 2023. Tampa, Florida
SOF Week
USSOCOM
Podcasts, Videos, and Movies
Podcast – Advising in El Salvador. A Special Forces officer discusses his time advising an El Salvadorian army unit during the conflict against a communist insurgency. Although not there to participate in combat operations he soon found himself under enemy fire. The Spear, Modern Warfare Institute at West Point, December 20, 2022, 35 minutes.
https://mwi.usma.edu/podcast-the-spear-advising-in-el-salvador/
Video – From MARSOC to the Mozart Group. Andrew Milburn is hosted by The Team House and discusses his groups activities in Ukraine. Candid conversation assisted with some spirited beverages. Milburn spent decades in special operations and is the author of When the Tempest Gathers. YouTube, November 2022, 2 hours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkhCZmo_z8U
Podcasts
SOFCAST. United States Special Operations Command
https://linktr.ee/sofcast
The Pinelander. Blacksmith Publishing
https://www.thepinelander.com/
The Indigenous Approach. 1st Special Forces Command
https://open.spotify.com/show/3n3I7g9LSmd143GYCy7pPA
Irregular Warfare Podcast. Modern War Institute at West Point
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/irregular-warfare-podcast/id1514636385
sof.news · by SOF News · December 30, 2022
8. Will China Lead the End of Globalization?
Conclusion:
While these steps are unlikely to build a “Great Wall” around the second-largest economy in the world, they may presage a larger shift in the global economic order, one that prioritizes domestic jobs and self-sufficiency over ever-cheaper consumer goods. Those who predicted the decline of globalization may have been right. They just misjudged where it would start. The United States and like-minded countries around the world must reckon with the reality of the demise of globalization, however, they should come to terms with the view that China might actually be the prime catalyst.
Will China Lead the End of Globalization?
As China looks inward, its leaders may be coming to the realization that the global economy might be incompatible with their goals.
The National Interest · by Scott Friedman · December 28, 2022
Globalization has been a defining feature of our times. For decades, as the United States shifted to a service and information economy, low-cost goods from China filled our Walmart carts and, later, our Amazon boxes. As shipping rates declined and overseas manufacturing capacity swelled, Americans traded factory jobs at home for imported consumer goods. This was assumed to be the natural order of things.
Until it wasn’t.
A concern that started as a fringe chorus of “China hawks” ringing the alarm bells on the risk of offshoring production was brought center stage by the global coronavirus pandemic, which laid bare the fact that great power competition is now at the forefront of not only politics but business as well. It has forced corporate boards to realize that this competition would play out in the commercial markets in an unprecedented way. One by one, the underpinnings of our consumer economy have been pulled into the fray as U.S. political leaders on both sides of the aisle articulate the growing need to “decouple” our economy from China’s. The view on the street, and in many capitals around the world, is that the United States is driving the unwinding of a twenty-year experiment in lashing the world together through unfettered economic ties.
But what if the end of globalization actually begins in China? With rising inflation globally, unsteady economies still reeling from coronavirus, and a demographic cliff coming, it seems reasonable that the Chinese government will take steps to shore up its domestic economy by erecting walls around it. In fact, we already see indications of this in certain sectors. By now, the world is wise to the Chinese Communist Party’s practice of inviting corporations into China with the promise of massive market opportunities, only to force joint ventures and abruptly cap the foreign company’s market share while championing home-grown producers and manufacturers that not only service their domestic needs but also export and compete globally.
As China looks inward, its leaders may be coming to the realization that the global economy might be incompatible with their goals. Policies such as “dual circulation,” which accelerate domestic independence by requiring self-sufficiency first and exports second, offer a window into what a gradual end to global trade as we know it might look like. Even though it’s unlikely that sweeping protectionism will drop like a veil overnight, we can look to China’s new requirements on the medical industry to anticipate how this slow-motion decoupling could play out.
Over the course of the last year, regional authorities have required Chinese medical companies to buy from local suppliers and limit the sourcing of components in the end-use medical equipment to domestic Chinese firms. This is a critical change for a market that is dominated by Western technology firms and believed to be one of the most profitable sectors of the global economy as the population ages. If these regulations are enforced, foreign companies will be at the back of the line to source from China while also being boxed out from meaningfully participating in the Chinese market.
While these steps are unlikely to build a “Great Wall” around the second-largest economy in the world, they may presage a larger shift in the global economic order, one that prioritizes domestic jobs and self-sufficiency over ever-cheaper consumer goods. Those who predicted the decline of globalization may have been right. They just misjudged where it would start. The United States and like-minded countries around the world must reckon with the reality of the demise of globalization, however, they should come to terms with the view that China might actually be the prime catalyst.
Scott Friedman is a senior visiting fellow at the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue University and former senior policy advisor to the House Committee on Homeland Security.
Image: Reuters.
The National Interest · by Scott Friedman · December 28, 2022
9. Hard-Line Positions by Russia and Ukraine Dim Hope for Peace Talks
Hard-Line Positions by Russia and Ukraine Dim Hope for Peace Talks
Both Moscow and Kyiv say they are ready to talk, but their terms for sitting down at a negotiating table suggest otherwise.
nytimes.com · by Shashank Bengali · December 28, 2022
Ukrainian soldiers in the capital, Kyiv, attending the funeral of a director, Oleh Bobalo, killed in fighting against Russian forces near Bakhmut in the Donetsk region.Credit...Laura Boushnak for The New York Times
As the battle for Ukraine turns into a bloody, mile-by-mile fight in numbing cold, Ukrainian and Russian officials have insisted that they are willing to discuss making peace.
But with a drumbeat of statements in recent days making clear that each side’s demands are flatly unacceptable to the other, there appears to be little hope for serious negotiations in the near future.
Ukraine this week proposed a “peace” summit by the end of February, but said Russia could participate only if it first faces a war-crimes tribunal. That drew a frosty response from the Kremlin, with Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov saying that Kyiv must accept all of Russia’s demands, including that it give up four Ukrainian regions that Moscow claims to have annexed.
“Otherwise,” he said, “the Russian Army will deal with this issue.”
Russia does not fully control any of those regions, and has even lost territory there in recent months as Ukrainian forces fight to reclaim all the land seized by Moscow. But on Wednesday, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said it was impossible to accept a peace plan that did not recognize those four Ukrainian regions as part of Russia.
“Any plan that does not take into account these circumstances cannot claim to be a peace plan,” Mr. Peskov said, according to the state-run Tass news agency.
The hard-line positions suggest that both sides believe they have more to gain on the battlefield, analysts say.
“This suggests there is not necessarily a push for a negotiated peace or even some sort of negotiations, but still a push for whatever endgame is being sought militarily,” said Marnie Howlett, a lecturer in Russian and Eastern European politics at the University of Oxford.
Ukraine holds the momentum, having retaken much of the land that Russia captured early in the war. But Moscow’s forces still occupy large chunks of the east and south, and Russia is readying more troops and launching aerial attacks on infrastructure, deepening Ukrainians’ misery even as Russian soldiers struggle on the ground.
On Wednesday, the Ukrainian military said that Russia had launched a barrage of strikes at the southern city of Kherson, including one that damaged a maternity ward, as officials continued to urge on residents to evacuate. Images shared by one Ukrainian official after the strike showed blown-out windows, a hole in the roof and piles of rubble in one of the rooms.
Kherson has been battered by shelling since Ukraine retook the city last month, with Russian forces using new positions on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River to launch near daily barrages at the city.
The war has now passed its 300th day. There have been no peace talks between Ukraine and Russia since the early weeks of the conflict, which began when Russia launched a full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, and both sides have signaled a determination to keep fighting.
Visiting Washington last week, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that weapons and aid from the United States and allies would help Ukraine sustain its resistance well into 2023, emphasizing that “we have to defeat the Kremlin on the battlefield.”
And President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in a brief televised interview over the weekend, said that he was prepared to negotiate over “acceptable outcomes,” but insisted that “99.9 percent of our citizens” are “ready to sacrifice everything for the interests of the Motherland.”
Western officials have dismissed Mr. Putin’s periodic offers to negotiate as empty gestures. In calling for talks without hinting that he is prepared to abandon his onslaught — and repeating a propaganda line that Russia is fighting a defensive war for its own survival — Mr. Putin is trying to send the message that Russia will eventually win, and that the sooner Ukraine capitulates, the fewer people will die.
“They are both in it for the long haul,” said Karin von Hippel, director general of the Royal United Services Institute, a military research institute in London. “Putin still feels he can win this. He still has more men and more money, although you wonder what his tipping point will be.”
While Russia’s losses are believed to be enormous — more than 100,000 killed and injured, American officials have said — Mr. Putin has signaled recently that he is prepared to accept many more. He told senior military officials in a televised meeting last week that of the 300,000 reserves called up this fall, half were still at training bases and represented a “strategic reserve” for future fighting.
On Wednesday, Russia’s prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, said that his country’s economy had contracted by 2 percent over the past 11 months. That is a smaller decline than many experts had predicted at the start of the war, and suggests that Moscow has so far managed to weather the effects of Western sanctions.
This month, Mr. Putin emphasized that there were “no limits” to Russia’s military spending.
But as the evidence of Russian military atrocities has multiplied — and with Ukraine’s continued battlefield success — Kyiv’s negotiating position has hardened.
In late March, weeks after the invasion and with Russian troops still threatening to seize the capital, Ukrainian negotiators at a meeting in Istanbul proposed adopting neutral status — in effect abandoning a bid to join NATO, which Russia has long opposed — in exchange for security guarantees from other nations.
They also suggested separate talks on the status of Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula seized by Russia in 2014, and of Donbas, the eastern area claimed by Moscow.
Those terms are now off the table.
“The emotional background in Ukraine has changed very, very much,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Mr. Zelensky, told the BBC in August. “We have seen too many war crimes.”
Last month, addressing a summit of leaders of the Group of 20 nations, Mr. Zelensky presented a 10-point “formula for peace” that called for Russia’s full withdrawal from Ukrainian territory, including Crimea and Donbas.
It also demanded an international tribunal to try Russian war crimes; Moscow’s release of all political prisoners and those forcibly deported during the war; compensation from Russia for war damages; and steps by the international community to ensure the safety of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants and to provide for its food and energy security.
Demanding maximum concessions is a time-honored negotiating tactic, but analysts say that Ukraine is eager to demonstrate — particularly to European allies that are enduring higher energy costs this winter because of a Russian oil embargo — that it sees a path out of the conflict.
“The Ukrainian proposal offers a glimpse at Ukraine’s vision of how the war with Russia could one day end,” said Stella Ghervas, a professor of Russian history at Newcastle University in Britain. In the wars of modern European history, she said, winners on the battlefield have often been the ones to push hardest for peace.
“In the Napoleonic wars, World War I and World War II, the successful military leaders and peacemakers were often the same individuals,” she said. “Those who sought peace were the same who had successfully fought the war. The serious initiatives for peacemaking during the great wars in Europe have come always from the strongest party on the battlefield.”
Still, Ukraine’s peace proposals have received a generally cautious response. When Mr. Zelensky mentioned his plan at a joint news conference with President Biden last week, Mr. Biden did not comment on the proposal, saying only that the United States and Ukraine “share the exact same vision” for peace.
On Wednesday, the French defense minister, Sébastien Lecornu, visited the Ukrainian capital for the first time since the war began, following a pledge by President Emmanuel Macron to send more weapons to Ukraine. Mr. Lecornu laid a wreath at a monument to Ukrainians who have died in the war.
Many in Ukraine and in Eastern Europe have been critical of France’s response to the war, drawing a link between its relatively limited military support and Mr. Macron’s approach to Russia. While unequivocally backing the Ukrainian cause, Mr. Macron has said “we must not humiliate Russia” and called security guarantees for Russia an “essential” part of peace talks.
Mr. Zelensky said this week that he had sought India’s help on the peace plan in a call with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose government holds the Group of 20 rotating chair and has been mentioned as a possible mediator in talks. Mr. Modi “conveyed India’s support for any peace efforts,” but did not mention the Ukrainian plan.
Another potential interlocutor is Turkey, which this summer brokered a deal involving Russia, Ukraine and the United Nations to allow for the export of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea. That agreement, along with occasional exchanges of prisoners between Ukraine and Russia, has offered hope that the two sides could one day discuss a cease-fire.
But analysts say that Russia must demonstrate that it will negotiate in good faith and act on the terms of any peace agreement in order to earn some level of trust by Ukraine, which it has invaded twice in less than a decade.
“Ukraine will always be a neighbor of Russia,” said Ms. Howlett, the Oxford lecturer. “Any peace settlement has to come with the acknowledgment and understanding that Russia isn’t going anywhere.”
Anton Troianovski, Constant Méheut and Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.
nytimes.com · by Shashank Bengali · December 28, 2022
10. The Illusion of Controls
Excerpts:
The United States will face challenges in seeking such a consensus, including on the question of whether it is wise to freeze China’s commercial capabilities, as well as more technical questions of whether other countries have the legal authority and enforcement capacity to implement the desired policies. U.S. officials must have difficult conversations with allies about how wide the yard and how tall the fence should be with respect to so-called dual-use technologies, those that have both military and commercial uses. Although key partners are aligned with the U.S. assessment of China as a strategic threat, there remain fundamental disagreements about the effectiveness of the U.S. approach and the tradeoffs inherent in the intensifying use of export controls. A multilateral deal built on the threat of further U.S. extraterritorial controls may deliver short-term policy objectives, but it will only deepen the concerns of allies and their semiconductor industries about the costs of depending on U.S. technology and encourage such actors to develop alternatives. Threats of new controls are not enough. U.S. officials must work with partners to develop a shared understanding of how to best respond to Chinese technological advancement.
Building a shared strategy to responsibly manage the technology competition with China has never been more urgent. Beyond export controls, the Biden administration and Congress are considering a range of new tools to address the perceived dangers of economic entanglement with China, including unprecedented regulations of U.S. investment in China. The ultimate objective may be to stem the flow of critical U.S. technology, capital, and expertise into China’s advanced technology sectors. But just as the United States cannot effectively weaponize its nondominant position in chip supply chains, it equally will not succeed in slowing China’s indigenous technology advances more broadly if it simply acts alone.
The Illusion of Controls
Unilateral Attempts to Contain China’s Technology Ambitions Will Fail
December 30, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by Sarah Bauerle Danzman and Emily Kilcrease · December 30, 2022
In October, the Biden administration announced a series of new, unilaterally imposed export controls designed to freeze China’s advanced chip production and supercomputing capabilities. The strengthened rules came less than a month after National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan announced a major change in U.S. technology competition strategy. Previously, the United States sought to deny the export of chips or other technologies to China if such items were designed or likely to be used for military purposes, or if the transfer would impair the U.S. ability to maintain an advantage over competitors in cutting-edge commercial technologies that might also have military applications. Now, Sullivan said, “we must maintain as large of a lead as possible” in certain technology areas as a whole, for all intents and purposes erasing the line between civilian and military applications in the advanced chip production and supercomputing sectors.
A narrative quickly took hold that these export controls, and especially the “foreign direct product rule” provisions that allow the United States to apply its controls extraterritorially under certain circumstances—such as preventing companies outside the United States from selling semiconductors to China if they were produced using U.S. equipment—were a sign that the U.S. was “weaponizing” its influential position in the semiconductor supply chain. The United States, this argument went, enjoys market dominance in certain kinds of software and equipment used to design and manufacture semiconductors, as well as certain advanced chips critical for artificial intelligence, and it can use this privileged position to stymie China’s attempts to develop its own microelectronic and supercomputing capabilities. In a similar way, the United States has used the centrality of the U.S. dollar to freeze individuals and governments out of the global financial system.
But the U.S. role in the semiconductor supply chain cannot be compared with the primacy of its currency in global finance. Technology supply chains can be adapted and reorganized more easily than the dollar-based financial system. Worse, this argument is dangerous because it lulls policymakers into a false sense of security about the effectiveness of unilateral approaches, leading them to discount the importance of building multilateral alliances to ensure the effectiveness of export controls. It may also undermine the critical signaling of Western unity in confronting the systemic challenges presented by China. Although U.S. officials are committed to convincing key allies and partners to jointly impose similar controls, the U.S. actions were announced alone and the prospect of a deal with other allies and partners remains uncertain.
Understanding how export controls or other instruments of geoeconomic statecraft can be applied to greatest effect requires a finer appreciation of the U.S. position within globalized supply chains, as well as the underlying structure and adaptive nature of these networks. Unlike U.S. dollar dominance in global finance, the U.S. position in advanced technology supply chains is more contingent and more vulnerable to shocks. Coordinating geoeconomic strategy and policies with key partners and allies can shore up the U.S. position and prevent power within these networks from shifting away from the United States over time.
A FAULTY ANALOGY
For states to deploy weaponized interdependence effectively over time, they must enjoy a dominant position within a hierarchical network structure. The centrality of the U.S. dollar in the global financial infrastructure is the classic example of a hierarchical network in which the United States enjoys unambiguous dominance and can exploit its position to achieve its geopolitical objectives. U.S. sanctions strategy is based on this premise. It is exceedingly difficult to reorient the global financial system around an alternative to the dollar because of the so-called network effects of the currency’s ubiquity—just like social media platforms, a currency becomes more useful the more widely it is used. The U.S. dollar has the resilience to remain the dominant currency even in the face of extreme shocks, such as the 2008 financial crisis.
Policy planners should not overlearn the lessons of the United States’ experience with financial sanctions, nor should they make the mistake of imagining that the supremacy of the dollar offers an analogy for the country’s position in the global semiconductor supply chain. This supply chain is actually far more difficult to effectively weaponize than the global financial system because its complexity allows for those involved to adapt to shifts over time. It consists of multiple networks of different inputs that generate chokepoints in several different countries. The United States is arguably the most influential node of these networks, accounting for 46 percent of the $528 billion global semiconductor market in 2021. It is globally dominant in the making of electronic design automation software that is integral to designing complex circuitry for the most advanced chips. Along with the Netherlands and Japan, it controls the supply of equipment necessary to manufacture semiconductors, a sector known as “tooling.”
But the United States is entirely reliant on Taiwan and South Korea for the fabrication of the most advanced semiconductors. Moreover, the United States manufactures only 11 percent of chips made globally. The raw materials necessary for microchip fabrication are similarly concentrated in just a few countries, including China. Foreign suppliers dominate the functions of testing, packaging, and assembly that take place at the back end of the chip production process. The intricate and often overlapping networks of production create numerous, complex dependencies among different places—notably China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States, and European states—at different stages of the supply chain. Several countries have greater control over specific parts of the supply chain than do others, but no single country dominates the entire network.
Because of high production costs, economic activity within each layer of the network tends toward concentration, with one or two different firms holding a dominant share of the global market for each particular part of the semiconductor production process. This tendency creates discrete technology chokepoints that the United States and others can leverage in the short term. It costs between $10 billion and $20 billion to create a plant that makes wafers (key components in semiconductors). Designing and developing new equipment has high R & D costs and long lead times that encourage industry consolidation. For instance, the Dutch chip maker ASML uses an extreme ultraviolet light lithography machine that took three decades to develop, requiring multiple corporate acquisitions, thousands of highly skilled workers, and close collaboration with technology suppliers. The industry’s high fixed costs, technical complexity, and demands for talent encourage specialization and the segmentation of markets such that just a few suppliers control many critical parts of the supply chain. To maintain those positions of control within the supply chain, firms must invest in continuous innovation and R & D. To keep up, firms and countries must continuously and fiercely compete, and they remain vulnerable to being replaced if they fall behind.
CUTTING THE CHAIN
Whether the United States, or any other state, can weaponize its position in the semiconductor supply chain is contingent upon how easily isolated countries can reconfigure critical pieces of the supply chain network. Replacing a key node in the chain is a complicated task, requiring a significant amount of patient investment and a high level of technical sophistication. But it does not require a complete reconfiguration of the semiconductor network as a whole, just one or two dedicated actors that have the technical capacity, deep R & D budgets, and economic motivation to replicate the functions of another country. The semiconductor space is cutthroat, and technology develops quickly. Engineers can make new breakthroughs both by developing more advanced chips and by finding more efficient and reliable production methods. Technological leaders can see their fortunes rise, fall, and revive—sometimes thanks to ample government assistance. Although finding alternatives to the United States would not be an easy feat, close competitors may be able to pull it off, particularly if they retain access to other sources of technology and expertise.
The dynamism of the industry is well illustrated through tooling, one of the chokepoint technologies that the new U.S. export controls seek to deny China. A handful of U.S. companies—namely, Applied Materials, KLA, and Lam Research—control important tooling technologies today. But foreign-based companies such as ASML and the Japanese firm Tokyo Electron are market leaders in related parts of the supply chain and are well positioned to develop substitutes to U.S. technologies in the medium term. These foreign companies may want to do just that, as the forced exit of U.S. tooling companies from China creates a natural market opening. The foreign tooling companies also have a strong incentive to design out U.S. technologies in their own supply chains as a way of evading the threat of further U.S. controls.
The recent unprecedented expansion of extraterritorial rules in U.S. export controls turbocharges these concerns, heightening the risk that other countries or firms will ice out U.S. suppliers as a matter of protecting their autonomy and preserving their ability to sell globally—including in China. Critically, U.S. tooling companies may face declining sales outside the Chinese market as foreign chip firms look to create production lines free of U.S. tools in order to avoid the long reach of the new export control policy. In 2019, the United States made aggressive use of extraterritorial controls to deny the Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei access to the global chip supply, which subsequently throttled Huawei’s expansion. But these measures were limited to one company as opposed to entire segments of China’s advanced technology ecosystem. The new U.S. willingness to use far-reaching authorities that are both unilateral and extraterritorial should be expected to create a greater shock to the supply chain than the U.S. actions that targeted Huawei. It is therefore likely that foreign firms and governments will increasingly view reliance on U.S. technology as a vulnerability they have to mitigate.
U.S. tooling companies may see their own prospects decline as a cycle of shrinking market opportunities leaves them with less revenue to invest in innovation. This same dynamic played out in the commercial space sector in the early years of the twenty-first century, after the United States unilaterally imposed stricter controls on satellite exports to China. U.S. market share and capabilities declined as European firms started offering products that excluded U.S. components, including to the China market. The new controls will have an undeniable effect in the short term by denying China access to tooling, but this chokepoint may prove undefendable over time as the supply chain shifts to include alternative suppliers.
THE WEAPONIZATION FALLACY
The case of semiconductors illustrates how countries cannot easily weaponize interdependence, especially when it comes to supply chains characterized by complex and overlapping dependencies. Certain companies may be able to maintain specific technology chokepoints in the semiconductor supply chain, but they can only keep those positions through continuous competition. This generates a supply chain structure that is far more amenable to change over time and harder for any single player to control. Global leadership in other advanced technology areas—such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing—is highly contested and will present similar complications. Smart and effective policies to strengthen U.S. technological leadership in all these areas must recognize such constraints.
In this context, the United States must act quickly to build a consensus among advanced economies on a shared approach to the technology competition with China, one that reaches a deeper understanding of the appropriate role for export controls. The United States may not dominate the entire semiconductor supply chain, but it has the strong advantage of deep alliances and partnerships with the majority of places that represent other critical nodes. A better coordinated strategy will dramatically decrease the risk that other actors will simply fill the vacuum left by the United States. Multilateralism will help preserve the U.S. role within these networks and ultimately make any controls imposed on China more devastating. For example, U.S. tooling could be replaced over time by Dutch and Japanese capabilities, but it will be much more difficult for China to replicate the capabilities of all three countries on its own. To that end, recent press reports of progress in negotiations among these countries are promising, but it remains too early to assess whether the talks will result in a deal that creates a genuine, multilaterally controlled chokepoint.
The United States will face challenges in seeking such a consensus, including on the question of whether it is wise to freeze China’s commercial capabilities, as well as more technical questions of whether other countries have the legal authority and enforcement capacity to implement the desired policies. U.S. officials must have difficult conversations with allies about how wide the yard and how tall the fence should be with respect to so-called dual-use technologies, those that have both military and commercial uses. Although key partners are aligned with the U.S. assessment of China as a strategic threat, there remain fundamental disagreements about the effectiveness of the U.S. approach and the tradeoffs inherent in the intensifying use of export controls. A multilateral deal built on the threat of further U.S. extraterritorial controls may deliver short-term policy objectives, but it will only deepen the concerns of allies and their semiconductor industries about the costs of depending on U.S. technology and encourage such actors to develop alternatives. Threats of new controls are not enough. U.S. officials must work with partners to develop a shared understanding of how to best respond to Chinese technological advancement.
Building a shared strategy to responsibly manage the technology competition with China has never been more urgent. Beyond export controls, the Biden administration and Congress are considering a range of new tools to address the perceived dangers of economic entanglement with China, including unprecedented regulations of U.S. investment in China. The ultimate objective may be to stem the flow of critical U.S. technology, capital, and expertise into China’s advanced technology sectors. But just as the United States cannot effectively weaponize its nondominant position in chip supply chains, it equally will not succeed in slowing China’s indigenous technology advances more broadly if it simply acts alone.
- SARAH BAUERLE DANZMAN is Associate Professor of International Studies at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. She was previously a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in the Office of Investment Affairs at the State Department.
- EMILY KILCREASE is Senior Fellow and Director of the Energy, Economics, and Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. She previously served in economics and security roles at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the National Security Council, and the Department of Commerce.
Foreign Affairs · by Sarah Bauerle Danzman and Emily Kilcrease · December 30, 2022
11. Spy vs. spy: Dept. of Defense analyst’s treasonous trail detailed in new book
Spy vs. spy: Dept. of Defense analyst’s treasonous trail detailed in new book
americanmilitarynews.com · by Jacqueline Cutler - New York Daily News · December 30, 2022
Every spy keeps secrets, but Ana Montes hid a shocking one.
She was a traitor.
For nearly 20 years, the U.S. intelligence analyst compiled information on Cuba, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. She combed through data, interviewed experts, and drew up lists of undercover agents.
Then she shared everything with her real bosses – in Havana.
“Montes leaked information that likely led to the death of an American Green Beret killed in action in El Salvador,” Jim Popkin writes in “Code Name Blue Wren: The True Story of America’s Most Dangerous Female Spy – and the Sister She Betrayed.”
“She freely shared the identities of hundreds of Americans working on Cuban intelligence matters around the globe,” Popkin writes. “She revealed the existence of a stealth satellite so costly and highly classified that U.S. government officials still won’t utter its name.”
Making the betrayal especially bitter? Her family’s devotion to the military and law enforcement. As Montes was passing secrets to Fidel Castro’s agents in Washington, her younger sister, Lucy, was an FBI translator and even working in a unit catching Cuban spies in Miami.
Ana Montes’ treason surprised everyone who knew her. Born into a conservative family, her Puerto Rican father had come to the mainland to study medicine and became a doctor in the U.S. Army and later a private psychiatrist. He and his family – wife, two girls, and two boys – settled in suburban Maryland.
He insisted on strict discipline, and enforced it with beatings.
“Nobody ever knew what was going to set him off,” his daughter, Lucy, said. “He had a bad temper and a bad marriage with my mother. He was a violent man.”
As she grew up, Montes increasingly defied him – including politically. Still, her leanings seemed more progressive than radical. After college, she joined the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Privacy and Information Appeals. It was an entry-level government job, handling the growing deluge of Freedom Of Information requests.
Montes passed the routine background investigation and was awarded a top security clearance. “Loyal, very moral, extremely independent with a flawless reputation,” the report concluded. She rose quickly in government while pursuing a graduate degree at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
At the time, the campus provided a safe space for Castro sympathizers. One leftist professor, Walter Kendall Myers, was already spying for Cuba. He was convicted in 2009 and received a life sentence. Grad student Marta Velazquez also on Castro’s payroll, was charged with recruiting other eager young Americans.
Velazquez zeroed in on Montes, who had made no secret of her government job or her disgust with American foreign policy.
“At a restaurant in Washington, (Velazquez) made a soft pitch,” Popkin writes. “‘Ana, I have friends who can help you assist the desperate Nicaraguan people…. They need someone to translate Spanish-language news articles.’”
Velazquez suggested a trip to New York, so Montes could meet her friends, who were Cuban intelligence officers.
On Dec. 16, 1984, Montes agreed to betray her country.
Of course, she told no one. But when her sister called with the news that she had just joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Montes was horrified.
“She got all upset,” Lucy recalled later. “I was really surprised that she would be so against it. I couldn’t understand it.”
Once government agents started looking closely, there were many things not easily understandable about Ana Montes. By now, she had a job at the Department of Defense’s Defense Intelligence Agency — and increased access to national secrets. Soon, her betrayals included a human cost.
She revealed the names of undercover agents working against the Cuban government. Alerted to one spy’s arrival, her Havana handlers coldly messaged back, “We are waiting here for him with open arms.” She also visited a military base in El Salvador, supposedly as part of her official job. A month later, rebels attacked that camp and killed 44 soldiers, including a Green Beret.
“I’m certain that she turned over information about that one particular camp to the Cubans,” one U.S. investigator declared later. “I mean, there is no doubt.” But there was no hard evidence.
There rarely was, thanks to Montes’ almost-paranoid security. She received coded instructions via short-wave radio; she replied via pay phones. Unlike other spies, Montes refused to risk removing files from her office, instead committing them to memory. Later, she would meet her Cuban bosses at local Chinese restaurants and repeat the stolen secrets word for word.
Montes remained remarkably successful. She continued to earn raises and promotions at work and even received an award from the head of the CIA. Ironically, Montes also received an award from the Cubans – a medal so secret they showed it to her, then took it back.
But her double life was taking a toll. Because there was no one she could truly trust, she kept everyone at bay. She had no close friends and few romantic possibilities. At one point, her Cuban bosses sympathetically arranged a blind date with another spy. It didn’t work out. Montes began to see a psychiatrist. She took endless showers as if trying to scrub herself clean.
Unsurprisingly, Montes began to arouse suspicions. She had started pushing her way into meetings she had no business in, accessing reams of classified information for which she could claim no legitimate use. American operatives had already received a tip that one of their colleagues had been working with the Cubans. A few details – dates of trips, certain electronics purchased – seemed to point to Montes.
Slowly, carefully, they began to spy on the spy.
FBI agents tailed her walks around Washington, sifted through her apartment building’s dumpsters, tapped her phone, and hacked her computer. They broke into her apartment when she was away and discovered a short-wave radio. Before they left, they installed hidden cameras and microphones.
The evidence they eventually assembled — including communications between Montes and her Cuban bosses — was undeniable.
On Sept. 21, 2001, Montes received a call at work saying there was a problem with a timecard. Could she come to the Inspector General’s office and clear it up? When Montes showed up, a receptionist ushered her into a conference room. Two FBI agents were waiting. Montes barely flinched, even as they snapped on the handcuffs.
And she has not wavered since.
At her trial, Montes refused to cry or even apologize. “I believe our country’s policy toward Cuba is cruel and unfair,” she stated. “I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself.” Unlike other spies, it seemed she had not done this for money. Over almost 20 years, Montes only accepted a few thousand dollars, primarily for expenses.
Instead, her reason was deeper — she spied out of conviction and love. Montes was faithful only to Fidel.
The judge sentenced her to 25 years, and she was sent to a supermax prison in Texas, where her fellow inmates included Squeaky Fromme and Al Qaeda terrorists. Her only friend was a death-row murderer who had slit open a pregnant woman and stolen her baby.
Montes silently does her time. On Jan. 8, 2023, having served 21 years, three months, and 19 days, she is scheduled to walk out a free woman.
And if Montes regrets anything – that’s just another one of her secrets.
___
© 2022 New York Daily News
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
Share
Flip
americanmilitarynews.com · by Jacqueline Cutler - New York Daily News · December 30, 2022
12. Putin Can't Fix This Disaster: Is Russia Running Out of Troops in Ukraine?
Putin Can't Fix This Disaster: Is Russia Running Out of Troops in Ukraine?
19fortyfive.com · by Peter Suciu · December 30, 2022
In October, Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu warned that the conflict in Ukraine was heading for an “uncontrolled escalation” after Moscow warned that it believed Ukraine would use a “dirty bomb” on the battlefield. Kyiv denied it was planning to employ such a weapon, and many Western analysts suggested it was part of a “false flag” operation by the Kremlin.
(Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here. Check out More 19FortyFive Videos Here)
There had been additional fears that Russia could escalate the conflict after Vladimir Putin called up hundreds of thousands of new troops, showing his willingness to increase the manpower available to continue his “special military operation.”
Though it would be wrong to put those fears of escalation aside, this week, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) provided an assessment of the Russian offensive campaign and forecast
“with high confidence that Putin will not seek to engage NATO militarily at this time in response to the provision of any of the Western military systems currently under discussion. Russia is barely holding off the Ukrainian military at a fearful cost to itself and Russian forces in Ukraine could not survive a serious conflict with NATO at this time.”
ISW added that at least for the foreseeable future, the risks of deliberate Russian escalation to a major conflict with NATO were extremely low.
Lack of Manpower in Ukraine
One factor is that Russia simply is running out of men to fight the war, even with Putin’s efforts to increase manpower.
In fact, Russian losses in Ukraine have been so great that the Kremlin’s forces are no longer operating as company and battalion tactical groups, and have been forced to use squad-size assault groups in the recent fighting for Bakhmut in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
Units with as few as 10 to 15 soldiers are taking part in engagements with enemy positions.
According to ISW, this echoes what Russia faced in August in the Kherson region, when its units degenerated from company and battalion tactical groups to individual squad-size units.
Wagner Group Losses Mounting
It hasn’t just been the regular Russian Army that has suffered such significant losses in Ukraine. ISW also reported that the mercenary force known as the Wagner Group – the unit that has been described as Putin’s private army – has also seen heavy losses in the fighting in Bakhmut.
The losses among the private military contractors have been so great that it has likely “strained” the Kremlin’s current operation capabilities in the besieged city.
There are also reports of division between commanders of the pro-Russian mercenary force and the Russian commanders. According to a video that made the rounds on social media, a Wagner fighter even verbally berated Chief of the General Staff of Russia’s Army Valery Gerasimov for the lack of supplies and support they’ve received in recent weeks.
Russian media has tried to downplay the exchange suggesting it was a Ukrainian nationalist, dressed as a Wagner trooper, who appeared in the video.
That claim has been widely dismissed. Instead, it seems more likely that even the mercenaries are having enough of Putin’s futile war.
According to the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) this week, ammunition shortages remain the “most important limiting factor for Russian offensive operations” despite the recent alleviation of personnel shortages.
The ISW assessment concluded, “Russian rate of advances in the Bakhmut area will likely decrease if Russian forces continue advancing at all unless significant new reinforcements and supplies of artillery rounds arrive soon.”
Author Experience and Expertise: A Senior Editor for 19FortyFive, Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer. He has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers, and websites with over 3,200 published pieces over a twenty-year career in journalism. He regularly writes about military hardware, firearms history, cybersecurity, politics, and international affairs. Peter is also a Contributing Writer for Forbes and Clearance Jobs. You can follow him on Twitter: @PeterSuciu.
19fortyfive.com · by Peter Suciu · December 30, 2022
13. The Chinese Communist Party Has Surrendered to COVID-19
Excerpts:
The regime’s strategy, Gershaneck points out, is to blame others for the disaster: “lower-level officials, vaccine makers, and ‘foreign forces.’ ” In late December, he noted, “China’s Foreign Ministry went into Wolf Warrior mode once again to attack ‘Western’ news media for ‘hype and distortion’ regarding the Party’s chaotic handling of the end of its zero-Covid policy.”
The Party, believing itself to represent the inevitable forces of history, cannot blame itself. It tells the Chinese people that it always has been infallible, “great, glorious, and correct.” This view has led to its absurd and obviously false propaganda narratives, “extreme dissembling” Burton points out. “The propaganda machinery is working overtime,” he told me.
“In any political system, whether democratic or autocratic, when a signature policy of the top leader is abandoned, it is crucial that the leader strive to maintain his or her authority by presenting the change as having been decided by him or her,” Garside observes. “Xi Jinping has failed to do this.”
So Xi did not make a mistake. He just failed. The consequence is that there is apparently intense infighting at the top of the Communist Party.
China, as a result, looks unstable.
The Chinese Communist Party Has Surrendered to COVID-19
19fortyfive.com · by Gordon Chang · December 31, 2022
China’s Xi Jinping Capitulates on COVID-19: Henry Gao of Singapore Management University argues that Chinese ruler Xi Jinping suddenly reversed his “dynamic zero-Covid policy,” perhaps the world’s most draconian set of disease-control measures, because he believed his own propaganda and overestimated the ability of his regime to handle the aftermath.
(Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here. Check out More 19FortyFive Videos Here)
The aftermath will be horrific. Scientists predict 800 million people in China will get the disease this winter. Some estimate 1.1 billion will be infected. As Charles Burton of the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute told 1945, “there is a massive wave of disease and miserable death spreading all over China.”
Did Xi Jinping make a policy mistake, as Gao believes?
More likely, Xi did not “decide” anything. A better explanation is that he simply capitulated to the disease.
How so?
As an initial matter, Xi’s policy had failed to contain the disease. The World Health Organization believes the current “explosion” of cases in China is not the result of the abandonment of zero-Covid, and leaked Chinese case figures tend to support the international body’s assertion.
Moreover, the Communist Party and Chinese central government were no longer able to administer their disease-control regime. First, the Chinese people, through extraordinary protests beginning at the end of October, made it clear that after three years, they would no longer accept Xi’s harsh measures.
Second, municipalities bore most of the cost of implementing zero-Covid lockdowns and could no longer afford them. Even the capital of Beijing was running out of cash for this purpose.
Third, Xi’s policy was fast driving the Chinese economy deep—or deeper—into contraction. Zero-Covid, often implemented by extreme tactics, was also driving factories out of China because it had disrupted—in some cases, severely—both production and transportation.
Although it had been clear for a long time that Xi’s approach was disastrous, China’s willful leader stuck to it. He doubled down on the policy in his Work Report, a nearly two-hour speech that opened the Communist Party’s 20th National Congress on October 16.
The subsequent capitulation to the disease has eroded Xi’s support in senior Party circles. “His opponents have inflicted humiliation upon him,” Roger Garside, former British diplomat and author of China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom,” told 19FortyFive.
There are other indications that Xi is not as powerful as he was just a few weeks ago. The Central Economic Work Conference, held this month, apparently junked his signature “Common Prosperity” program.
While Xi has been losing his grip over the Communist Party, the Communist Party has been losing its grip over its own officials. Case in point: On the 23rd of this month, American and British media outlets reported in detail on secret deliberations of China’s National Health Commission.
The revelations were shocking: commission minutes show that almost 37 million people contracted the disease on December 20. Some 248 million people got Covid in the first 20 days of this month. Bloomberg News called the outbreak “by far the world’s largest.” Documents were leaked and have now been published online. The stunning disclosures suggest officials were so disgusted that they decided to undermine their own party state.
The Communist Party is apparently in panic mode. Relentless propaganda is seeking to accomplish the impossible: portraying both the zero-Covid policy and its complete and sudden abandonment as wise. “For three years, China has waged a savage propaganda campaign to convince the world that its draconian ‘zero-Covid’ was the most effective way to combat the virus,” Kerry Gershaneck, author of the recent Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to ‘Win Without Fighting,’ told 1945. “The narrative on zero-Covid has now shifted.”
So how does the Party escape the consequences of what people can see with their own eyes?
The regime’s strategy, Gershaneck points out, is to blame others for the disaster: “lower-level officials, vaccine makers, and ‘foreign forces.’ ” In late December, he noted, “China’s Foreign Ministry went into Wolf Warrior mode once again to attack ‘Western’ news media for ‘hype and distortion’ regarding the Party’s chaotic handling of the end of its zero-Covid policy.”
The Party, believing itself to represent the inevitable forces of history, cannot blame itself. It tells the Chinese people that it always has been infallible, “great, glorious, and correct.” This view has led to its absurd and obviously false propaganda narratives, “extreme dissembling” Burton points out. “The propaganda machinery is working overtime,” he told me.
“In any political system, whether democratic or autocratic, when a signature policy of the top leader is abandoned, it is crucial that the leader strive to maintain his or her authority by presenting the change as having been decided by him or her,” Garside observes. “Xi Jinping has failed to do this.”
So Xi did not make a mistake. He just failed. The consequence is that there is apparently intense infighting at the top of the Communist Party.
China, as a result, looks unstable.
A 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on Twitter @GordonGChang.
19fortyfive.com · by Gordon Chang · December 31, 2022
14. How America Wins (Book review)
Conclusion:
Whether one agrees with all the policy proposals in The American Imperative is less important than embracing Runde’s central challenge: how do you make soft power work in a world where just asking folks to follow the rules does not cut it. The U.S. will never master the challenge of China, let alone deal with a restive Russia and a threatening Iran, unless it bests them all at the application of both hard and soft power.
How America Wins
19fortyfive.com · by James Jay Carafano · December 30, 2022
Book Review of David F. Runde. The American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership Through Soft Power. New York: Post Hill Press, 2023. 223 pp. $28.00.
If the differences in American foreign policy were two grim, heavily armored hordes entrenched on opposite sides of a shelled and bloody battlefield, then the pages of The American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership Through Soft Power would be fluttering on barbwire in no-man’s land.
The American Imperative refuses to take sides. David Runde, a senior vice president at The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a bipartisan think tank, has written a prescription that mixes medicine from contrasting views of American statecraft.
Runde opens his book by rightly scolding Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 bestseller, The End of History and the Last Man, not for celebrating liberal ideas like democracy, human rights, and free markets, but for thinking humanity’s big moment had arrived. The American Imperative does a fair job explaining how the world inevitably slipped back into an era of great power competition with the U.S. and like-minded nations facing off against the likes of China, Russia, and Iran. “World events,” he writes, “have shocked the world out of the complacency that followed Fukuyama’s optimistic prediction.” Rather, The American Imperative focuses on how free countries can survive and thrive in our brutal times.
But, coming out of the gate, Runde should have thumped Joseph Nye’s Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics (2004) instead of The End of History. Fukuyama could, perhaps, be excused for his exuberance, hoping the end of the Cold War signaled the end of big geo-political scuffles. Nye can’t make that excuse. After 9/11, it was clear the future world was going to be uncompromisingly messy.
History never has and never will simply “follow the rules.” That’s a real problem for Nye’s vision of substituting soft power—diplomacy, foreign aid, economic development, and cooperative action through international organizations—for the use of force. 9/11 reminded us that bad guys don’t play nice. And when they don’t, 10 diplomats can’t take the place of an army division. The instruments of foreign policy are not fungible.
Whether he meant to or not, Nye’s proposal was often framed as deciding between hard power or soft power. One of the provocative strains in The American Imperative is that Runde eschews that choice. He makes the case that soft power, done right, complements hard power in great power competition.
Runde rejects structuralist theory, the notion that international relations can be governed by rules and norms fairly arbitrated by international institutions. He does not, however, shun structuralist tools. If they work, they work. Instead, Runde argues “the discussion of soft-power needs a major refresh.”
Runde dedicates several chapters to retooling the instruments in the soft power tool kit. He addresses international institutions, public diplomacy, foreign aid, economic development, and more. All his proposals are worth consideration.
When it comes to international institutions there is no question that the U.S. needs better options than just quitting everything or going along with the crowd. As Runde points out, international institutions are not all evil, but they are not benign either. “[T]his power-sharing system reflects geopolitical realities …” he notes. China, in particular, has used its influence in international organizations to press Beijing’s interests in malicious ways. Runde argues for triage: assessing the value and conduct of existing organizations and then developing an action plan for dealing with them that better serves U.S. interests.
The American Imperative also contends the U.S. needs to do a better job fighting the global war of ideas. Who can argue with that? In this new kind of war, the bad old ideas of authoritarian dictators are back.
Another important discussion in The American Imperative is rethinking how the U.S. does foreign aid and economic development. There is no question that, under the current system, the U.S. gets a very poor return on its investment, nor does Washington compete effectively with China. Runde has confidence in reforming current institutions. Another strategy might be almost entirely shifting away from depending on them at all.
Whether one agrees with all the policy proposals in The American Imperative is less important than embracing Runde’s central challenge: how do you make soft power work in a world where just asking folks to follow the rules does not cut it. The U.S. will never master the challenge of China, let alone deal with a restive Russia and a threatening Iran, unless it bests them all at the application of both hard and soft power.
A Heritage Foundation vice president, James Jay Carafano directs the think tank’s research on matters of national security and foreign relations.
19fortyfive.com · by James Jay Carafano · December 30, 2022
15. Why did the US just ban TikTok from government-issued cellphones?
Of course a ban on government devices is justified and prudent. But can we ban it on all devices? How will that be received by young people who think this is government overreach? Have we done a good job of convincing the public of the very real threat? My anecdotal evidence says no. Many young people almost equate this with a "public good" that provides useful information to the public.
Why did the US just ban TikTok from government-issued cellphones?
Trump tried to impose a total ban on the China-based app and some states have already prohibited its use on official devices
The Guardian · by Johana Bhuiyan · December 31, 2022
The US government has approved an unprecedented ban on the use of TikTok on federal government devices. The restrictions – tucked into a spending bill just days before it was passed by Congress, and signed by Joe Biden on Thursday – add to growing uncertainty about the app’s future in the US amid a crackdown from state and federal lawmakers.
Officials say the ban is necessary due to national security concerns about the China-based owner of the app, ByteDance. But it also leaves many questions unanswered. Here’s what you need to know.
TikTok admits using its app to spy on reporters in effort to track leaks
Read more
Why did the ban happen?
The US government has banned TikTok on federal government-issued devices due to national security concerns over its China-based parent company, ByteDance. The US fears that the Chinese government may leverage TikTok to access those devices and US user data.
TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter said the company was “disappointed” that Congress moved forward with the proposal and that it was “a political gesture that will do nothing to advance national security interests”.
The ban means that, in about two months, federal government employees will be required to remove TikTok from their government-issued devices unless they are using the app for national security or law enforcement activities.
The director of the US Office of Management and Budget and other offices have 60 days to come up with standards and processes for all government employees to remove the app from their phones. Several federal agencies such as the White House and the defense, homeland security and state departments have already banned TikTok, so it won’t change anything for those employees. And earlier this week, Catherine Szpindor, the chief administrator of the House of Representatives, also instructed all staff and lawmakers to delete the app from their devices.
How did we get here?
US security concerns about TikTok have existed for years. Donald Trump first attempted, unsuccessfully, to ban TikTok in 2020, but bipartisan efforts to regulate and rein in use of the app reached a fever pitch in 2022 after news outlets reported ByteDance employees were accessing US TikTok user information.
TikTok is a Trojan horse for the Chinese Communist party
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri
National security concerns were reinforced by warnings from the FBI director, Christopher Wray, that the Chinese government could use the app to gain access to US users’ devices. Several, predominantly Republican-led states – including Texas, South Dakota and Virginia – have also recently banned the use of TikTok on state government-issued devices.
In April, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced a similar ban to the one now taking effect, calling TikTok a “Trojan horse for the Chinese Communist party”. The measure, the contours of which were largely replicated in the ban that was passed on Friday, was unanimously approved by the Senate earlier in December.
Have other countries taken similar actions against TikTok?
While other countries such as Indonesia have imposed temporary bans on TikTok, the biggest country that continues to prohibit the use of the app is India. India permanently banned TikTok along with more than 50 other Chinese apps after a deadly border dispute with China, citing national security concerns. National bans in other countries have not lasted more than, at most, a few months.
Should we be more worried about TikTok than other apps?
It depends on whom you ask. Several digital privacy and civil advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Fight for the Future say while the potential for China to exploit access to TikTok is indeed concerning, other apps and services offer government entities, including in the US, similar access to user data.
Unless we’re also going to ban Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Uber and Grubhub, this is pointless
Evan Greer of Fight for the Future
“Unless we’re also [going to] ban Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Uber and Grubhub, this is pointless,” said the Fight for the Future director, Evan Greer. “Yes, it’s possibly a bit easier for the Chinese government to gain access to data through TikTok than other apps, but there’s just so many ways governments can get data from apps.”
But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have introduced bills and applauded efforts to limit the use of TikTok. In addition to Hawley’s bill, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida introduced a bill to ban the company from operating in the US entirely. “This isn’t about creative videos – this is about an app that is collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day,” Rubio said in a press release announcing the bipartisan bill.
The Democratic senator Mark Warner of Virginia has also encouraged efforts to ban TikTok on government devices and called for more states to “take action to keep our government technology out of the CCP’s [Chinese Communist party’s] reach”.
Lawmakers in Washington have attempted to limit the use of TikTok, citing national security concerns. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
What are the geopolitical implications of this ban?
The US has ramped up its efforts to address potential national security concerns from China over the last few years, including adding more China-based companies and entities to a commerce department blacklist limiting exports to those firms. The focus on TikTok is part of this larger campaign, but some groups warn that a ban on TikTok would lead to similar moves from China.
Blanket bans on apps based on a company’s foreign ownership will only hurt US businesses in the long run
Gillian Diebold of the Center for Data Innovation
“Blanket bans on apps based on a company’s foreign ownership will only hurt US businesses in the long run because countries could seek to block US online services over similar national security concerns,” said Gillian Diebold, a policy analyst at the Center for Data Innovation.
Like other privacy advocates, Diebold said that “policymakers should pursue more promising solutions that address the underlying risks.
“For example, to address data concerns, lawmakers should prioritize passing federal privacy legislation to protect consumer data that would explicitly require companies to disclose who they share data with and hold them accountable for those statements,” Diebold said.
Could the US ever ban TikTok outright?
There have been several attempts at banning TikTok from operating in the US entirely. Rubio’s bill, for instance, would block all of the company’s commercial operations in the US.
But the viability of such bans have yet to be proved. Trump’s previous attempt to ban new users from downloading TikTok was blocked in court in part due to free speech concerns. The EFF general counsel, Kurt Opsahl, said a total ban is a violation of free speech and while Rubio’s bill and similar proposed laws to ban TikTok purportedly “protect America from China’s authoritarian government”, they actually adopt “one of the hallmarks of the Chinese internet strategy”.
“A government is within its rights to set rules and restrictions on use of official devices it owns, but trying to ban TikTok from public use is something else entirely,” Opsahl said.
“TikTok’s security, privacy and its relationship with the Chinese government is indeed concerning, but a total ban is not the answer,” he continued. “A total ban is not narrowly tailored to the least restrictive means to address the security and privacy concerns, and instead lays a censorial blow against the speech of millions of ordinary Americans.”
The Guardian · by Johana Bhuiyan · December 31, 2022
16.How TikTok Became a Diplomatic Crisis
Will it be the cause of domestic political instability in the U.S if it is completely banned?
How TikTok Became a Diplomatic Crisis
A Chinese app conquered the planet — and now the U.S. is threatening to shut it down. Can the world’s biggest virality machine survive?
How TikTok Became a Diplomatic Crisis
nytimes.com · by Alex W. Palmer · December 20, 2022
To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
On March 10, two weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the White House convened a Zoom call with 30 prominent TikTok creators. Jen Psaki, then the White House press secretary, and members of the National Security Council staff briefed the creators, who together had tens of millions of followers, on the latest news from the conflict and the White House’s goals and priorities. The meeting followed a similar effort the previous summer, in which the White House recruited dozens of TikTokers to help encourage young people to get vaccinated against Covid.
The app had only become more popular in the intervening months. “We recognize this is a critically important avenue in the way the American public is finding out about the latest,” the White House director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty, told the assembled group. “So we wanted to make sure you had the latest information from an authoritative source.” Yet at the same time, the Biden administration was more than a year into negotiations with ByteDance, the Chinese company that created and owns TikTok, about national security concerns surrounding the app. In fact, the White House staff members who organized and briefed the TikTok creators were barred from downloading the app on their work phones.
The administration’s contradictory approach to TikTok — its embrace of the app as a vital conduit to the public, and its fear of the app as a potential tool of foreign influence — is perhaps a fitting response to the utterly unique problem that TikTok poses. Seemingly overnight, TikTok has managed to remake American culture both low and high, from media and music to memes and celebrity, in its own image. TikTok turned Olivia Rodrigo into a household name and propelled the author Colleen Hoover to the top of the best-seller list, with more copies sold this year than the Bible. TikTok coined “quiet quitting,” one of the hallmark phrases of 2022, and introduced a whole new dialect of algospeak — “seggs,” “unalive,” “le dollar bean” — that is now spreading across pop culture. Corporations and brands, from Goldfish crackers to Prada, have redirected billions of dollars worth of advertising to the platform in recognition of its all-encompassing reach, which can, at seemingly any moment, turn even a decades-old product into a must-have item. Last year, TikTok had more site visits than Google, and more watch minutes in the United States than YouTube. Facebook took almost nine years to reach one billion users; TikTok did it in five.
The app’s extraordinary success is made even more remarkable by the fact that it is a product of America’s greatest geopolitical rival. Despite decades of trying, no Chinese company has ever conquered American society like TikTok. It’s difficult to imagine a Russian or Iranian company — or, increasingly, even another Chinese company — pulling off a similar feat. TikTok’s provenance has stoked persistent and longstanding worries about its vulnerability to exploitation and manipulation by the Chinese government. Over the last year in particular, TikTok has faced an unceasing stream of bad press, with each week seeming to bring a fresh revelation about the company’s questionable data practices and spotty internal safeguards. In just the last six months, TikTok and ByteDance have been accused of lying about the access of China-based employees to American user data, using a news app to push pro-Beijing content abroad and allowing Chinese state media accounts to run unchecked and unlabeled as they criticized the American political process.
If TikTok’s popularity has thus far provided it some insulation against government action, the app’s time may be running out. In November, Brendan Carr, a commissioner of the F.C.C., said it should be banned outright. Senator Mark Warner, co-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said of a ban, “The sooner we bite the bullet, the better.” Christopher Wray, director of the F.B.I., told Congress he was “extremely concerned” about TikTok’s operations in the United States. Earlier this month, Senator Marco Rubio introduced legislation that would effectively prevent TikTok from operating in the United States by banning all apps “subject to substantial influence” by China, Russia and other foreign adversaries.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, is said to be nearing a deal with TikTok. Speaking at a conference of tech leaders, Kemba Walden, the principal deputy national cyber director, said that the White House had not made any final decision on a ban, but voiced support for “any measure that will raise security.” Maryland, South Dakota, South Carolina, Nebraska, Texas, Alabama and Utah have already banned use of the app on state devices. A bill passed by the U.S. Senate last week would do the same at the federal level. The military has also barred the app from government devices.
What often goes unnoticed in these conversations is that TikTok is as much a product of the West as it is of China. ByteDance owes its very existence to the intermingling of ideas, capital and people that defined the last five decades of U.S.-China engagement. The United States sought to woo China with the appeal of its model and the benefits of the existing international order, in the hope that a liberalized market economy would foster domestic political reform. At the same time, Beijing seemed eager to build up its own tech sector as an engine of economic growth and global soft power. The success of a product like TikTok was only the most visible example of a deeper tech symbiosis that once appeared inevitable.
But now the world has changed. In the United States, being tough on China is one of the few areas of bipartisan agreement. And in this fraught geopolitical context, TikTok is considered a Trojan horse — for Chinese influence, for spying, or possibly both. In China, meanwhile, a broad crackdown has sought to rein in high-flying tech companies and their founders, out of fear that, with their influence, independence and popularity, they were becoming alternative power bases to the Chinese Communist Party. The campaign is only one part of a broader political and social chill that threatens to pull the country back to the days of Mao. TikTok itself is not available in China — users there must access a different ByteDance app, which follows Chinese government directives on censorship and propaganda.
Just a few years ago, the rise of ByteDance seemed like a harbinger of an era of Chinese app dominance. Indeed, it would be hard to find a company more self-consciously modeled, in both spirit and substance, on America’s tech giants. ByteDance’s founder internalized the mythos of Silicon Valley, taking to heart the idea, long promoted by Washington, that the American market was the ultimate prize, and that it welcomed any entrepreneur with the talent and ambition to succeed. But now, with walls going up on both sides of the Pacific, TikTok seems likely to be the last of its kind as well as the first. The company is caught in the middle between the old era and the new — too Chinese for America, too American for China.
Credit...Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan
On Christmas Day in 2010, a short, bespectacled 27-year-old Chinese programmer named Zhang Yiming logged onto Douban, a Chinese hybrid of Rotten Tomatoes and Goodreads, to share his thoughts on a movie he had just watched. Zhang used his Douban account as a chronicle of his personal development, recording the books he wanted to read (“What Would Google Do?” “Catch-22” and “The Road to Serfdom”) and the movies he’d seen (“The Departed,” “Good Will Hunting,” “Inception”). The movie Zhang watched that Christmas was “The Social Network.” The movie was of particular interest to Zhang; he was only a year older than Mark Zuckerberg and, after several years spent bouncing between small start-ups and an unhappy stint at Microsoft, he had recently become a founder himself. Zhang’s company, 99fang, was a real estate search engine, but he had ambitions to build something bigger. The story of Zuckerberg and his ruthless climb to the top was both inspiration and warning. He gave it four out of five stars.
Born in 1983 as the only son of a librarian and a nurse, Zhang came of age in a China flush with reform and newfound connections to the West. He moved to Tianjin for college, where he studied computer engineering. Zhang loved the freedom that technology offered and displayed a fondness for the West, politically as well as culturally. In 2009, when Chinese authorities blocked access to several websites, he took to his personal blog to voice his disapproval, according to a Wall Street Journal profile. “Go out and wear a T-shirt supporting Google,” he wrote. “If you block the internet, I’ll write what I want to say on my clothes.”
In 2011, smartphone shipments in China exceeded those in the United States for the first time. Riding the subway in Beijing, Zhang noticed that fewer and fewer people were reading newspapers; instead, they turned to their phones to pass the time. Zhang, a restless entrepreneur, developed an idea for a new company, one that would take advantage of the rise of the mobile internet and the birth of early artificial intelligence. “Just like Zuckerberg founded Facebook to connect people with people, and Travis founded Uber to connect people with cars,” he later said, he wanted to “connect people with information.”
The problem with a lot of the internet, Zhang believed, was the paralyzing number of options it presented to users. The website was “an outdated form of information organization,” he told an interviewer — messy and imprecise and filled with extraneous information. And the RSS feed was an unsuitable replacement, he wrote in a now-deleted blog post, because people were “forced to figure out ‘what I like and what I want’ themselves.” At one meeting with an investor, Zhang sketched out on a napkin his vision of a superior system, powered by artificial intelligence — it would be information finding users, rather than the other way around. In early 2012, he started ByteDance.
An early backer took Zhang to almost two dozen Chinese investors, but none of them were interested. Digital media was not a great business, and China had its own emerging internet giants that could simply copy anything novel ByteDance devised. It didn’t help that Zhang was still so baby-faced that, when introduced, people often ignored him and spoke to his colleagues instead. On top of this, Zhang was not an A.I. expert, nor were any of ByteDance’s early employees. There were not yet any detailed reference texts available in Chinese, and, according to Chinese Entrepreneur Magazine, when Zhang tried to buy one that was in pre-publication, he was rebuffed. Zhang eventually taught himself to write a recommendation engine from scattered resources on the internet.
A few months after ByteDance’s founding, Matt Huang, an American investor and venture capitalist, visited Beijing to check out the tech scene. A friend told him about ByteDance and set up a meeting. When Huang arrived at the company’s offices, he found a humble operation, with Zhang overseeing about 20 people jammed into two apartments. After two hours of conversation, Huang was ready to invest in Zhang’s idea, despite hesitations about the business model. “I was skeptical of the idea but blown away by the person,” Huang said. Most of his lingering doubt came down to the viability of applying A.I. to a news app. But, he said, “I thought if someone was going to figure it out, it was him.”
In August 2012, ByteDance launched the first version of Jinri Toutiao (“Today’s Headlines”), an app that used A.I. to, in Zhang’s words, “let every user, at every moment, see their own front news page.” Toutiao pioneered the system that TikTok would later ride to global dominance. Other content platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, required users to manually accumulate friends and connections, whose posts then populated the user’s feed. Toutiao, by contrast, didn’t care whom you knew, only what you liked. It required no sign up at all — no need to create an account and password, or to describe interests or preferences. Users were simply presented with articles upon downloading the app. Based on how a user reacted to a piece of content — reading the whole article or just a few sentences, pausing on a particular paragraph, swiping back up to read something again, leaving a comment — Toutiao’s underlying technology began to generate a picture of who the user was and what they wanted.
Best of all, the recommendation engine got better with every use. It was a virtuous cycle: more users meant more data; more data meant a smarter algorithm; a smarter algorithm meant more users; and on and on. The app hit one million daily average users only four months after it started. By one count, revenue grew from almost nothing in 2014 to $2.5 billion in 2017. The bigger it got, the more criticism Toutiao faced. Detractors said the app catered to the basest human interests — celebrity gossip, scandal, disaster and violence — to keep users hooked as long as possible. The average user was spending more than an hour a day on the app, and Toutiao was, by revenue, one of the fastest-growing apps in the history of the internet. Still, Zhang could see the ceiling: According to the Chinese business press, an internal company assessment placed the total size of China’s newsfeed market at around 240 million daily average users. If Toutiao claimed half the pie, it would max out at 120 million daily average users. To keep growing, the company had to look abroad.
But the push also reflected something more fundamental than business strategy. Chinese companies, Zhang has said, are “born to be global,” just like American companies. “There was a different kind of leadership, a hunger for growth,” a former ByteDance executive told me. “It was a challenge, in some sense self-imposed — if the big Western tech can do it, why can’t we? We are no less.”
In 2014, Zhang visited Silicon Valley with a group of Chinese founders, touring the offices of Facebook, Tesla and Airbnb. He spotted Xiaomi phones in the hands of American tech workers, and heard conversations about Alibaba’s hotly anticipated American I.P.O. Back in Beijing, Zhang summarized his feelings on his blog: “The golden age of Chinese tech companies is coming.”
A lip-syncing app called Musical.ly was already showing the way. Started in Shanghai by a pair of Chinese entrepreneurs, Musical.ly was a surprise hit in the U.S. market, particularly among teenagers. Musical.ly’s rise intrigued ByteDance, which was on the hunt for a new product to plug into its recommendation engine. In March 2016, the company assigned a handful of employees to a new initiative called Project X, with the goal of replicating Musical.ly as closely as possible. The team discovered that none of the existing Chinese video-sharing apps — there were hundreds of them — had the technology to sync videos with soundtracks. The gap, of about 200 to 300 milliseconds, was small, but noticeable enough to turn off potential users. Fixing the syncing issue was the original selling point of the new app, dubbed Douyin (“Shaking sound”).
Douyin was a near pixel-level recreation of Musical.ly. Opening the app, you were thrust immediately into a video, with no play or pause buttons. Swipe up, and you could scroll through a seemingly endless feed of 15-second videos, one after another, filling the full screen of the phone’s display. The interface was doubly effective: simple and intuitive enough for anyone to figure out on the first use, while also designed to capture as much data as possible for the recommendation engine. In most vertical scrolls, you’re shown several items at once, making it difficult for the platform to know what you’re looking at or what you think of it. By putting one video in front of you at a time, Douyin could better decipher how the user reacted, and use that data to refine future recommendations.
Douyin took a canny approach to growth. While many other ByteDance products catered to older or more rural populations, Douyin initially focused on young people from first-tier Chinese cities, the kinds of users whom other people wanted to emulate. “They built influencers,” Erin Huang, one of Douyin’s first contracted creators, told me. “They weren’t shouting, ‘Use our app!’ They were saying, ‘Hey, do you see this person? You can be like them.’” Growth exploded around February 2017, as challenges like “Dance as if taking a bath” went viral on other Chinese social media platforms, drawing in new users and stocking Douyin with more and more content. By May, the app had surpassed one million daily average users. Around the same time, Zhang reached out to the founders of Musical.ly, proposing an acquisition. Zhang believed it would be a perfect fit, according to an investor involved in the deal, because each had what the other needed. ByteDance offered algorithmic capability and business acumen; Musical.ly offered a way onto the phones of millions of American teenagers, the most valuable customers in the world.
According to reporting by Benita Zhang, a prominent Chinese business journalist, Musical.ly put two key conditions on a deal with ByteDance. First, the name of the app had to be changed, to break free from the association with lip-syncing preteens. Second, ByteDance would spend at least $1 billion on marketing. Zhang agreed, and acquired Musical.ly in November 2017 for roughly $1 billion. By that point, ByteDance had already created an international version of Douyin, but had not yet determined how to combine the new acquisition with the existing product.
The company had struggled, too, when figuring out what to name the new app. A team at ByteDance had drawn up a list of English words and whittled down the choices. One possibility was “TikTok.” It sounded cool, but the team reportedly worried that, to Western ears, it would call to mind the 2009 Kesha song. Ultimately the imperatives of ByteDance’s global ambitions overrode any concerns. “TikTok” was a name ripe for virality: It could be pronounced in much the same way across the globe, no matter the language, from Japan to India to Argentina. With a name like that, an app could take over the world.
ByteDance’s Beijing offices were located in Haidian, the heart of China’s tech industry, and they were laid out much like any millennial-dominated internet firm. Desks were arranged in long rows, internet-cafe style, with a conference room set in the middle of the floor plan and retro-themed phone booths sprinkled throughout. Every corner had a break room stocked with drinks and snacks. Even the very top executives, like Zhang Yiming, worked out of shared offices.
The fidelity to American business culture ran deep. Zhang was known to quote Jack Welch and Steve Jobs frequently, particularly Jobs’s famous injunction to “stay hungry, stay foolish.” When Zhang organized a book exchange within the company, the title he chose was “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” The first tenet of ByteDance company culture, reinforced through banners and posters throughout the office (including, on occasion, in the bathrooms), is “Always Day 1,” a maxim taken directly from Amazon.
Zhang wore a T-shirt and jeans most days, and insisted that everyone call him by his given name, Yiming — a rarity in the formal and status-obsessed world of Chinese corporations, especially for a high-profile founder. “I hate formality, I hate hypocrisy,” Zhang told an interviewer. He was a frequent Douyin user himself, often creating videos and experimenting with new stickers. At mealtimes, Zhang waited in the same line as the rest of the staff. The idea that executives would have individual elevators, not uncommon at large companies, was “very cheesy,” he once wrote in a note to employees.
But according to interviews with current and former ByteDance employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for professional consequences, the company was caught between the cultures it was trying to bridge. Employees say they were expected to work “996,” meaning 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — 72 hours — a standard schedule for Chinese tech companies. During this early period of expansion, calls with overseas offices often ran as late as midnight, and important meetings took place on Sundays. ByteStyle, the company’s code of values, preaches a culture that could have been lifted wholesale from Google or Amazon: diverse, inclusive, radically honest and transparent. But discussing salaries was “a line drawn in blood,” one former employee said, and speaking with the press was absolutely forbidden. The structure was flat, especially by Chinese standards — ByteDance abolished titles for senior positions, and let all employees access other employees’ metrics, including Zhang’s. But it was still clear in which direction orders flowed, and managers were rarely questioned.
“ByteDance is run like a machine,” a former employee said. In China, the company is nicknamed the Super App Factory, in recognition of its streamlined system for pumping out new products. (By one count, ByteDance had more than 140 apps under its umbrella between 2018 and 2020.) The high level of organization and systematization is one of the company’s strengths, because it allows for rapid progress and growth. But it can also be cold and dehumanizing. “Your goals are publicized, and they instill the mantra that your peers are your competitors, not your friends,” the employee said. “It’s like a boiler room, a Wall Street boiler room.”
When the company’s international expansion began, all staff members were told to learn English. Zhang was learning, too, and he sometimes mentioned books he had heard on “Speak English,” a popular E.S.L. app, like the Eckhart Tolle book “The Power of Now.” In 2020, ByteDance hired 40,000 new employees — an average of 150 every working day — many of them outside China, and most under pandemic conditions. Some Chinese employees bristled at the consequences of the expansion abroad. “A lot of Chinese employees may have been working for ByteDance for years, and they didn’t want to start studying English or talking to foreigners or switching the company values,” another former employee told me. “For a lot of people in the Beijing office, they felt they were losing their company to Yiming’s conquest of foreign markets.” Some Chinese employees were reportedly upset at the way that foreign hires described themselves as only working for TikTok in their LinkedIn profiles, with no mention of ByteDance.
The integration was complicated for the foreign employees too — particularly those who came to ByteDance from senior roles at big American tech companies. Having been promised autonomy and independence, they found it could be difficult to accept that ultimate authority rested in Beijing. “America has been so used for so long to being the standard setter and arbiter of business practice, to be the home market and the HQ, that it’s not in the American psyche to be one of the regions,” the second former employee said. “The Americans aren’t used to not having their way.”
What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.
For the foreign employees at the Beijing headquarters, the role of cultural translator was an unavoidable part of the job. When ByteDance tried to internationalize one of its short video products, the first former employee recalled, he was called in to consult. In China, the product was known as Xigua Shipin (“Watermelon Video”), and the internationalization team announced that they had chosen an overseas name: “Ripe Melons.” He told them that they couldn’t call it that. “They said, ‘Why?’” the former employee said. “I said, ‘Just trust me, you can’t.’ They thought it was a great name. I said, ‘Melons are a slang word for women’s breasts.’ They’re like, ‘No, it’s melons that are fresh.’” The product was eventually named BuzzVideo.
Gliding across cultures as a kind of internet-era anthropologist was part of what made working at TikTok interesting and novel. When the app was first introduced, every country and every market had a slightly different proclivity. Thai users liked videos of people dancing at school; Japanese users preferred funny videos about otaku, young people obsessed with anime, manga and video games; Vietnamese users especially enjoyed deft camera work. The United States proved harder to crack, until TikTok’s product managers let the users drive the creation of a new category — Americans, it turned out, had an unusual attachment to memes.
But often, ByteDance’s rapid foreign growth resulted in a strange mash-up. “TikTok’s culture is incredibly Chinese in a way contrary to the advertising materials, in a way that’s jarring to foreigners,” the second former employee said. “But on the flip side, it’s a much more foreign tech company than most Chinese people have worked in before.” In Beijing and foreign offices alike, turnover was often high, as employees burned out on the long hours, the coordination across time zones and the juggling of cultures. But success eventually brought its own kind of stability. “It’s become a mainstream tech firm — we’re getting people from Google, Facebook, Snapchat, consulting, blue-chip firms,” a current American employee said. “It no longer feels in any way like a pariah Chinese company.”
While ByteDance was pushing abroad, China was changing. When Zhang first started the company, in 2012, Xi Jinping had not yet taken power, and it was still possible to envision the country moving on a path, however gradual and uneven, toward greater reform and openness. But under Xi, that hope has been smothered. Since taking office, he has embarked on a far-reaching reassertion of state power. Among Xi’s priorities has been a widespread crackdown on big tech, one part of a broader effort to rein in private companies. While most big American tech firms had long been barred from operating inside China, the country’s domestic giants had been tolerated, even nurtured. But fearing that tech firms’ wealth and influence could pose a threat to party power and economic stability, the Chinese government has punished, fined and regulated the sector into line with party objectives. One by one, China’s most prominent firms and their founders came under the hammer.
When Ant Group, the financial services arm of Alibaba, was nearing an I.P.O. that was anticipated to be the world’s largest, the government ordered it suspended, and soon after announced a probe into Alibaba’s supposed monopolistic practices. The company’s charismatic founder, Jack Ma, briefly disappeared. In April 2021, Chinese regulators called in the leaders of nearly three dozen of the country’s largest tech companies, ordering them to “learn from Alibaba” and conduct a “comprehensive self-inspection” within a month. In July, Didi, the Chinese version of Uber, was ordered to halt new user registrations just two days after the firm’s American I.P.O.; the company announced that it would delist a few months later. New rules unveiled soon after required internet companies with more than one million users to seek government clearance before listing on overseas stock exchanges. Once seen as the embodiment of China’s economic dynamism and the carrier of Chinese soft power abroad, the country’s tech sector was reminded that it exists at Beijing’s mercy.
A raft of legislation has made clear the government’s priorities. The Cybersecurity Law and National Intelligence Law, each of which took effect in 2017, created affirmative legal responsibilities for Chinese companies and citizens to assist the investigative and intelligence-gathering activities of state organs. “Any organization or citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with state intelligence work in accordance with the law,” the National Intelligence Law states, “and maintain the secrecy of all knowledge of state intelligence work.” In 2021, two new laws on data security asserted the extraterritorial reach of the Chinese state over any data on Chinese citizens anywhere in the world.
‘The regulatory authorities have provided us with much guidance and assistance, but in our hearts we failed to properly understand and recognize it.’
Communist Party cells, a fixture of China’s state-owned enterprises, have taken on a larger and more prominent role throughout the economy. Under Chinese law, all organizations with more than three party members are required to form a party cell, which reports directly to the party bureaucracy and often exerts control over business decisions. Companies frequently publicize the activities of their Party cells as a way of currying favor with the state. “At the end of the day, the Chinese state holds all the cards,” Jordan Schneider, a China analyst at the Rhodium Group and host of the “ChinaTalk” podcast, said. “Firms and their leadership have learned that pushing back too much on government demands can have severe consequences.”
In late 2017, as ByteDance passed $20 billion in valuation, government regulators ordered that updates to several popular verticals on Jinri Toutiao be halted for 24 hours. The app, regulators said, was “spreading pornographic and vulgar information” and “causing a negative impact on public opinion online.” ByteDance later announced that it would hire 2,000 new “content reviewers,” with preference given to party members. The company also shut down the gossipy Society section and created a new vertical called New Era, featuring state media coverage.
A few months later, ByteDance pulled one of its short-video products from app stores after state media accused the platform of glorifying teen pregnancy and hosting advertisements for fake products. Within a week, Jinri Toutiao was temporarily pulled from app stores as well. Regulators then ordered ByteDance to shut down the company’s oldest product, a humor app called Neihan Duanzi (“Subtle Jokes”). The app’s content — a mix of not-so-subtle jokes and sketch videos — had “caused strong dislike among internet users,” the authorities said.
At around 4 a.m. Beijing time the morning after the measures were announced, Zhang posted a long apology. He said he had been unable to sleep, filled with remorse and guilt. Neihan Duanzi had failed to live up to “core socialist values,” Zhang continued. “Over the past few years, the regulatory authorities have provided us with much guidance and assistance, but in our hearts we failed to properly understand and recognize it.” For that, he was sorry — and grateful for the government’s leadership. “As a start-up company developing rapidly in the wake of the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, we profoundly understand that our rapid development was an opportunity afforded us by this great era,” Zhang wrote. “I am grateful for this era. I am grateful for the historic opportunity of economic reform and opening; and I am grateful for the support the government has given for the development of the technology industry.”
In order to ensure that ByteDance would improve its understanding and implementation of the “four consciousnesses” of Xi Jinping Thought and hew to “public opinion guidance,” the company would “strengthen the work of party construction,” deepen cooperation with party media and “strengthen the editor-in-chief responsibility system” — a role that, only a few years earlier, Zhang said ByteDance did not need, since it would privilege the preferences of one individual over the aggregated wisdom of all the company’s users.
The contrast with Zhang’s blog post from a decade earlier, when he criticized the expulsion of Google, was stark. It is unlikely that Zhang, who was not a party member, had any great love for the party’s demands. Perhaps he had changed; he now had a multibillion-dollar business to consider, and the livelihoods of tens of thousands of employees. But either way, China certainly had.
Major American platforms at first saw little to worry about in TikTok. No Chinese platform had ever truly captured the American market, and for all that TikTok had gained from the Musical.ly deal in terms of users, it seemed likely to pay for in terms of future growth. Musical.ly had swept up a preteen audience and then stagnated; there was little reason to think TikTok would fare any differently. Besides, TikTok was not really a social network at all. The reason people wanted to be on Facebook, Snap or Instagram was because their friends were on it. “People thought the social network is where the moat comes from; it’s why Facebook is hard to compete with,” an early adviser to ByteDance told me. The major players in American social media were considered so entrenched and immovable that they faced calls to be broken up on antitrust grounds.
If anything, the flush newcomer from China seemed like good news. In 2018, ByteDance spent almost $1 billion in advertising for TikTok, with a budget that reportedly doubled for three straight quarters. TikTok blanketed Facebook, Instagram, Snap and other American social media platforms with ads. TikTok upped the pace again in 2019, reportedly doling out $3 million a day in U.S. advertising alone, a majority of it on Snap. Executives at Snap, who believed their niche as a messaging service was insulated from any threat by TikTok, welcomed the spending. “We were buying so many ads, the money was eye-popping,” a former ByteDance employee said. The response from Snap, he recalled, was, “What can we do to keep this coming?”
At the time, TikTok’s 30-day user-retention rate was rumored to be just 10 percent. By the standards of most social media companies, TikTok was flailing — burning money with nothing to show for it. But ByteDance was playing a different game. Before it could take off, TikTok’s recommendation algorithm needed to be trained to know what was cool — this time for an American audience. The data from Musical.ly’s users provided a first tranche, but in order to make TikTok a compelling product, the algorithm needed to feed on as much data as possible. “It was about getting people, people, people,” a former executive at an American social media company told me. “The more people we get, the more it learns and the more people we can get. That’s the flywheel.”
By mid-2019, the other platforms began to realize that TikTok was not going away. The app had eclipsed 100 million daily average users worldwide, and minted its first bona fide superstar in the artist Lil Nas X, establishing TikTok as a launching pad for musical fame. Then, with the pandemic driving whole countries into lockdown in 2020, TikTok prospered like never before. According to reporting in the Chinese business press, TikTok gained 110 million daily average users between March and April alone. In Iraq, TikTok counted 40 percent of the country’s total mobile-internet population as monthly active users, despite conducting no advertising, promotion or outreach there. The mobile-intelligence firm Apptopia estimated that TikTok was downloaded 89 million times in the United States in 2020, eclipsing even Zoom. In just the first half of the year, according to the research firm Sensor Tower, the app had more than 620 million downloads worldwide.
For Facebook in particular, the threat was acute. The platform was bleeding young users, and engagement was plunging; its fortunes seemed to be cratering just as TikTok’s surged. ByteDance had also been poaching Facebook executives, including Instagram’s head of public policy for the Asia-Pacific region, and Facebook’s public policy leads for Indonesia and Japan.
In a speech at Georgetown University in October 2019, Zuckerberg drew the battle lines. He draped Facebook, which had tried unsuccessfully for years to enter the Chinese market, in the American flag, portraying the contest between the two platforms as one of freedom versus oppression. “China is building its own internet focused on very different values, and is now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries,” he said. He noted the strong encryption protections on WhatsApp, a Facebook product, and its use by protesters around the world. By contrast, he said, TikTok was said to be censoring discussions, even in the United States. “Is that the internet we want?” he asked.
According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, at a dinner with President Trump during the same Washington visit, Zuckerberg pressed Trump on the threat to American businesses from Chinese internet companies. Stopping Chinese platforms should be a higher priority than concerns over Facebook’s hegemony, he reportedly argued. (A representative for Facebook said that Zuckerberg did not remember discussing TikTok in particular.) Facebook set its substantial lobbying operation to work, meeting with lawmakers and White House staff members to fan the flames against the Chinese app.
TikTok had opened a Washington office earlier that year, with a single employee. Sitting at the intersection of three of the most contentious issues in American politics — China, big tech and social media — TikTok knew it would face scrutiny. “There was no way this wasn’t going to be a tough slog,” a person familiar with TikTok’s lobbying operations said. “It wouldn’t matter who was here or what they did; just the basics of the company make it very hard.”
When the Facebook campaign began, the office was just starting its Washington outreach. According to someone who was present at a September 2019 event at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, Zhang asked officials from SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate and one of ByteDance’s biggest investors, for guidance on how to staff up a D.C. operation at a rapid clip. The pace of hiring quickened later in the fall as Zuckerberg pressed the case against Chinese companies. The resulting ByteDance lobbying team was a who’s who of Washington, composed of former congressional aides to leaders in both parties, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi; Kevin McCarthy, House minority leader; Chuck Schumer, Senate majority leader; and Jim Clyburn, House Democratic whip. From just over $500,000 in 2019, ByteDance’s lobbying budget grew nearly eightfold in 2020, then almost doubled again the next year. “They literally went from one person to, like, 30 in a year and a half,” the person familiar with TikTok’s lobbying operations told me. “It was one of the biggest ramp-ups I’ve ever seen.”
In mid-July 2020, President Trump, Vice President Pence and members of the cabinet gathered in the Cabinet Room of the White House for a meeting. Among the agenda items was TikTok. After a briefing by the deputy national security adviser, Matt Pottinger, there was a short discussion. “It was clear that there was more or less unanimity that TikTok is a national security threat,” a person present said. “The discussion was how to deal with it.”
Administration officials had first begun outreach to Capitol Hill about TikTok in early 2019. At the time, the administration was preparing a series of actions against Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications firm, and TikTok seemed to evoke some of the same concerns about data privacy and Chinese government influence. But while TikTok was growing in popularity, it was still confined to a small enough audience to keep it from being a government priority. “There was hope that it would be a fad, like Myspace,” said a Trump White House official, who requested anonymity to discuss internal governmental deliberations. “That it would just fade out.”
By 2020, it was clear that wouldn’t happen. TikTok’s growing dominance provoked two primary concerns: First, that the data gathered on American users could be accessed by Beijing and deployed for the purposes of blackmail, harassment or espionage. Second, that the algorithm itself could be used to advance the Chinese government’s foreign-policy goals, whether by promoting content favorable to Beijing or by suppressing views deemed objectionable. The company had already been accused of censoring content considered politically sensitive in China, as well as removing or burying videos related to Black Lives Matter, protests in Hong Kong and the repression of the Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang Province. (TikTok has said that these were temporary issues that do not reflect the current workings of the app.)
Trump’s cabinet considered three options. The first was to let the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States take the lead. CFIUS — an interagency panel tasked with assessing the national-security implications of investment from overseas — had already opened an investigation into ByteDance’s acquisition of Musical.ly. The committee would make a recommendation to the president, suggesting either a full divestment of Musical.ly — a death sentence for TikTok in its most important market — or mitigation measures that could allay the government’s concerns. The second option, favored by the U.S. Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, was to allow TikTok to remain a Chinese company but operate in partnership with an American company, which would host its data servers on U.S. soil.
The third option was an outright ban of the app. The government of India had already banned TikTok and dozens of other Chinese apps on national security grounds, following deadly border clashes with China. In the United States, a similar move would require a strong and well-developed legal theory, taking into account First Amendment concerns and the distinction between objectionable publishers, which cannot be banned, and a foreign-owned platform.
Presented with three choices, Trump chose the flashiest and most legally dubious: an outright ban. The previous month, TikTok users pranked Trump’s re-election campaign by organizing people around the world to register for a rally in Tulsa with no intention of showing. Brad Parscale, the chairman of Trump’s re-election campaign, tweeted that they had received more than one million ticket requests; about 6,200 people ultimately showed up. The botched rally seemed to have put TikTok on the president’s radar. “That was a pretty major factor in the executive order,” said a former Trump administration official who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the White House’s decision-making. Trump signed an executive order preventing further downloads and updates of TikTok in the United States if the company was not sold to an American buyer within 45 days. Eight days later, CFIUS concluded its investigation, recommending that the president order a divestment.
The weeks following Trump’s announced ban were a circus to rival anything the administration had produced to date. Seeing a chance to snatch the world’s most popular app at a fire-sale price, suitors swooped in. Seemingly every major American tech company was rumored to be pursuing a deal, including Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Eventually, the contours of an agreement were reached. Walmart and Oracle would jointly purchase a stake in a new U.S.-based entity, with ByteDance remaining the majority shareholder. Oracle would oversee the app’s data, ensuring that the personal information of American users was stored only in the United States. At the same time, ByteDance reportedly redoubled efforts already underway to move more of the company leadership to Singapore.
Zhang reportedly learned of the proposed ban when a friend sent him a link to an interview with Trump. From his base in Beijing, Zhang kept American hours, huddling with advisers and investors about how to respond. He wrote a letter to his employees, reiterating his desire to lead “a trustworthy global company.” In China, Zhang’s letter received hundreds of sharp replies, condemning him as a traitor, a coward and an American stooge, sometimes referencing his youthful blog posts that favorably described American culture and politics. Zhang hardly deserved to be called Chinese at all, some angry online commenters said — really he was a jingmei fenzi, an “American at heart.”
And then, just as capriciously as it had burst forth, the drama subsided. After the 2020 election, the proposed deal was shelved, and the Trump administration seemed to forget about the issue entirely. Though Biden quickly rescinded Trump’s executive order, the CFIUS divestment order remained in place. TikTok was left in limbo: operating normally for all appearances, but with the lingering threat of a ban or other government action constantly overhead.
The Biden administration came into office promising to repudiate its predecessor in both style and substance. But China policy — and China tech policy in particular — has represented a clear continuity. The Biden administration has come to see tech advancement as a zero-sum game that the United States must not lose. The centerpiece of Biden’s China tech policy thus far has been a set of sweeping restrictions on the sale of the most advanced semiconductor chips and chip-making equipment to China. Semiconductors are the lifeblood of the digital age, powering every industry and field in which the United States and China are competing, from autonomous cars to artificial intelligence, supercomputing and advanced missiles. The new rules were striking for their unprecedented breadth, cutting off not just the chips themselves but also access to any U.S.-made software or components needed to make the chips.
Under the policy, any “U.S. person” — citizens, permanent residents, anyone who lives in the country and U.S. companies — must receive a government license to work with a Chinese company in the field of advanced-semiconductor production. Taken together, the restrictions seem designed to smother China’s tech industry before it can catch up to America’s. Tech decoupling between the United States and China, once seen as extreme option, is now debated only in its details: when, how and where. “This is going to manifest across trade, investments, people and ideas,” said Schneider, the Rhodium Group analyst. “You’ll likely end up seeing decoupling as a slow and steady march on every dimension.” But in the middle of the Biden administration’s China tech policy sits a TikTok-size hole.
If TikTok has escaped the scrutiny faced by other Chinese companies (or even other American social media giants), it is in part because the user base skews so young. According to the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of 13-to-17-year-olds in the United States use TikTok. Few lawmakers or regulators even understand TikTok. The app’s opacity has also offered a shield. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, TikTok does not share data with researchers or allow outsiders to study the platform. (Last month, TikTok said it was preparing a beta version of a platform-research tool.)
The controversies swirling around TikTok have done little to blunt the app’s ascent. In September 2021, the company announced that it had reached one billon active monthly users, meaning that it had been adding new users at an average rate of nearly 550,000 per day for five straight years. Even with the ban in India, TikTok was the most-downloaded and highest-earning nongame app in the world for the first half of this year. Between Douyin and TikTok, more than one billion people around the world use a ByteDance app every day. On Douyin alone, the average cumulative use time each day accounts for something like 90,000 years.
‘If you look at the people who draw the analogies between Google and Facebook and TikTok, they’re either unsophisticated or they have an ax to grind in favor of TikTok.’
Facebook, which renamed itself Meta in 2021, is still pressing Washington for help. According to emails viewed by The Washington Post, the company has hired one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to lead a nationwide public relations campaign against TikTok. The firm, Targeted Victory, has placed opinion columns and letters to the editor in regional newspapers, encouraged journalists and politicians to dig into TikTok and helped spread damaging news stories. The overall aim is to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat, especially as a foreign-owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” a director for the firm wrote in a February email.
TikTok has proved a ripe target. Over the summer, BuzzFeed reported on leaked audio from dozens of internal company meetings revealing that, contrary to TikTok’s public assertions, data on American users was still routinely accessed by China-based employees. Soon after, BuzzFeed reported that ByteDance had used TopBuzz, a now-shuttered American news app modeled on Toutiao, to push pro-China content to users, while also censoring stories critical of Beijing. (ByteDance has denied this, calling it “ridiculous.”) More recently, Forbes found that Chinese state media accounts were flourishing on TikTok, often by promoting attacks on specific U.S. politicians and the state of American institutions in general. Forbes also reported that a team at ByteDance headquarters planned to use TikTok to track the location of specific American users — exactly the nightmare scenario that critics had warned about. Taken together, these stories have only amplified concerns that TikTok cannot be trusted with its power over American data and attention spans.
The company’s response has done little to allay concerns. Instead of acknowledging the unique hazards of their situation, company officials have sought to distance TikTok as much as possible from its Chinese origins and ownership. TikTok has claimed, for instance, that it is not a Chinese company because the legal entity that owns TikTok and all of the businesses in China is actually registered in the Cayman Islands. TikTok and ByteDance executives have also repeatedly said, including in sworn testimony to Congress, that TikTok has never provided user data to the Chinese government, nor would it if asked — an assertion that the company would knowingly violate Chinese law. “If you look at the people who draw the analogies between Google and Facebook and TikTok, they’re either unsophisticated or they have an ax to grind in favor of TikTok,” said Dan Harris, a lawyer who works with foreign companies in China and writes the China Law Blog. “Most serious people see a difference. It doesn’t mean they’re all great or all bad, but there is a difference.”
TikTok is reported to be making progress on a deal with the Biden administration that would allow the app to retain its Chinese ownership, but keep its American user data on servers in the United States. That arrangement seems unlikely to satisfy anyone, but all the available solutions are imperfect. An outright ban, especially one targeting Chinese companies writ large, risks looking like Sinophobia, and also — somewhat counterintuitively — like acquiescence to the Chinese Communist Party’s view that every citizen and entity in China is a willing appendage of the party. Yet to turn a blind eye to the potential risks posed by a company like TikTok is to ignore the political, economic and social infrastructure of control that the Chinese government under Xi has spent more than a decade constructing.
Whatever happens with ByteDance, the lessons for the next Chinese entrepreneur are sobering. “He can do what ByteDance is trying to do: get a Singaporean passport and incorporate there,” said Ivan Kanapathy, a former director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia on the National Security Council staff. “There’s no answer if he’s in China. If he wants to be a global tech company, that’s it. You can’t have both. If you want the China market, go to China. If you want the West, go West. That’s where we’re going. I have no doubt.”
In May 2021, Zhang Yiming announced that he would transition out of his role as C.E.O. of ByteDance over the next six months. It was time for him to take on a new role, Zhang said in a letter to employees, both to avoid the trap of becoming too central to the organization, and to help spur the type of longer-term thinking that would lead to ByteDance’s next breakthrough. “The truth is, I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager,” he wrote. He preferred to spend time alone, reading, being online and daydreaming about the future.
A few months later, news broke that the Chinese government had taken an ownership stake in a ByteDance subsidiary. The subsidiary held operating licenses for some of the company’s most important Chinese businesses. Though the size of the stake was small — just 1 percent, divided between the China Internet Investment Fund; China Media Group, controlled by the Communist Party’s propaganda department; and the Beijing municipal government’s investment arm — the implications were unavoidable. The Chinese government took one of three seats on the subsidiary’s board, wielding a level of influence incommensurate with its nominal stake.
Zhang is reported to have spent most of his year in Singapore, ostensibly to escape the onerous restrictions and lockdowns of China’s “zero Covid” policy. But it’s not hard to see the relocation as driven by other factors. “I don’t think Zhang Yiming is all that interested in being a tool of any government,” Schneider said. “I think he wants to build an online empire and make a lot of money. Most entrepreneurs in most corners of the globe don’t have to worry about their success being branded a tool of the state.”
In 2016, just after the release of Douyin, Zhang gave a long and wide-ranging interview to the Chinese magazine Caijing. Though Toutiao was a well-established success, Zhang was not yet a household name in China, and he was almost totally unknown overseas. Over the course of the interview, Zhang talked about human nature, corruption, integrity, books that had influenced him, the importance of delayed gratification and much else. It was his dream, Zhang said, to “learn English well,” though running a company left little time for anything besides work.
Toward the end, the interviewer asked Zhang about his reputation for being extremely realistic, “like a robot.” Zhang replied that failing to face reality always created problems for people. “The best way to predict the future is to create it,” he said, “but only if you face it.”
Alex W. Palmer is a contributing writer for the magazine. His 2019 cover story on the D.E.A.’s investigation of a North Dakota teenager’s death by fentanyl overdose was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Pablo Delcan is a designer and art director from Spain. In 2014 he founded Delcan & Co., a design studio based in New York.
nytimes.com · by Alex W. Palmer · December 20, 2022
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
| 
