Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners


Quotes of the Day:

"In short, the strategic problem of the United States has two
aspects: to create a level of thermo-nuclear strength to deter the
Soviet bloc from a major war, or from aggressions in areas which
cannot be defended by an indigenous effort; but to integrate this
with a policy which does not paralyze the will to resist in areas
where local resources for defense do exist."

"The ultimate argument for the little war thesis, however, must
be in terms of the over-all requirements of United States security.
The most frequent argument in favor of our maintaining a foothold
on the Continent of Eurasia, and specifically in Western
Europe, is, in military terms, that our whole strategy depends on
the refueling facilities which our allies provide for our strategic
air force. But we have a strategic interest in Eurasia independent
of the range of our heavy bombers (which can, after all, be increased
by technical advances) , namely, the geopolitical fact
that in relation to Eurasia the United States is an island Power
with inferior resources at present only in manpower, but later
on even in industrial capacity. Thus we are confronted by the
traditional problem of an "island" Power—of Carthage with
respect to Italy, of Britain with respect to the Continent—that
its survival depends on preventing the opposite land-mass from
falling under the control of a single Power, above all one avowedly
hostile. If Eurasia were to fall under the control of a single Power
or group of Powers, and if this hostile Power were given sufficient
time to exploit its resources, we should confront an overpowering
threat. At best we would be forced into a military effort not consistent
with what is now considered the "American way of life."
At worst we would be neutralized and would no longer be masters
of our policy."


"If this is true, we cannot cast off the "grey areas" without dire
consequences. We may be able to win a war without their assistance,
but we cannot survive a long period of peace without denying
them to the U.S.S.R. If the United States ever became confined
to "Fortress America," or even if Soviet expansion in the
"grey areas" went far enough to sap our allies' will to resist,
Americans would be confronted by three-quarters of the human
race and not much less of its resources and their continued existence
would be precarious."
- Henry Kissinger, Military Policy and Defense of the 'Grey Areas'," Foreign Affairs, 1955





1. General Officer Assignments
2. Operation Fox Hunt: How China Exports Repression Using a Network of Spies Hidden in Plain Sight
3. Nine Individuals Charged in Superseding Indictment with Conspiring to Act as Illegal Agents of the People’s Republic of China
4. To Win Friends and Influence People, America Should Learn From the CCP
5. SASC Adds $25 Billion To NDAA In Bipartisan Vote
6. "No chance" U.S. can stop Chinese invasion of Taiwan, military expert says
7. On Chinese Hacking, Biden Gets It
8. Bird-Mimicking Electric Drone Hits New Endurance Record
9. Women, Peace, and Security: Moving Implementation Forward
10.How the Party Commands the Gun: The Foreign-Domestic Threat Dilemma in China
11. US Playing Long Game To Pressure China On Cyber Ops: Experts 
12. SOCOM Members Got an All-Star Crash Course in AI
13. China has a ‘lying flat’ youth problem
14. A legendary Chinese dissident blogger has suddenly fallen silent
15. SOCOM Wants Four ‘Armed Overwatch’ Squadrons, With One Always Deployed
16. Strengthening Taiwan’s Resistance
17. Prepare Now for War in the Pacific
18. Learning in the grey zone: how democracies can meet the authoritarian challenge |
19. 





1. General Officer Assignments


General Officer Assignments
The chief of staff of the Army announces the following general officer assignments:
Lt. Gen. Antonio A. Aguto Jr. to commanding general, First U.S. Army, Rock Island Arsenal, Illinois. He most recently served as commanding general, 3d Infantry Division and Fort Stewart, Fort Stewart, Georgia.
Lt. Gen. Stuart W. Risch to judge advocate general, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C. He most recently served as deputy judge advocate general, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.
Lt. Gen. Edwin J. Deedrick Jr. to U.S. Military Representative to the NATO Military Committee, Belgium. He most recently served as commander, Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, Operation Freedom's Sentinel, Afghanistan.
Maj. Gen. (Promotable) Jonathan P. Braga, deputy commanding general, U.S. Army Pacific Command, Fort Shafter, Hawaii, to commanding general, U.S. Army Special Operations Command, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Maj. Gen. (Promotable) Paul A. Chamberlain, director for Army Budget, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management and Comptroller), Washington, D.C., to military deputy for Budget, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management and Comptroller), Washington, D.C.
Maj. Gen. Joseph B. Berger III to deputy judge advocate general, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C. He most recently served as commanding general/commandant, U.S. Army Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School, Charlottesville, Virginia.
Maj. Gen. John W. Brennan Jr., commanding general, 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne), Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to commander, Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, Operation Inherent Resolve, Iraq.
Maj. Gen. Jeffery D. Broadwater, commanding general, 1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas, to deputy commanding general, V Corps, Fort Knox, Kentucky.
Maj. Gen. Brian J. Mennes to deputy commanding general, XVIII Airborne Corps, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He most recently served as commanding general, 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry) and Fort Drum, Fort Drum, New York.
Maj. Gen. John B. Richardson IV, deputy commanding general, III Corps, Fort Hood, Texas, to commanding general, 1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas.
Brig. Gen. Eugene D. Cox to command surgeon, U.S. Army Forces Command, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He most recently served as commander, U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease, Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Brig. Gen. Jack M. Davis, commanding general, Regional Health Command-Pacific; market manager, Puget Sound Enhanced Multi-Service Market; and chief of the Army Nurse Corps, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, to director, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center; deputy director, National Capital Region Market, Defense Health Agency; and chief of the Army Nurse Corps, Bethesda, Maryland.
Brig. Gen. Marcus S. Evans to chief of staff, U.S. Special Operations Command, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida. He most recently served as commander, Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan, U.S. Forces-Afghanistan/Headquarters NATO Special Operations Component Command-Afghanistan, Operation Freedom's Sentinel, Afghanistan.
Brig. Gen. Alison C. Martin to commanding general; and commandant, U.S. Army Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School, Charlottesville, Virginia. She most recently served as executive officer to the judge advocate general, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.
Brig. Gen. David E. Mendelson, staff judge advocate, III Corps, Fort Hood, Texas, to assistant judge advocate general for military law and operations, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.
Brig. Gen. Clinton K. Murray to commanding general, Brooke Army Medical Center; and deputy market manager, San Antonio Military Health System, Joint Base San Antonio, Texas. He most recently served as commander, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Silver Spring, Maryland.
Brig. Gen. George R. Smawley, staff judge advocate, U.S. Cyber Command, Fort Meade, Maryland, to commanding general, U.S. Army Legal Services Agency; and chief judge, U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals, Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
Brig. Gen. Brett G. Sylvia, deputy commanding general (Maneuver), 1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas, to vice director, J-5, Joint Staff, Washington, D.C.
U.S. Army Reserve
Maj. Gen. Rodney L. Faulk, commander (Troop Program Unit), U.S. Army Support Command - First Army and deputy commanding general, First Army, Rock Island, Illinois, to commanding general (Troop Program Unit), 99th Readiness Division, Fort Dix, New Jersey.
Maj. Gen. Robert D. Harter, assistant deputy commanding general for Reserve Office (Individual Mobilization Augmentee), U.S. Army Material Command, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, to deputy chief of Army Reserve, (Individual Mobilization Augmentee), Office of the Chief of Army Reserve, Washington, D.C.
Brig. Gen. Joseph D’costa, deputy commander - support (Troop Program Unit), 412th Engineer Command, Vicksburg, Mississippi, to deputy commanding general - support (Individual Mobilization Augmentee), Eighth Army, Korea.
Brig. Gen. Dianne M. Del Rosso, deputy commanding general (Forward) (Troop Program Unit), 1st Theater Sustainment Command; and commander, 311th Sustain Command (Expeditionary), Operation Spartan Shield, Kuwait, to assistant deputy chief of staff, Logistics (Individual Mobilization Augmentee), Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-4, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.
Brig. Gen. Joseph Dziezynski, deputy commanding general (Individual Mobilization Augmentee), U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to commanding general (Troop Program Unit), Military Intelligence Readiness Command, Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
Brig. Gen. Cheryn L. Fasano, deputy commander (Troop Program Unit), 377th Theater Sustainment Command, Belle Chasse, Louisiana, to mobilization assistant to the commander and commander (Individual Mobilization Augmentee), Joint Transportation Reserve Unit, U.S. Transportation Command, Scott Air Force Base, Illinois.
Brig. Gen. Tony L. Wright, commander (Troop Program Unit), 98th Training Division (Initial Entry Training), Fort Benning, Georgia, to deputy chief of staff, strategy, plans and policy, (Individual Mobilization Augmentee), Supreme Allied Command Transformation, Norfolk, Virginia.



2. Operation Fox Hunt: How China Exports Repression Using a Network of Spies Hidden in Plain Sight

A long read with some fascinating stories.

Excerpts:

Update, July 22, 2021: Based on information in a superseding federal indictment that was unsealed on July 22, we have updated this story to include the name and title of an individual previously identified only as PRC Official-2 and the title of an official identified as PRC Official-1. PRC Official-2 is Tu Lan, 50, a prosecutor for the Hanyang District of Wuhan. PRC Official-1 is the director of the Wuhan prosecution office’s anti-corruption bureau.

The July 22 indictment charged two additional defendants with acting and conspiring to act in the United States as illegal agents of the People’s Republic of China and with engaging and conspiring to engage in interstate and international stalking. It also charged two of the nine defendants in the case with obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice.



Operation Fox Hunt: How China Exports Repression Using a Network of Spies Hidden in Plain Sight
China sends covert teams abroad to bring back people accused — justifiably or not — of financial crimes. One New Jersey family was stalked as part of a global campaign that takes families hostage and pressures immigrants to serve as spies.
ProPublica · by Sebastian Rotella,Kirsten Berg
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
On the hunt again, the cop from Wuhan rolled into New Jersey on a secret reconnaissance mission.
Hu Ji watched the suburban landscape glide past the highway. He was in his early 40s, about 6-foot-1, smooth and confident-looking. His cases had led from Fiji to France to Mexico, making headlines back home. The work was riskier here; in fact, it was illegal. But he knew the turf. He’d identified himself as a Chinese police officer on his tourist visa, and the Americans hadn’t given him any trouble. Sometimes, it was best to hide in plain sight.
Hu’s driver took an exit into a wooded subdivision, cruising by big homes set back from the two-lane road that wound through one of the country’s wealthiest enclaves. The driver was a new recruit, a boyish-looking Chinese immigrant in his late 20s who lived in Queens and called himself Johnny. Johnny’s uncle in Houston had been a target of Hu’s covert team. Two months earlier, they had “persuaded” the uncle, a former chief accountant for a provincial aviation agency, to return to China to stand trial for alleged crimes. Hu had essentially offered a brutal deal to Johnny and his relatives: If you want to help your family, help us destroy someone else’s.
So in September 2016, Johnny became an indentured spy. He’d already done surveillance to prepare for this visit. Stopping the car, Johnny pointed out the location. The cop surveyed the large lawn, the trees flanking a brick path, the two-story house behind bushes.
Don’t tell anyone you brought me here, he said.
Hu Ji in front of Interpol headquarters Credit: Source: Wuhan Evening News
Locked onto his new target, Hu mobilized his team. It grew to at least 19 American and Chinese operatives: hired muscle, private detectives (including a former New York Police Department sergeant), and undercover repatriation specialists who slipped in and out of U.S. airports with ease. The team did stakeouts while the unsuspecting neighborhood slept. They employed aliases and cover stories to relay money, intelligence and threats. When the stage was set, they brought their target’s frail and elderly father from China to New Jersey as human bait — a high-stakes gambit known as an “emotional bomb.”
This time, it blew up in their faces. Last October, Hu hit the headlines again, this time in the United States, when federal prosecutors in New York charged him and seven others with conspiracy to act as illegal agents for China. Six of them, including the former NYPD detective, were also charged with conspiracy to engage in interstate stalking.
The three-year investigation revealed for the first time the inner workings of Operation Fox Hunt, a shadowy fugitive-apprehension program that is a pillar of President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign.
But it underscored something more troubling: the extent to which China is brazenly persecuting Chinese people around the world, defying other nations’ laws and borders with impunity. And it illuminated a little-known cloak-and-dagger battle between Chinese operatives and American agents on U.S. soil amid growing tensions between the two countries.
Launched in 2014, Operation Fox Hunt and a program called Operation Sky Net claim to have caught more than 8,000 international fugitives. The targets are not murderers or drug lords, but Chinese public officials and businesspeople accused — justifiably and not — of financial crimes. Some of them have set up high-rolling lives overseas with lush mansions and millions in offshore accounts. But others are dissidents, whistleblowers or relatively minor figures swept up in provincial conflicts.
As part of President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, in 2015 China released this list of its 100 most wanted fugitives sought for economic crimes. The names on the list were targets of Operation Fox Hunt, a global fugitive-apprehension program launched in 2014, and a related program called Operation Sky Net. This photo spread appeared in the Chinese Communist Party’s English-language newspaper, China Daily.
Credit: Source: China Daily, redacted by ProPublica
In 2019, an immigration judge in New York granted political asylum to a former social security clerk from Beijing. The young clerk had landed on Fox Hunt’s most-wanted list, but he argued in U.S. court that his former bosses in China had framed him for embezzling about $100,000 after he denounced their corruption. Despite the judge’s ruling, he remains under federal protection because of ongoing harassment by Chinese government operatives.
Former Assistant Attorney General John Demers, who led the National Security Division of the Justice Department until last month, said China sets a dangerous precedent when it pursues expatriates here, violating U.S. laws and abusing human rights in both countries. (Demers declined to discuss the prosecution in New York.)
“If proceeds of corruption are laundered here, from China or any other country, we will investigate and, if we can, prosecute,” Demers said. “But some of these people didn’t do what they are charged with having done. And we also know that the Chinese government has used the anti-corruption campaign more broadly within the country with a political purpose.”
The global Fox Hunt campaign, he said, reflects “the authoritarian nature of the Chinese government and their use of government power to enforce conformity and repress dissent.”
China and the United States don’t have an extradition treaty, in part because of well-documented problems in China’s justice system. But U.S. authorities have tried to work with Chinese authorities to bring fugitives to justice. Some who were in the country illegally have been deported to their homeland. In other cases, China has supplied evidence to help American authorities convict legal immigrants for crimes, such as money laundering, committed in the U.S.
Nonetheless, over the past seven years Chinese fugitive hunters have stalked hundreds of people, including U.S. citizens and permanent residents, according to U.S. national security officials. Undercover repatriation teams enter the country under false pretenses, enlist U.S.-based accomplices and relentlessly hound their targets. To force them into returning, authorities subject their relatives in China to harassment, jail, torture and other mistreatment, sometimes recording hostage-like videos to send to the United States. In countries like Vietnam and Australia, Chinese agents have simply abducted their prey, whether the targets were dissidents or people accused of corruption. But in the United States, where such kidnappings are more difficult, Fox Hunt teams have relied mainly on coercion.
“They use pressure, leverage, threats against family, they use proxies,” said FBI Deputy Assistant Director Bradley Benavides, chief of the China branch of the bureau’s counterintelligence division. “Certainly, they are good at getting what they want.”
Fox Hunt, experts say, is part of a calculated offensive to send a message that no one is beyond the reach of Beijing. As the Chinese Communist Party builds the largest police state in history, it is exporting repression. A report by Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights group, concluded that China conducts “the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world.” With the West preoccupied by other threats such as terrorism, Chinese spies have saturated diaspora communities with conscripted agents.
“This is the one thing that Chinese dissidents most fear,” said Teng Biao, a human rights lawyer and visiting professor at the University of Chicago. “Almost every Chinese overseas has at least one family member living in mainland China. Our fear is that our family will be targeted, they will have trouble. We have to worry about the personal safety of family members in China. That’s why we have to practice self-censorship.”
Transnational repression is just one front in a wide-ranging offensive. In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the FBI has over 2,000 active China-related investigations, with a 1,300% increase in economic espionage cases alone. The FBI opens a new investigation into China every 10 hours, Wray testified.
The Justice Department’s China Initiative against spying has resulted in charges against former CIA officers, a U.S.-born professor, Chinese military officials and a China-based executive at Zoom charged with disrupting online commemorations of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
“We have seen an acceleration of efforts across the range of malign Chinese government behavior,” Demers said. “There is a real change, I think, in the assertiveness and even the brazenness of some of this activity.”
In addition to tracking down those accused of economic crimes, Chinese security forces also travel the world in pursuit of others in the regime’s crosshairs, including Tibetans, Hong Kongers, followers of the Falun Gong religious movement and, perhaps most visibly, the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group. The United States and others have accused China of committing genocide in the Xinjiang region against the Uyghurs.
Chinese leaders defend their efforts to retrieve fugitives. The lack of an extradition treaty with the United States, they say, makes the country a refuge for runaway criminals. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson dismissed the allegations in the New York case as a “smear.”
“When conducting law enforcement cooperation with other countries, the Chinese law enforcement authorities strictly observe international law, fully respect foreign laws and judicial sovereignty, and guarantee the legitimate rights and interests of criminal suspects,” said the spokesperson, Wang Wenbin. “Their operations are beyond reproach. Driven by ulterior motives, the United States turns a blind eye to basic facts and smears Chinese efforts to repatriate corrupt fugitives and recover illegal proceeds.” (The Chinese embassy did not respond to a request for further comment.)
ProPublica’s examination of the New Jersey case, the first prosecution involving a Fox Hunt operation, and of other clandestine Chinese missions in the United States, contradicts the official’s statement. For years, covert repatriation squads from China have tracked their targets in all manner of quintessentially American settings, from quiet housing tracts to suburban chain restaurants to immigrant business districts. Hu’s trail reveals the ambition of the effort. He is just one officer in one team from Wuhan, part of a swarm of teams from other provinces and Beijing that have been active in the United States.
To reconstruct Hu’s trajectory and other Fox Hunt activities, ProPublica interviewed leaders of the FBI and Justice Department, current and former national security officials with expertise on China-related cases, and Chinese dissidents and expatriates. ProPublica also reviewed the federal criminal complaint and other court documents; reports by governments, academic entities and human rights groups; and social media and press archives.
The reporting uncovered evidence that went beyond the New Jersey case, indicating that the Wuhan Fox Hunt team had roamed coast to coast for several years, often without the knowledge of U.S. law enforcement, taking advantage of fear and silence in immigrant communities.
“You have to understand the Chinese intelligence services,” said an Asian American former counterintelligence official. “They will tap literally anyone with access in the community where the fugitive may be hiding and working. China has the largest security apparatus in the world.”
In the summer of 2016, Johnny got grim news from Wuhan.
The Chinese police had somehow brought his uncle, the former accountant, back from Houston. Newspapers published photos celebrating the success of the secret manhunt. In them, a short, bespectacled, morose-looking man stood on an airport runway flanked by uniformed officers.
The cop who caught your uncle is named Hu Ji, Johnny’s relatives told him. He will contact you about another case. Do what he says.
Johnny, whose given name is Zhu Feng, had studied in Guam before moving to Flushing, home to one of America’s largest enclaves of Chinese immigrants. His extended family became legal U.S. residents and embraced their new home. His older brother served in the U.S. military and then worked for the Social Security Administration and Customs and Border Protection, according to court documents and public records. (A CBP spokesperson declined to comment, citing the open FBI investigation.)
Johnny, who is now 34, seemed a malleable recruit. He did odd jobs: tour guide, selling used cars. On social media, he sported a Yankees cap and a boyish smile and called himself “Endless Johnny.”
Now, he put that life on hold and became a secret agent for the Chinese government, prosecutors said. From Wuhan, Hu laid out the mission. His new target, Xu Jin, had directed Wuhan’s development commission before he left for the United States in 2010 with his wife, Liu Fang, a former insurance company executive. Prosecutors had charged them with taking millions of dollars in bribes — crimes for which the maximum punishment is death.
The couple, now both 56, had gotten U.S. green cards through a program that grants residency to foreigners who invest more than $500,000 in the United States. The California consultant who helped them apply later pleaded guilty to immigration fraud, and investigators in that case alleged that the wife’s petition for residency contained false information. But they remain legal residents. (The couple declined to be interviewed.)
In 2015, the Chinese government put the couple on its list of 100 most wanted fugitives in Operation Fox Hunt. Chinese authorities have said they made three formal requests for U.S. assistance about the wanted couple, providing evidence about alleged money laundering and immigration crimes that could be prosecuted here. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment on that assertion.
Meanwhile, Hu’s team began a slow dance of coercion and harassment. They locked up the former official’s sister in Wuhan to pressure him to return to China, court documents said. And they discovered other relatives of the couple living in the upscale New Jersey suburb of Short Hills. Hu’s team suspected the targets had supplied illicit funds to buy the relatives’ $1.3 million home, and that the couple was living nearby. The house was their best lead.
Scope out the house and take photos, Hu told Johnny.
The cop from Wuhan represents the two faces of Fox Hunt: swashbuckling crime fighter at home, stealthy criminal in the United States.
As a veteran of the police foreign affairs unit in China’s ninth-largest city, Hu, who is now 46, was roughly the equivalent of a mid-level detective in Dallas. But his career soared after he joined a Fox Hunt task force. In early 2016, Wuhan media had published glowing profiles about him, describing his imposing height, his travels to 29 countries, his arrests of eight fugitives. In one photo, Hu beamed in a green suit outside the cavernous headquarters of Interpol in Lyon, France.
“Out of the country does not mean out of the legal system,” he told the Hubei Daily. “Show your sword and punish even those in faraway lands.”
Beijing led the crusade, but many of the traveling apprehension teams came from the provinces. Chinese embassies and consulates overseas helped them while maintaining deniability. If hunters like Hu succeeded, it enhanced their careers and helped spread Xi’s message that there were no safe havens. If they failed, the central government was insulated.
Credit: For ProPublica
In September 2016, Hu flew to New York to meet Johnny and launch the operation. Johnny drove him to New Jersey to check out the house in Short Hills and other locations. Hu soon pressed another relative into service: Johnny’s father, Zhu Yong, who also goes by Jason Zhu. Jason, who is now 64, was divorced and suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure. He didn’t have a steady job, dividing his time between a home in Connecticut and his older son’s place in Queens, and he traveled frequently to China. But he, too, became a covert operative, prosecutors said. (Jason’s lawyer and relatives declined to comment.)
This conscription of the families of captured targets is a ruthlessly effective tactic. It ensures loyalty and obedience. It’s also tradecraft, using local intermediaries to shield Chinese officers. The teams are often organized in silos so the foot soldiers don’t know other players or all the details.
At Hu’s direction, the neophyte spies started building a network. First, they needed a local private investigator, preferably an ex-cop with contacts and the skills to track people down.
The Zhus’ choice didn’t seem like someone who would become entangled in foreign espionage. Michael McMahon, now 53, came from an Irish American family of police officers and firefighters. During his 14 years at the NYPD, he’d worked in narcotics and an elite street crime unit, rising to detective sergeant. He’d won the Police Combat Cross, the department’s second-highest honor, for his role in a gunfight in the Bronx. In 2003, he retired on partial disability related to ailments caused by his time at Ground Zero after the Sept. 11 attacks. His wife, an actress, had had a long-running part on “As the World Turns,” a daytime soap opera.
To contact McMahon, the Fox Hunt team enlisted a woman who presented herself as the New York-based employee of a translation company, according to his lawyer, Lawrence Lustberg. The woman told the detective that she’d found him through a Google search and introduced him to Johnny and Jason Zhu, describing them as representatives of a private Chinese company that was trying to recover assets from a former employee who had stolen money, Lustberg said.
In late October, during a second U.S. trip, Hu sat down with McMahon at a Panera Bread restaurant in Paramus, New Jersey, a suburb about 20 miles from New York City. The Chinese cop posed as Eric Yan, an executive of the company, during that meeting and other interactions, the lawyer said. Jason and Johnny Zhu also participated in meetings with McMahon and were involved in paying him.
Johnny identified himself as the nephew of the owner of the Chinese firm, which he described as a construction company, Lustberg said.
McMahon “believed he was meeting company personnel” and never learned the team’s true mission, Lustberg said. “Nothing seemed suspicious at meetings. They never mentioned the Chinese government or that anybody worked in law enforcement in China. They talked about asset recovery. And they came across as employees with a vested interest in locating the money.”
Prosecutors would later dispute the idea that McMahon was an innocent pawn.
McMahon gathered information about the targets’ property records, bank accounts and travel. He brought in two more investigators to help stake out the house in New Jersey, even alerting local police to the surveillance to prevent any trouble. But the team was unable to find the wanted couple’s home.
On Nov. 12, Hu sent the private detective an email, using the Yan alias, to say he had “reported all we found” to his superiors in China.
In December, Hu visited New York again. This time, he brought his boss. Authorities have identified Hu’s superior only as PRC (People’s Republic of China) Official-1, the director of the Wuhan prosecution office’s anti-corruption bureau and a leader of a Wuhan Fox Hunt task force that includes prosecutors and investigators in the Communist Party’s anti-corruption unit. Hu and his boss were part of a group from Wuhan that entered the country with ease as they carried out their illegal mission. Once again, Johnny served as their driver.
Days after that trip, Hu summoned Johnny to Wuhan for a meeting. Next time, Hu told him, they didn’t plan to come back from America empty-handed.
China does not have a monopoly on cross-border repression.
Saudi spies have secretly repatriated Saudi college students whom they accused of dissidence or Islamic extremism in the United States. A U.S. rendition program that captured dozens of suspected terrorists worldwide caused backlash in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. In 2009, an Italian court convicted 23 Americans, most of them CIA officers, of snatching an extremist cleric off a street in Milan and flying him to his native Egypt, where interrogators tortured him. And this month, federal prosecutors charged Iranian intelligence officers with plotting the rendition of an Iranian American journalist, describing an audacious scheme that could have involved kidnapping her in New York, taking her by boat to Venezuela and flying her to Iran.
But Chinese law requires citizens to assist China’s all-powerful intelligence agencies, a mentality that extends abroad. Systematic spying in the diaspora dates back decades. During the running of the Olympic torch in San Francisco in 2008, FBI agents watched Chinese spies with walkie-talkies direct platoons of dutiful students — about 7,000 bused in from around the country — disrupting pro-Tibet protests. More recently, the FBI has investigated incidents in which cars painted and equipped like Chinese police vehicles cruised through immigrant communities in California. The rogue patrols are messages from the Chinese government that immigrants should obey the regime in Beijing and watch what they say and do, according to Demers, the former Justice Department official.
“There are so many organizations working for the Chinese government,” said Teng, the legal scholar. “In most cases, student and neighborhood associations are actually controlled. The foreign governments and the universities have not realized this urgent and important issue. They don’t deeply understand how the Chinese government uses these associations to achieve its own political purposes. The response by Western governments and universities has been far from sufficient.”
When Xi became president in 2013, he declared war on graft. He capitalized on resentment of an elite enriching themselves in a rapacious economy. Many of them had sent children to foreign schools, purchased foreign homes and prepared exit strategies. Xi took aim at an exodus of public servants and businesspeople with dubious fortunes who were decamping to countries such as Australia, Canada and the United States.
“That is the genius of the Chinese political system,” said Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow at the Asia Program of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “If you’re in any position of power, it’s highly unlikely you’ve never engaged in corruption. So that means anyone can be pursued through Fox Hunt.”

The moralistic rhetoric highlighted scandalous details, such as the $4.4 million that a former finance director of Jiangxi province allegedly lost in Macau casinos before his deportation from Singapore. China secured Interpol red notices, which are alerts that a country has requested arrest and extradition, for expatriates around the world.
After Operation Fox Hunt started in 2014, U.S. authorities began detecting illegal incursions by fugitive hunters who threatened U.S. targets, showing up at their homes and trying to enlist the help of local police and prosecutors, especially Chinese Americans. In August 2015, as President Xi prepared to visit, Washington warned Beijing to rein in Fox Hunt. FBI agents still found themselves skirmishing with Chinese spies deployed to intimidate dissidents in American cities during the presidential visit.
Weeks after the presidential visit, Beijing seemingly retaliated against a dissident who had criticized Xi’s regime during protests in Seattle, obtaining an Interpol red notice on charges of bid-rigging. A U.S. court later granted the dissident political asylum, and Interpol lifted the notice.
The Obama administration spent several years negotiating with China about the Fox Hunt fugitives. During the customary lighthearted exchange of gifts at a meeting, one senior U.S. official gave Chinese counterparts a toy stuffed fox. U.S. prosecutors charged some fugitives and repatriated others, including convicts who had done federal prison time for embezzling $485 million from the Bank of China.
But there was acrimony over Beijing’s bargaining chip: about 39,000 illegal immigrants from China, including convicted criminals, in U.S. custody. They had spent years stranded in the United States after deportation proceedings because China refused to take them. Now Chinese diplomats offered to relent — if the U.S. threw in names from the Fox Hunt list. The Americans wanted Beijing to accept the deportees first. And the targets on the list, many of whom had legal status in the U.S., could not simply be shipped back to China.
“We resisted,” said a former senior U.S. official. “We said it’s apples and oranges. We can’t do that. There’s no due process. If you have a case, you have to present it.”
By 2016, federal agents were infuriated to discover that China had used the talks as cover for additional covert operations on U.S. soil. Chinese police officers in the delegations that had come to Washington to discuss Fox Hunt had secretly peeled off to pressure Fox Hunt targets, three former U.S. officials told ProPublica.
“They used delegations to send officers to go out and try to threaten these people, either their assets or their relatives,” the former senior official said.
Most of the stalled deportees remain here today. And not all the Fox Hunt targets turned out to be fat cats.
Liu Xu, a former clerk, was the youngest person on a list of the Fox Hunt 100 most wanted, and the one accused of stealing the smallest amount of money. He was 29 when he fled to Sugar Land, a Houston suburb, in 2013. He told a U.S. immigration judge that he was a whistleblower. Working as a contractor at a social security administration office, he caught his bosses creating fictitious aid recipients and pocketing payments, according to his New York lawyer, Li Jinjin, who also goes by Jim Li. The bosses promptly framed the clerk for stealing about $100,000, Li said.
“He was accused of things that a lower-level official could not do,” Li said. “The prosecutors were trying to protect the bosses.”
In 2019, the judge granted political asylum to the clerk, who has moved and remains under federal protection because of harassment that has included photos of him and his home, complete with his address, being published in Chinese-language media, Li said.
Li, a tough 65-year-old, once served as a police officer in Wuhan. While studying for a Ph.D. in Beijing, he went to jail for participating in the Tiananmen Square protests. The lawyer said Fox Hunt prosecutions often grow out of regional feuds, snaring relatively minor figures.
“These are products of local political conflicts,” Li said. “They pursue them as fugitives because the central government sets a goal. And the provincial government wants to achieve the goal for political needs.”
In the spring of 2017, the plan was ready.
Hu stayed in Wuhan, a remote puppet master running the show. But he sent in a closer: a specialist who had the risky task of bringing back the target. U.S. prosecutors identify her as Tu Lan, 50, a prosecutor for the Hanyang District of Wuhan. She would lead the repatriation team, but because she didn’t speak English, Johnny would stick close and be her intermediary with Mike, as the team called the American private detective.
The other specialist on the team was Li Minjun, now 65, a doctor who had worked for the Ministry of Public Security, U.S. officials said. Her assignment: to escort an elderly man across the world against his will in order to ambush his son.
The father’s age has not been disclosed, but Hu felt he was frail enough to put a physician at his side for the more than 15-hour flight. The plan was to bring the father unannounced to the house in New Jersey — human bait to lure his son out of hiding, Hu told McMahon in an email in March.
“We just want to recomm[e]nd you trace him to find [his son’s] address,” Hu wrote to the detective.
Later, the family would accuse Chinese officials of kidnapping the father. Prosecutors say the team forced him to make the trip.
The father had orders to tell his son how much the family would suffer if the son didn’t obey. Hu hoped the shock would cause the wanted man, Xu Jin, to surrender on the spot, investigators say.
Cases around the world show that such strong-arm methods are typical. Often, victims accompany captors without a struggle because they fear retaliation against relatives. One businessman on Fox Hunt’s list who lived in Canada flew back to surrender in Shandong province in 2016 after police there arrested his ex-wife, according to a Human Rights Watch report.
First, Hu’s team had to get the father into the United States. Departing passengers at U.S. airports rarely encounter border enforcement other than TSA personnel. But it’s harder to enter the country with a captive in tow. Johnny helped coach the elderly man on responses to standard questions asked by border inspectors at Newark Liberty International Airport, a vulnerable moment of the plan.
“Have you all decided how to beat this questions[?]” Johnny asked his bosses in a text on April 1.
Text messages show Johnny was in Wuhan getting the hang of his newest cloak-and-dagger role: overseeing operatives he had hired in the Chinese community in New York. Johnny deployed an accomplice to beef up the stakeout team with instructions to “conduct surveillance there for 5 days. 12 hours on the first day, 10 hours on the second day, and 8 hours on the last three days. … The compensation is 1800USD.”
Johnny ordered a recruit in Queens, a driver and logistics man, to keep his mouth shut around the visiting big shots.
“Do not ask them what they come here for,” he wrote. “This thing is carried out secretly. … Just follow instructions when working for the Chinese government.”
On April 3, Johnny and Tu, the head of the repatriation team, landed in Newark and checked into a hotel. Johnny met McMahon at the Panera the next day and gave him a $5,000 cash retainer. Hu emailed the detective photos of the father and the wanted couple.
The moment of truth came on April 5. That evening, Johnny drove back to the airport to pick up the father and the police doctor, who made it through customs without a hitch. Meanwhile, McMahon sat outside the Short Hills house, exchanging texts with Johnny as the plan kicked into action. Less than an hour later, Johnny dropped the human bait at the relatives’ front door.
Credit: For ProPublica
The relatives called the son. The next day, the wanted man did exactly as Hu had envisioned: He picked up his father. The surveillance team followed them back to the wanted man’s home about half an hour away. They’d found their target.
But Hu’s hopes for a lightning-bolt triumph evaporated. Instead of submitting, the family contacted law enforcement and the FBI got involved, a move the Fox Hunt team quickly detected. On April 7, Johnny sent a text to the prosecutor saying Hu wanted her “and the doctor to come back as soon as possible” to “evade actions by U.S. law enforcement,” the criminal complaint says. Both women hurriedly caught flights back to China.
The team didn’t give up just because FBI agents were onto them. With the specialists safe, Hu continued the stakeout with his U.S. operatives. Joining Hu at the command post back in Wuhan, Tu gave orders to stay ready.
“The key is the status of [the father],” she texted Johnny on April 9. “The main purpose is to let him persuade [his son] to surrender.”
But two days later, Johnny sent McMahon a text saying he’d been told to return to Wuhan.
“Let me know if I need to go to China lol,” McMahon responded.
“They definitely grant u a nice trip if they can get [the target] back to China haha,” Johnny replied.
The gambit had failed. The father was allowed to go home. On April 12, Johnny went to Newark Airport separately from the elderly man and checked in on the same flight to Shanghai. His handlers in Wuhan told him to ensure the father met the doctor when he landed, and to treat him “with good intention” because of his age.
Before boarding, though, Johnny had a scare. CBP officers intercepted and questioned him. They showed him photos of Tu, his traveling companion a week earlier, and asked about her. He claimed she was a friend of his uncle and he had been her tour guide. The inspectors photographed the night vision goggles they found in his luggage, then let him go.
Johnny sent a frantic message to the accomplice who lived in Queens.
“Delete all of our chat record after reading this,” he wrote. “There are some problems. Someone in the U.S. will be looking for you. … Be careful of everything. If there is anything, use other phones to call. Your cell phone may be tracked.”
McMahon received no such warning, his lawyer said. The detective has kept his emails and texts from the case, a sign that he had no knowledge of the attempted repatriation, Lustberg said. McMahon also didn’t know that the family had contacted the FBI, according to his lawyer, who said the texts about China were just “banter.”
U.S. officials are skeptical. They noted that McMahon emailed himself a newspaper article on April 6, the day before the team leader fled back to China, with the headline “Interpol Launches Global Dragnet for 100 Chinese Fugitives.” The story had photos of the wanted couple and information about the Chinese government’s fugitive-apprehension programs.
“Accordingly, I believe that McMahon was aware that” the couple “were Operation Fox Hunt targets,” an FBI agent wrote in the criminal complaint.
On April 23, Hu sent McMahon an email thanking him for finding the address of a woman in northern California, Lustberg said. She was the adult daughter of the couple in New Jersey. Instead of giving up, Hu’s team was already attacking on a new front.
The federal charges against the cop from Wuhan focus on the operation in New Jersey. But ProPublica has learned that Hu roamed the country for several years, his activities alternately covert and overt, unmolested by law enforcement as he pursued at least two additional targets.
“Xi Jinping has brought a sense of urgency to the process,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a former FBI counterintelligence chief. “There is a boldness, a brazenness, in the way they are treating us. They don’t think there will be a consequence.”
Hu has visited this country at least eight times. In addition to three trips in 2016 described in court papers, he was here in 2015 — nominally to attend a training program at the University of New Haven.
In a photo in Chinese media, Hu holds a certificate next to Henry C. Lee, a Chinese American forensic scientist known for his participation in cases such as the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Until recently, Lee directed an eponymous institute at the university that offers programs for visiting Chinese law enforcement officials and researchers.
The caption did not mention a date or place, but a university spokesperson confirmed that the photo was taken on campus. An organization called the U.S.-China Business Training Center arranged Hu’s visit and issued the certificate, said the spokesperson, Doug Whiting, in an email. Whiting had no other information on Hu’s visit.
“Rosters are not kept or maintained, nor are any kind of formal or informal records of the programs offered,” Whiting wrote. “All visitors presumably had been approved for visas by U.S. Customs and therefore no additional background checks were necessary. ... It’s impossible to know specifically what program, or when, Mr. Hu Ji attended.”

That is surprising because of the widespread infiltration of U.S. universities by Chinese spies. Officials at the U.S.-China Business Training Center, which lists offices in California and China, did not respond to requests for comment.
U.S. officials told ProPublica that they subsequently determined Hu was in New Haven in 2015. The timing coincides with his Fox Hunt activity.
In a case still cloaked in intrigue, Hu engineered the repatriation of a U.S. legal resident while she was traveling in Mexico in 2015. Chinese press and government accounts withheld the woman’s full name and obscured her face in a published photo, describing her as a manager of a Wuhan investment company wanted for fraud.
Hu told Chinese newspapers that he learned she was in the United States, requested an Interpol red notice in 2013, and “started to track her” — activity that was illegal if done on U.S. soil.
“Fugitives who fled to the United States are the most difficult to catch, and it is even more difficult to catch fugitives who hold a U.S. green card,” an article in the Chutian Metropolis Daily said.
Chinese accounts claim Hu “miraculously” got a break in September 2015 when he found out the woman had flown to Cancun and Mexican authorities detained her. She requested that Mexican officials deport her to the United States, so Hu and Chinese embassy officials in Mexico “raced against time,” fearing U.S. diplomats could intervene, the accounts say. Hu organized a ruse with Mexican officers: They tricked the prisoner onto a plane to Shanghai by telling her it was bound for Houston, the articles say. A published photo shows Hu at an airport with two Mexican immigration officers who transported the prisoner.
Mexico kept the affair unusually quiet. There was no Mexican press coverage, no standard announcement about international cooperation in action.
Asked about the matter, FBI officials said they had not identified the woman and were investigating. But ProPublica has identified her based on information from knowledgeable officials, detailed summaries of Chinese court documents, and other sources.
She is 50-year-old Suying Wang. In 2012, she came to the United States, where she married a U.S. citizen. Records show he is the president of a small business in Houston that has an affiliate in Mexico City. They lived in a condominium complex in Houston. Her former husband, who has since divorced her, declined to comment when reached by telephone.
As for Wang’s arrest in 2015, ProPublica confirmed elements of the Chinese accounts, but discovered other details that change the story. In reality, Chinese operatives did surveillance of three fugitives in Merida, Mexico, a city about 190 miles from Cancun on the Yucatan peninsula, according to U.S. and Mexican officials. At the Chinese embassy’s request, Mexican immigration officers then arrested Wang and two others wanted for unrelated economic crimes, the officials said. Because Mexico does not have the death penalty, Chinese diplomats signed a pledge stating that Wang did not face execution in China, according to the officials, who requested anonymity.
Mexico deported Wang on Sept. 23, 2015. Photos obtained by ProPublica confirm Hu’s involvement. They show the prisoner in transit in the custody of Chinese officers. Those officers also appear in a published photo of Hu and Mexican officers at an airport, and in another in which Wang’s face is obscured.
Credit: Source: People’s Public Security News
Despite the Interpol notice and her Chinese citizenship, the deportation — and the reported deception used to get her on the plane — raise questions. International refugee law bars governments from returning foreigners to countries where they face a well-founded fear of persecution. China is a notorious violator of human rights. And Mexican authorities had a clear alternative: They could have sent the U.S. resident to the United States, a close ally.
The other two targets were also sent back to China, but it is unclear if they were U.S. residents as well. The episode reflects China’s growing clout south of the border. One of Hu’s superiors, a Wuhan deputy police chief named Xia Jianzhong, later visited Mexico to thank immigration chiefs for their help.
A spokesperson at the Mexican embassy in Washington declined to comment on the case.
In Wuhan, a court sentenced Wang to five years in prison, a sentence reduced to three years on appeal. The rather light punishment, combined with the scope and expense of the operation, underscores that one of the main goals of Operation Fox Hunt is instilling fear in the diaspora.
Hunters from Wuhan have worked other cases in Houston. While pursuing one man between 2016 and 2018, they caused his brother-in-law in Wuhan to lose his job and forced him to visit a prosecutor’s office for months; they made his business partner’s wife go to the United States and hire private detectives to investigate him; they tortured and jailed his brother and harassed their elderly mother, according to the wanted man’s lawyer, Gao Guang Jun. Parts of the ordeal were also documented in the report by Human Rights Watch in 2017.
“It was a huge attack on the family,” Gao said. “The whole family is broken.”
Hu’s name did not surface in that case, though his team may have been involved. But starting in 2015, he led the attack on the family of the former accountant in Houston. ProPublica has identified him as Zhu Haiping — the uncle and brother, respectively, of Johnny and Jason Zhu in New York.
Zhu Haiping, now 58, spent 18 years on the run, accused of stealing almost $2 million while he was deputy finance director of an aviation agency in Wuhan. Hu’s task force located him in Houston, where he was a legal resident, and hounded him. Urged by his family to surrender, he “said he would return many times, but he never finalized a date,” according to an article in the magazine of the Communist Party’s anti-corruption unit.
Finally, Hu’s team unleashed an “emotional bomb,” the article says. They sent the wanted man a video of his friends, his former home and Wuhan delicacies set to music.
“He started to tear up, and the mere remaining suspicion at the bottom of his heart had gone,” the article says.
In July 2016, Zhu “was returned” to China, according to U.S. court papers. The details of the repatriation are unknown, but it is hard to believe he surrendered because of an appeal to sentiment.
Hu’s ability to cross U.S. borders repeatedly during his hunts is startling. Although he kept his mission secret, he identified himself as a police officer for the Wuhan Public Security Bureau on his application for a U.S. tourist visa in the New Jersey case. In March 2016, a Chinese newspaper article even mentioned his investigation of the former Wuhan development official in New Jersey, calling the wanted man one of Fox Hunt’s top targets. But Hu had no known problems at U.S. airports when he traveled back and forth.
Asked if that was a breakdown in border security, federal officials said visa screening consists mainly of checking U.S. databases, which in this case apparently did not include information from the Chinese press. The chances of detection were low because of the large number of visa applicants reviewed by U.S. consulates in China, they said, and consular officials and border officers were not as aware of Fox Hunt then as they are today.
Hu’s point man in California was Rong Jing.
Rong, a married businessman, lived in Rancho Cucamonga, an arid city south of the San Gabriel Mountains and about 35 miles east of Los Angeles. Like the operatives in New York, he was an immigrant with permanent resident status. But Rong, now 39, described himself as a bounty hunter for the Chinese government, court documents said. He apparently liked the work and liked to talk about it. His bragging would give investigators a primer on the reach and relentlessness of Fox Hunt networks.
Just weeks after aborting the scheme involving the father in New Jersey, Hu turned up the heat on the wanted couple. He zeroed in on their daughter in northern California. She had arrived in the United States as a child, studying at a private boarding school years before her parents fled China. She had earned an advanced degree at Stanford, gotten married and made a life for herself far from her parents and their problems with the Chinese courts.
None of that mattered to the hunters from Wuhan. The daughter became their new weapon.
In May 2017, Rong hired a private investigator to stalk her. Unfortunately for him, the investigator was a confidential informant for the FBI. U.S. officials did not disclose if or how they maneuvered the informant into place. Since starting the investigation in New Jersey in early April, agents had been mapping the travel and contacts of the Fox Hunt team, and Hu had spent time in California, according to interviews and court records.
More generally, the FBI had been watching private investigators — especially in areas with large Asian communities — because of the role they had increasingly played in Fox Hunt. Rong does not speak English, so it is likely that the investigator he hired speaks Mandarin.
The bottom line: The FBI now had a man inside Hu’s operation.
On May 22, Rong met for four hours with the investigator-informant at a restaurant in Los Angeles. In a recorded conversation, Rong offered the detective $4,000 to investigate and videotape the daughter. If the team succeeded with the repatriation, he and the detective could split any reward money, Rong said.
Rong said the bosses in Wuhan hadn’t told him “what to do with” the daughter. It was possible they could ask him “to catch” her, he said. Rong and the detective might have to act as proxies for Chinese officers who “wouldn’t feel comfortable to arrest her” in the United States, he said.
If there are “things they wouldn’t feel comfortable to do,” Rong said, “we need to be there on their behalf.”
Rong asked whether the detective had a problem with removing someone from the country. “Say, if he wants us to bring him/her over, can you bring him/her over? Would this bring about any legal issues?”
Once the detective had shot video of the daughter, his next job would be to contact her parents and persuade them to return to China, Rong said. For the next few weeks, the private investigator went through the motions of shadowing the daughter, supervised by the FBI.
Reporting to Rong on July 14, the detective discussed photos he had provided of the daughter and her home. Then he asked: “You don’t think they’ll do any harm to her, do you?”
Rong’s reply wasn’t entirely reassuring. If the detective got in trouble, they would both be in trouble, he said.
“If there was an accident,” he said, “in truth you [could claim that you] were just … investigating her.”
At other moments, Rong sounded less menacing. She was “simply a daughter,” he said, emphasizing that the parents were the main targets.
Credit: For ProPublica
Unlike the New York operatives, Rong wasn’t wary of the detective. His recorded conversations painted an inside picture of Operation Fox Hunt.
The Communist Party footed the bill. Rong did freelance missions exclusively for Wuhan, receiving a fee for each repatriation. He talked about teams of visiting “lobbyists.” They were salaried “civil servants” of the Chinese government who traveled on work visas under multiple identities. Their job was “persuading people” to return to China, he said.
The account fits with information uncovered in other cases. The clandestine hunts follow a pattern: Investigators like Hu create networks and swoop into the country at key moments, insulated by layers of forced recruits, hired civilians, private detectives, even street criminals. The pursuits last for years, sometimes even after U.S. law enforcement intervenes.
Rong and the private detective met again, but the project in California fizzled out. The case went quiet until November, when the FBI had another breakthrough.
Although Hu had warned Johnny to stay in China after he flew back with the elderly father, the young man returned to the United States on Nov. 9. FBI agents interviewed Johnny and he confessed, giving up details of the operation during two interviews, court papers say. The agents let him go and he returned to China the next year. FBI officials did not explain their decision, but agents often delay arrests while they build cases.
The pressure on the family in New Jersey continued. In April 2018, Xinba Construction Group, a company based in Wuhan, sued the couple in New Jersey state court. The lawsuit accused the former official of extorting bribes while in powerful posts in Wuhan, delaying projects and causing the company to lose $10 million. In a countersuit denying the allegations, the defendants alleged that the company had teamed up with Chinese authorities to retaliate for the former official’s opposition to a contentious toll-collection contract.
Chinese companies and security forces often coordinate criminal and civil actions against Fox Hunt targets, experts said. The Wall Street Journal wrote about the practice, including the Xinba lawsuit against the couple, last year.
Lawyers for both sides did not respond to requests for comment. The lawsuit is still in the discovery phase. In February, federal prosecutors involved in the Fox Hunt criminal case in New York filed a motion to intervene and request a stay in the Xinba suit.
The next salvo from Hu’s team was more primitive. Between April and July of 2018, an unknown conspirator harassed the daughter in California, sending derogatory messages about her family to her Facebook friends.
In New Jersey that September, two young men showed up at the wanted couple’s house. The intruders banged on one door, tried to open another, peered through windows, and left threatening notes.
“If you are willing to go back to the mainland and spend 10 years in prison, your wife and children will be all right,” one note said. “That’s the end of this matter!”
Surveillance video and fingerprints led investigators to Zheng Congying, now 25, of Brooklyn. Investigators believe he was hired muscle. He has pleaded not guilty. His attorney declined to comment.
Seven months after the threats, someone sent the wanted couple a package containing a compact disc. It recalled Hu’s “emotional bomb” in Houston. Over a song in Mandarin, a video showed images of their relatives in China, including the elderly father whom Hu’s team had brought to New Jersey. The father sat next to a desk where a book by President Xi, “The Governance of China,” was prominently displayed.
“I believe that this shot was deliberately staged to make [the son] aware that the PRC government played a role in taking this picture and creating this video,” an FBI agent wrote in the complaint. He described the photo as a form of implicit coercion demonstrating “the government’s control over [the son’s] aged parents.”
In the video, the wanted man’s sister implored him to come back. She said their parents were sick, isolated and distraught.
“When parents are alive, you can still call someplace a home,” she said in the video. “When parents are gone, you can only prepare for your own tomb.”
The lengthy investigation gave insight into a secret world at a crucial time.
“The timing of the investigation ties nicely with our understanding of when Fox Hunt came to be more broadly understood outside of China,” said Benavides, the chief of the FBI’s China counterintelligence branch. “This investigation absolutely helped the FBI understand how Fox Hunt operatives work, what the plans and intentions are and how aggressive they would be in this arena.”
That aggressiveness has only escalated worldwide. In 2017, an abduction squad descended on a Chinese Canadian billionaire in Hong Kong’s Four Seasons Hotel. They allegedly drugged him, rolled him out in a wheelchair, and spirited him to the mainland. When another billionaire living in New York, Guo Wengui, made allegations of high-level corruption, Chinese security chiefs traveled to confront him at his penthouse overlooking Central Park. FBI agents ordered them to back off, saying they had violated the terms of their visas.
And Beijing crossed another line in France. After “two years of unremitting efforts,” Chinese authorities announced in March 2017, investigators from the Ningxia region and embassy personnel in Paris had “successfully persuaded” a fugitive to come home. Zheng Ning, a cashmere industry executive, had lived in France for three years before his mysterious disappearance.
Unlike the United States, France has an extradition treaty with China. Yet French officials say they knew nothing about the repatriation. French intelligence chiefs complained to their Chinese counterparts afterward.
“It’s shocking,” said Paul Charon, a China expert at the French defense ministry’s Institute for Strategic Research. “It also shows a bigger phenomenon: the hardening stance of the regime in Beijing, which dares to carry out these operations overseas and mock the sovereignty of other countries.”
U.S. officials acknowledge that the government was slow to respond to the threat.
“It did take us a while to catch up and realize what was happening,” said Demers, who returned to the Justice Department from private practice in 2018 and was chosen to lead the new China Initiative. “With things like Fox Hunt, we realized it was not going to be enough to change behavior simply through having meetings with the Chinese. We were going to have to be more aggressive.”
The FBI has tried to break through a wall of silence in immigrant communities to reach potential and known targets.
Qiu Gengmin, 59, is one of the latter. His name appeared on the Fox Hunt list six years ago as the result of an ill-fated shipbuilding deal and, he says, a vendetta by a security chief in Zhejiang province. Dogged Chinese agents have spied on him even at a Buddhist temple in Queens, he said. He has lost his money, home and wife. Authorities have harassed and jailed his relatives and friends in China.
“As long as I don’t go back, they do not have personal freedom,” Qiu said, hunched over a table in his lawyer’s office. “They will continue to surveil them and there will be no so-called freedom. They are not allowed to take the train, they are not allowed to fly, they are not allowed to go out. They are afraid.”
His story has ambiguities, however. U.S. prosecutors felt the evidence was strong enough to charge him with money laundering and conspiracy to transfer stolen property. He spent more than 20 months behind bars, pleading guilty to a federal charge of contempt. He has applied for political asylum.
About a year ago, three FBI agents interviewed Qiu as a victim, not a suspect.
“They say we need to follow up with your safety concerns,” he said. “We want to protect you. … They said if there’s anything, I should call them.”
And last October, federal prosecutors charged eight people, including Hu, in the first U.S. case targeting Fox Hunt.
Rong Jing, the California freelancer, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an illegal foreign agent and to conduct interstate stalking. His lawyer says he went down a hazardous path of agreeing to increasingly ominous requests from the Chinese government.
“You have a number of individuals who have made a new life in America but wind up in this type of situation by doing a benign favor for an old friend from the old country,” said the lawyer, Todd Spodek. “Yet over time their participation in the unlawful repatriation effort increases. As it increases, it crosses the line into criminal acts, which was not their original intention.”
Another defendant pleaded guilty to the foreign agent and stalking charges. McMahon, Jason Zhu and Zheng await trial on both charges.
Six FBI agents and two police officers arrested McMahon at his home in northern New Jersey at 6 a.m. on Oct. 28. His lawyer said that the Fox Hunt team duped the detective and that there is no evidence he knew he was working for the Chinese government. His total profit for a case that has destroyed him was $5,017.98, the lawyer said.
“He never spoke to someone whom he understood, whom he knew, to be a Chinese official,” Lustberg said. “Mike McMahon is a victim in this case.”
Johnny Zhu and Dr. Li Minjun are presumed to be in China. So are PRC Officials 1 and 2, and a third implicated official. Prosecutors did not charge or identify them, as often happens in counterintelligence cases for strategic and diplomatic reasons.
As for Hu, the fugitive hunter has become a fugitive. At last word, though, he was still a star. In 2018, his name appeared on the website of the Communist Party’s anti-corruption agency. Because of his long experience on the front lines, the organizers of a national training conference had invited him to Beijing as an instructor.
The cop from Wuhan taught a session about international law enforcement cooperation.

Update, July 22, 2021: Based on information in a superseding federal indictment that was unsealed on July 22, we have updated this story to include the name and title of an individual previously identified only as PRC Official-2 and the title of an official identified as PRC Official-1. PRC Official-2 is Tu Lan, 50, a prosecutor for the Hanyang District of Wuhan. PRC Official-1 is the director of the Wuhan prosecution office’s anti-corruption bureau.
The July 22 indictment charged two additional defendants with acting and conspiring to act in the United States as illegal agents of the People’s Republic of China and with engaging and conspiring to engage in interstate and international stalking. It also charged two of the nine defendants in the case with obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice.
ProPublica · by Sebastian Rotella,Kirsten Berg



3. Nine Individuals Charged in Superseding Indictment with Conspiring to Act as Illegal Agents of the People’s Republic of China


Nine Individuals Charged in Superseding Indictment with Conspiring to Act as Illegal Agents of the People’s Republic of China
PRC Prosecutor Allegedly Traveled to the United States, Directed Stalking of U.S. Residents, and Obstructed Criminal Investigation
justice.gov · July 22, 2021
A federal grand jury in New York filed an indictment today charging nine defendants with acting and conspiring to act in the United States as illegal agents of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) without prior notification to the Attorney General, and engaging and conspiring to engage in interstate and international stalking. Two of the nine defendants are also charged with obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice.
According to court documents, Tu Lan, 50, and Zhai Yongqiang, 46, both of China, are the latest two of nine charged in the superseding indictment. Co-defendants Hu Ji, 46 and Li Minjun, 65, both of China; Zhu Feng, 34, a Chinese national residing in Queens, New York; Michael McMahon, 53, of Mahwah, New Jersey; Zheng Congying, 24, of Brooklyn, New York; and Zhu Yong, aka Jason Zhu, 64, of Norwich, Connecticut, were previously charged in a related criminal complaint issued in October 2020 and a related indictment in May 2021. The name of the ninth defendant remains under seal.
According to court documents, the defendants allegedly acted at the direction and under the control of PRC government officials, conducted surveillance of and engaged in a campaign to harass, stalk and coerce certain residents of the United States to return to the PRC as part of a global, concerted and extralegal repatriation effort known as “Operation Fox Hunt.” The superseding indictment also alleges that Tu Lan, a new defendant who was employed as a prosecutor with the Hanyang People’s Procuratorate, traveled to the United States, directed the harassment campaign and ordered a co-conspirator to destroy evidence to obstruct the criminal investigation.
“Law enforcement officials around the world act according to a professional code of conduct,” said Acting Attorney General Mark Lesko for the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “They act to enforce the law, not to violate it in such an egregious manner. That aprosecutor and police officer not only directed and participated in a criminal scheme on U.S. soil, but then attempted to cover it up, is an affront to justice of the highest order.”
“As alleged, the defendants, acting as agents of the PRC, carried out an illegal and clandestine campaign to harass and threaten targeted U.S. residents in order to force them to return to the PRC,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Jacquelyn M. Kasulis. “Unregistered, roving agents of a foreign power are not permitted to engage in secret surveillance of U.S. residents on American soil, and their illegal conduct will be met with the full force of U.S. law. To the extent the PRC seeks to repatriate its citizens to the PRC, its agents are required to register with the Attorney General of the United States, coordinate with U.S. officials, and adhere to U.S. laws and protocols.”
"As noted in the superseding indictment, the Chinese government sent operatives to America to harass, surveil, and coerce U.S. residents to return to China. These acts are undemocratic, authoritarian, and contrary to the rule of law," said Assistant Director Alan E. Kohler, for the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. “The FBI will continue to protect those who are victims of harassment and intimidation by the government of China, or any other government practicing these tactics.”
As alleged, in and around 2012 and 2014, the PRC government caused the International Criminal Police Organization, aka Interpol, an inter-governmental law enforcement organization, to issue “Red Notices” for John Doe #1 and his wife, Jane Doe #1. According to the Red Notices, John Doe #1 was wanted by the PRC government for “embezzlement, abuse of power [and] acceptance of bribes” which carried a maximum possible penalty of death under PRC law. Jane Doe #1 was wanted by the PRC government for “accepting bribes” which carried a maximum possible penalty of life imprisonment under PRC law.
As alleged, the nine defendants participated in an international campaign to threaten, harass, surveil and intimidate John Doe #1 and his family, in order to force John Doe #1 and Jane Doe #1 to return to the PRC as part of “Operation Fox Hunt,” a PRC Ministry of Public Security initiative to locate and repatriate alleged Chinese “fugitives” who had fled to foreign countries, including the United States. Instead of operating with the approval and coordination of the U.S. government, PRC government officials carrying out Operation Fox Hunt traveled to the United States and directed non-official operatives in the United States to engage in violations of U.S. criminal law. Specifically, between approximately 2016 and 2019, PRC government officials, including defendant Tu Lan, the PRC prosecutor, and Hu Ji, a PRC police officer with the Wuhan Public Security Bureau, traveled to the United States and directed other defendants to engage in unsanctioned and illegal conduct on behalf of the PRC to coerce the targeted victims to return to the PRC.
As further alleged in the superseding indictment, a centerpiece of this criminal scheme was an April 2017 effort, directed by PRC officials Tu Lan and Hu Ji, to transport John Doe #1’s elderly father from the PRC to the United States to convey a threat to John Doe #1 that his family in the PRC would be harmed if he did not return to the PRC. At the direction of Tu Lan, Hu Ji and others, several defendants worked to investigate, surveil and locate John Doe #1 and his wife. Tu Lan then traveled to the United States along with John Doe #1’s father and a medical doctor, Li Minjun. While in the United States, Tu Lan directed several conspirators to surveil John Doe #1 and his family so the defendants would know where to bring John Doe #1’s father to deliver the demand that John Doe #1 return to the PRC. Afterwards, Tu Lan returned to the PRC, where she continued to supervise the operation with Hu Ji and other PRC officials, directed other U.S.-based conspirators to continue stalking John Doe #1 and then ordered the return of John Doe #1’s father to the PRC after their attempts to render John Doe #1 and Jane Doe #1 were unsuccessful.
Zhu Feng, Hu Ji and Zhu Yong worked with McMahon, a private investigator, to gather intelligence about and locate John Doe #1 and Jane Doe #1. To evade detection and frustrate a criminal investigation of their conduct, Tu Lan allegedly directed one of the conspirators to “delete all the chat content” between the conspirators. Subsequently, between 2017 and 2019 other defendants continued to harass and stalk the victims at the direction of the PRC government.
For example, on or about Sept. 4, 2018, two defendants drove to the New Jersey residence of John Doe #1 and Jane Doe #1 and pounded on the front door. The two defendants attempted to force open the door to the residence, then left a note at the residence that stated “If you are willing to go back to the mainland and spend 10 years in prison, your wife and children will be all right. That’s the end of this matter!”
All defendants are charged with acting as and conspiring to act as agents of the PRC, which carry maximum penalties of ten years and five years in prison respectively. The defendants are also charged with interstate stalking and conspiring to engage in interstate stalking, which carry a maximum penalty of five years in prison for each charge. Defendants Tu and Zhu are separately charged with obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice, which carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each charge. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Craig R. Heeren, J. Matthew Haggans and Ellen H. Sise are prosecuting the case, with assistance from Trial Attorney Scott A. Claffee of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.
An indictment is merely an allegation and all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
justice.gov · July 22, 2021



4. To Win Friends and Influence People, America Should Learn From the CCP

One thing is for sure: we are not executing an effective information program. Here is a former Director of the Office of Foreign Assistance and he does not even mention B3W (Build Back Better World). Did he not get the memo? Here is the fact sheet from the G7: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/06/12/fact-sheet-president-biden-and-g7-leaders-launch-build-back-better-world-b3w-partnership/

Conclusion:
Of course, Washington should not copy Beijing’s entire playbook. The Chinese government is well-known for offering unsustainable loans with opaque terms, degrading the rule of law, helping despots create police states built on omnipresent electronic surveillance, and insisting that governments give special treatment to Chinese companies. The United States certainly should not emulate every aspect of China’s engagement, but there are many lessons to learn.
With serious budget reform, increased flexibility in how Washington can spend its money, and seating partner countries at the table when key aid decisions are made, the United States can fix the self-inflicted problems that are holding it back in the developing world—and offer a much better alternative to the CCP.
To Win Friends and Influence People, America Should Learn From the CCP
Beijing’s development projects are flashy, fast, and relevant. Why aren’t Washington’s?
By Jim Richardson, a former director of the Office of Foreign Assistance at the U.S. State Department.
Foreign Policy · by Jim Richardson · July 22, 2021
Why is China winning the race for global influence? After all, the United States has almost twice as many diplomats stationed worldwide, spends 10 times as much on foreign assistance, and its contributions to international organizations—such as the United Nations—are 20 times larger. Yet Beijing is gaining new economic and security allies (especially in the developing world), increasing its influence in the international system, advancing key national security priorities, and growing the Chinese economy. Nearly 140 countries have signed on to China’s signature Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure-development strategy to link the world to Beijing and control global flows of data. And at the U.N., Chinese nationals now hold the top position in four of the organization’s 15 major agencies.
So how does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) do it, and what can the United States learn? Beijing’s global efforts are fast, flashy, and relevant. At every turn, the CCP is building international support and increasing its influence and reach. Washington needs to do the same—and beat Beijing at its own game.
Why is China winning the race for global influence? After all, the United States has almost twice as many diplomats stationed worldwide, spends 10 times as much on foreign assistance, and its contributions to international organizations—such as the United Nations—are 20 times larger. Yet Beijing is gaining new economic and security allies (especially in the developing world), increasing its influence in the international system, advancing key national security priorities, and growing the Chinese economy. Nearly 140 countries have signed on to China’s signature Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure-development strategy to link the world to Beijing and control global flows of data. And at the U.N., Chinese nationals now hold the top position in four of the organization’s 15 major agencies.
So how does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) do it, and what can the United States learn? Beijing’s global efforts are fast, flashy, and relevant. At every turn, the CCP is building international support and increasing its influence and reach. Washington needs to do the same—and beat Beijing at its own game.
The Chinese are fast. Travel just about anywhere in the developing world, and you will see that the Chinese government has built, or is building, a new facility—a convention center in Malawi, a seaport and airport in Djibouti, or an international financial city in Sri Lanka. While Chinese companies can move the dirt in a matter of weeks, most U.S. efforts outside emergency humanitarian relief take years to launch and organize. The U.S. government procurement process for a contract or grant can last 18 months or more, and that doesn’t include the strategic planning and complicated budget reworks required for new programs, which can take years more. Can leaders around the world really be expected to wait years for the United States when China can deliver in real time? The catch, of course, is that the CCP often pairs its projects with a boatload of debt and a plane full of Chinese workers. Washington can generally offer better terms, products, and results—but must be quicker if it wants to be competitive.
Beijing purposely embraces big projects with national visibility and impact, and demands clear Chinese branding and attribution.
Here is how the United States can do it.
First, Washington needs to reform the way it budgets and appropriates funds for foreign assistance. Right now, the Biden administration is developing its budget request for fiscal year 2023, which begins on Oct. 1, 2022. Federal departments and agencies will not begin spending any money appropriated by the U.S. Congress for that budget until 2026, and any new project financed with these funds might not start until the end of the decade. By then, hundreds of new Chinese projects will already be up and running.
Additionally, congressional constraints and directives dictate much of the budget of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. State Department’s foreign assistance. Take two of the main assistance accounts funded by Congress: development assistance and the Economic Support Fund. Development assistance, which is implemented solely by USAID, is a $3.5 billion per year account that funds everything from economic development to environmental projects to basic education. Congress now directs 96 percent of this account to specific countries and sectors. The Economic Support Fund, which is jointly implemented by both the State Department and USAID, is a $3 billion per year account originally intended to be a source of flexible funding to meet emerging development needs that advance U.S. national security interests. The account is now virtually indistinguishable from development assistance, with various congressional directives consuming around 80 percent of the account.
What’s more, federal departments and agencies often choose to interpret congressional directives narrowly, which further constrains funding. The recent decision by Congress to resume “earmarks”—which direct funds to a specific recipient, circumvent a competitive process, and were eliminated in 2011 following scandals and wasteful spending—will make the micromanagement even worse. This is not to say Congress always gets it wrong—in fact, it’s amazing how often it gets it right given the long lead times and complex environments. Greater flexibility, however, would make the wide-ranging portfolio of U.S. programs all the more relevant and impactful worldwide.
Congress and the White House should work together to make the United States’ foreign assistance funds more flexible while maintaining accountability and transparency. At minimum, they should return to the original vision of the Economic Support Fund as a flexible instrument and ensure that the professionals at the State Department and USAID have the resources to respond quickly to any opportunity around the world that would further U.S. strategic interests. This also means broadening the fund’s list of eligible countries and providing unrestricted funds, subject to congressional review before each project starts. The administration and Congress should also agree to abolish the assistance for Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia account, and merge it with a larger, more geographically flexible account. A relic of the Cold War, the account is no longer necessary. It restricts funding to one specific region, regardless of need or strategic interests.
Second, the administration and Congress should work jointly to further reform the unnecessarily complex and unwieldy process for awarding foreign assistance contracts and grants. While both the Obama and Trump administrations made good progress to simplify procurement, the current 18 months normally required for a full and open competition doesn’t fit a competitive strategic environment. It will require political capital and tough debates to create a budget and procurement system that is both flexible and respectful of the taxpayers’ trust, but it is urgently necessary.
The Chinese are flashy. When the CCP engages in a country, the Chinese become the talk of the town: big headlines, an all-in approach, and significant deliverables. They purposely embrace big projects with countrywide visibility and impact, and they demand clear Chinese branding and attribution—all accompanied by a full-court press from their diplomatic team and propaganda machine. The United States can and must do the same.
First, Washington must be willing to embrace big-ticket items, including large infrastructure projects, that are clearly U.S.-branded or co-branded. Strangely, there is considerable cultural resistance at the State Department and USAID to funding explicitly U.S.-branded projects. For example, the Trump administration proposed building a pandemic training institute for Southern Africa. While everyone agreed that building greater health capacity is critical, there was opposition from members of Congress who didn’t like the idea of funding a physical building with a U.S. flag at the front gate. Ultimately, the project was withdrawn by the Biden administration. Such a facility would have delivered good development outcomes, advanced critical national-security interests in the region, and sent a strong U.S. message. Meanwhile, the Chinese are building the headquarters for the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Ethiopia, having negotiated full access to all of its labs and data. Who was smarter?
The U.S. International Development Finance Corp. was designed as a tool for projecting U.S. influence, but has yet to realize its potential because it has chosen to act as a commercial bank instead. It needs to think and act big while being in lockstep with foreign-policy and development guidance from the State Department and USAID.
Second, the United States needs to promote its brand—unapologetically and everywhere. Washington is the largest donor of foreign aid globally and funds projects in nearly every developing country. Unfortunately, you would have a hard time telling who the donor country was even if you were standing right in front of a U.S.-funded project. You’d see scores of logos of individual U.S. departments, agencies, and partners—but to most people, even Americans, these logos are unfamiliar and cryptic. In contrast, Beijing keeps it simple: Everyone knows what the red banner with the yellow stars means. Fortunately, there already exists a simple, immediately recognizable visual brand to let the people of the developing world know that the United States is actively invested in helping them: It’s called the American flag.
The United States hamstrings itself because its foreign assistance often comes late and for the wrong thing.
Third, Washington needs to up its game on public diplomacy. Congress eliminated the U.S. Information Agency during the 1990s by folding it into the State Department. In retrospect, this merger gutted the United States’ capability to tell its story. The country is once again engaged in a worldwide battle of ideas and needs to influence hearts and minds. This will require a large cadre of professionals dedicated to public-diplomacy efforts, especially through social and other new media channels. The Trump administration began this process by bringing on more foreign service officers in public diplomacy at the State Department, but much more needs to be done. Washington must provide additional resources to U.S. embassies worldwide, require foreign service officers to undergo more public diplomacy trainings, and hold ambassadors accountable for integrating public diplomacy into their teams’ work at every turn.
Lastly, the United States needs to ensure it gets credit for contributions channeled through international organizations by effective and visible donor attribution. Washington shouldn’t be ashamed of doing good and saving lives. For instance, the U.S. government is by far the largest donor to international vaccine distribution—and rightfully so. Unfortunately, the Biden plan, released in early June, to donate 80 million COVID-19 vaccine doses fails to include the words “branding,” “attribution,” or “from the American people.” I hope this was simply an oversight.
The Chinese are relevant. The CCP succeeds in large part because it offers developing countries what they actually want. The United States, on the other hand, hamstrings itself because its foreign assistance often comes late and for the wrong thing. Regrettably, it is common for a partner government to need specific assistance now, only to hear from Washington that the budgeted funding cannot be used for that type of project.
Take education programs: The United States spends nearly $1 billion each year on basic education for children in developing countries—an important goal. Yet it takes years for anyone to tell whether these investments are paying off. Meanwhile, these countries often have immediate needs, to which Washington has trouble responding. Many want English-language programs for adults, access to nearly 1,000 U.S. community colleges for their young adults, or training in business for their budding entrepreneurs. These are amazing opportunities to expose the world’s future leaders to U.S. culture and values while ensuring that English remains the international language for commerce. Unfortunately, congressional and administration restrictions largely exclude the use of basic education dollars for these purposes. It’s as if no one has heard that good international development policy puts recipient nations in the driver’s seat by listening to local voices, hearing their concerns, responding to their unique needs, and investing in local institutions. All of this should be common sense.
Of course, Washington should not copy Beijing’s entire playbook. The Chinese government is well-known for offering unsustainable loans with opaque terms, degrading the rule of law, helping despots create police states built on omnipresent electronic surveillance, and insisting that governments give special treatment to Chinese companies. The United States certainly should not emulate every aspect of China’s engagement, but there are many lessons to learn.
With serious budget reform, increased flexibility in how Washington can spend its money, and seating partner countries at the table when key aid decisions are made, the United States can fix the self-inflicted problems that are holding it back in the developing world—and offer a much better alternative to the CCP.
Foreign Policy · by Jim Richardson · July 22, 2021


5. SASC Adds $25 Billion To NDAA In Bipartisan Vote

Note the response from CODEPINK.
SASC Adds $25 Billion To NDAA In Bipartisan Vote - Breaking Defense
One of Washington's savviest budget experts says this move on the National Defense Authorization Act by the SASC means "$25 billion in additional spending above the President's request is very likely now the ceiling for negotiations going forward," Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute says.
breakingdefense.com · by Colin Clark · July 22, 2021
Sen. Jack Reed, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee
WASHINGTON: In a sign that there is bipartisan support for a significantly larger defense budget, the Senate Armed Services Committee today added $25 billion to the defense policy bill, a 3 percent increase from President Joe Biden’s request.
One of Washington’s savviest budget experts says this move on the National Defense Authorization Act by the SASC means “$25 billion in additional spending above the President’s request is very likely now the ceiling for negotiations going forward,” Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute says in an email.
The move by the SASC does not necessarily mean that that much money will actually be appropriated. The appropriators who actually control the funds don’t always follow the lead of the authorizing committee. But the additional money is still a strong sign of support coming out of SASC, at a time when Washington wisdom is that Democrats will look to shift money from defense to other priorities.
“The starting point for negotiations happened first in the House when there were no Republican votes out of committee for the FY22 defense appropriations bill,” Eaglen says. “But the Senate vote is particularly important because it is bipartisan. HASC Chairman [Adam] Smith has increasingly signaled he is open to a higher topline, as well, but it’s unclear what the trades will be in exchange for Republicans.”
So, will this mean appropriators join the SASC?
“It’s not a question of if, but when,” Eaglen thinks. “But there are no fiscal deal talks underway by the two parties, and I don’t expect clarity on this until late winter — even possibly after the start of the new year.”
As an indicator of how the Democrat’s left flank is likely to react, the left-wing group group Code Pink released this statement:
“Just the proposed $25 billion increase to the Pentagon budget alone could end homelessness in the United States, making clear that Senators are more interested in increasing the profits of military contractors than meeting the needs of everyday working people,” says Carley Towne, CODEPINK co-director. “While millions of Americans are steeped in debt, living paycheck to paycheck, facing eviction, and struggling to pay medical bills amidst an ongoing health pandemic and recession, the Senate Armed Services Committee decided to hurl even more taxpayer dollars at an increasingly privatized for-profit war industry.”



6.  "No chance" U.S. can stop Chinese invasion of Taiwan, military expert says

I would expect nothing less from a Chinese military commentator.

Excerpts:

While the view out of Beijing suggests the PLA is capable of a swift and unannounced attack, military analysts in the U.S. and Taiwan predict such an outcome is far from conclusive.

China watchers say any invasion of Taiwan will require extensive amphibious preparations, including intentional troop movements that will serve as timely indicators for military intelligence in Taipei—and perhaps the U.S., too.

While the possibility of U.S. intervention remains, there is also the likelihood of action by Japan, which could find itself involved in the conflict in its capacity as an American treaty ally. Earlier in July, Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso intimated that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could pose an "existential threat" to Japan's own survival, necessitating a collective defense of the island with U.S. forces.

In addition, the U.S. has about 50,000 forward-deployed troops in Japan, mostly on Okinawa.

But despite the tense atmosphere and bellicose threats of war, analysts say there is no indication that China is preparing an imminent attack. They say Beijing is unlikely to take such a large risk before 2022, when China hosts the Winter Olympics and Chinese President Xi Jinping seeks a third term in the fall.



"No chance" U.S. can stop Chinese invasion of Taiwan, military expert says
Newsweek · by John Feng · July 22, 2021
China's recent live-fire drills near Taiwan were targeted at the island's government, a military expert said this week, claiming Chinese forces would leave "no chance" for the U.S. to intervene.
Veteran Chinese commentator Du Wenlong spoke confidently about the People's Liberation Army's amphibious capabilities on Tuesday amid a six-day, large-scale PLA exercise off the coast of eastern China, roughly 135 nautical miles north of democratic Taiwan.
Appearing as a panelist on Chinese state broadcaster CCTV's prime-time program Defense Review, the analyst said the short distance meant PLA forces would be able to reach the island's shores "within a day."
The prolonged Chinese military drills in the East China Sea were announced by China's maritime safety authority, which issued a no-go zone for merchant vessels lasting through July 21. The exercises—also about 120 nautical miles northeast of the disputed Senkaku Islands—would have involved the PLA's Eastern Theater Command.
1 of 2
Soldiers from China's People's Liberation Army march on Red Square during a military parade, which marks the 75th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, in Moscow on June 24, 2020. Pavel Golovkin / POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Soldiers from China's People's Liberation Army march on Red Square during a military parade, which marks the 75th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, in Moscow on June 24, 2020. Pavel Golovkin / POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Planes from the Chinese People's Liberation Army air force fly in formation during a parade to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party on July 1, 2021, in Beijing, China. Fred Lee/Getty Images
"From a strategic point of view, this allows us to traverse that distance in a very short amount of time, then begin combat maneuvers on the island," Du said of a hypothetical attack on Taiwan.
The live-fire drills were announced a day after a U.S. Air Force jet landed in Taipei to deliver what local media described as "diplomatic mail" for the American Institute in Taiwan, which is the de facto U.S. embassy on the island. The stopover lasted all but 34 minutes, but the nature of the delivery—involving an American military asset—irked Beijing, which accused the U.S. of trespassing in its airspace.
Du called the PLA exercises a "serious warning" about Taiwan's continued military engagements with the U.S.
"The current drills a short distance away could be considered a routine exercise, but I think they're specially targeted [at Taiwan]," Du added. "Taiwan is the target."
"How much time would the U.S. really have?" Du said, in the event China decided to launch a wave of attacks to invade the island.
He added: "Before U.S. forces arrive, we will have completed all our combat tasks. They will have no chance to intervene in a Taiwan Strait conflict."
Cross-strait tensions have risen in recent years amid a breakdown in dialogue between Taipei and Beijing, now into its fifth consecutive year. Each side blames the other for the impasse.
As U.S.-Taiwan ties reached new highs in the final year of the Trump administration, they coincided with a straining of relations between the U.S. and China. The Biden administration has been working to reestablish communications at all levels—seen as necessary to avoid misunderstandings and accidents, especially of a military nature.
Beijing, meanwhile, has offered weekly reminders of its intention to "unify" Taiwan, which it considers a Chinese province despite having never governed it. China has also warned Taiwan—increasingly confident about its security because of U.S. backing—that it will use force if necessary.
1 of 4
Taiwan’s female artillery brigade takes part in an anti-invasion drill on a beach in Pingtung County on May 30, 2019. Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images
Taiwan’s female artillery brigade takes part in an anti-invasion drill on a beach in Pingtung County on May 30, 2019. Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images
Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force Murasame-class destroyer JS Ikazuchi travels alongside the U.S. Navy's only forward-deployed aircraft carrier, USS Ronald Reagan, in the Philippine Sea on August 18, 2020. Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Jason Tarleton/U.S. Navy
U.S. Marines maneuver combat rubber raiding craft after conducting drills in the Coral Sea on July 19, 2021. Lance Cpl. Grace Gerlach/U.S. Marine Corps
U.S. Marines maneuver combat rubber raiding craft after conducting drills in the Coral Sea on July 19, 2021. Lance Cpl. Grace Gerlach/U.S. Marine Corps
Although the recent PLA drills were considered close at 135 nautical miles, it is not the nearest to Taiwan proper Chinese forces could come.
The choppy strait separating the two neighbors is only 70 natural miles wide at its narrowest point. Taiwan's outlying islands of Kinmen also lie just 3 miles from the Chinese port of Xiamen in Fujian province.
While the view out of Beijing suggests the PLA is capable of a swift and unannounced attack, military analysts in the U.S. and Taiwan predict such an outcome is far from conclusive.
China watchers say any invasion of Taiwan will require extensive amphibious preparations, including intentional troop movements that will serve as timely indicators for military intelligence in Taipei—and perhaps the U.S., too.
While the possibility of U.S. intervention remains, there is also the likelihood of action by Japan, which could find itself involved in the conflict in its capacity as an American treaty ally. Earlier in July, Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso intimated that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could pose an "existential threat" to Japan's own survival, necessitating a collective defense of the island with U.S. forces.
In addition, the U.S. has about 50,000 forward-deployed troops in Japan, mostly on Okinawa.
But despite the tense atmosphere and bellicose threats of war, analysts say there is no indication that China is preparing an imminent attack. They say Beijing is unlikely to take such a large risk before 2022, when China hosts the Winter Olympics and Chinese President Xi Jinping seeks a third term in the fall.
Newsweek · by John Feng · July 22, 2021


7. On Chinese Hacking, Biden Gets It

Excerpts:

The announcement could also help establish the kind of global norms that have long been lacking in cyberspace. The longer-term goal should be to work toward agreements akin to disarmament treaties, through which governments recognize their collective interest in curbing pointless, mutually harmful activity. Some of the intrusions detailed in the new charges, such as ransomware attacks against U.S. civilian targets, amount to pure criminality; they have no plausible national-security rationale or strategic objective. In the meantime, naming and shaming countries that permit such attacks — combined with a systematic effort by the Justice Department to target the criminals behind them — would be real progress.

Finally, greater openness on the government’s part is welcome in its own right. U.S. intelligence agencies were admirably transparent in detailing more than 50 specific tactics used by the attackers and providing technical advice for businesses responding to them. This should make clear that cybersecurity is something all Americans should take more seriously, and that better defenses are everyone’s responsibility.

Such measures won’t stop cyberattacks on their own, of course. And skeptics will find this judicious approach less satisfying than more aggressive forms of retaliation. But these steps are prudent, principled, and — most important — far more likely to succeed.


On Chinese Hacking, Biden Gets It Right
A dull and legalistic response will be more effective than escalation.
July 22, 2021, 8:00 AM EDT


Have you seen them? Image: Federal Bureau of Investigation.

After months of big talk and little action, President Joe Biden’s administration has finally taken a useful step in addressing cyberattacks — one that could avoid a looming crisis while also holding bad actors to account.
On Monday, the U.S. and its allies exposed what they called a years-long campaign of cyber intrusions backed by the Chinese government. A statement from the White House outlined charges of espionage, data theft, hacking (including the recent compromise of Microsoft Exchange), and ransomware attacks. At the same time, the Justice Department unveiled an indictment against four Chinese security officials for a global campaign of intellectual-property theft.

It’s the kind of response that’s been missing for some time. As the U.S. has suffered from a growing array of such attacks — and not just from China — Biden has responded mostly with rhetoric and publicity stunts, including presenting Vladimir Putin with a list of “red lines” that the Russian president seems to have summarily ignored.
This week’s action is far more likely to help.
For one thing, it demonstrated a united front with America’s allies, including NATO, the U.K. and the European Union. The range of nations joining in the criticism was unprecedented, and included countries such as Japan that have traditionally been leery of criticizing China. Speaking with one voice, they’ll make it harder to dismiss the charges as a witch hunt and will help draw a line between responsible and rogue actors in cyberspace. When confronted with such widespread external criticism in the past, China has often quietly moderated its policies.
In addition, a by-the-book legal approach affirms a commitment to the rule of law and should make it possible to avoid further escalation — a course that would almost certainly end up hurting rather than helping the United States. It’s true that the indicted officials may never see the inside of a U.S. courtroom, but the charges will nonetheless impose a real cost and cause other hackers to think twice. After a similar round of threats and indictments starting in 2014, Chinese cyberattacks declined markedly.
The announcement could also help establish the kind of global norms that have long been lacking in cyberspace. The longer-term goal should be to work toward agreements akin to disarmament treaties, through which governments recognize their collective interest in curbing pointless, mutually harmful activity. Some of the intrusions detailed in the new charges, such as ransomware attacks against U.S. civilian targets, amount to pure criminality; they have no plausible national-security rationale or strategic objective. In the meantime, naming and shaming countries that permit such attacks — combined with a systematic effort by the Justice Department to target the criminals behind them — would be real progress.
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Finally, greater openness on the government’s part is welcome in its own right. U.S. intelligence agencies were admirably transparent in detailing more than 50 specific tactics used by the attackers and providing technical advice for businesses responding to them. This should make clear that cybersecurity is something all Americans should take more seriously, and that better defenses are everyone’s responsibility.
Such measures won’t stop cyberattacks on their own, of course. And skeptics will find this judicious approach less satisfying than more aggressive forms of retaliation. But these steps are prudent, principled, and — most important — far more likely to succeed.
To contact the senior editor responsible for Bloomberg Opinion’s editorials: David Shipley at davidshipley@bloomberg.net .


8. Bird-Mimicking Electric Drone Hits New Endurance Record
One characteristic of the Asia Pacific: The tyranny of distance.

Excerpts:

The breakthrough comes as the U.S. military and the Army in particular struggles with connecting an ever-wider array of weapons, vehicles, and objects on the battlefield, part of an overall vision for transforming and accelerating operations called Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2.

The military is also grappling with how to extend its range over the vast distances of the Pacific Ocean, and do so with limited runway space as it prepares to counter China.

The Army is partnering with data visualization company Palantir to see how the data that the drone collects on the battlefield could help fuel new machine learning tools to allow operators to better make sense of intelligence data.



Bird-Mimicking Electric Drone Hits New Endurance Record
As the military grapples with connecting more things over longer distances, recent flight reveals a way forward.
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
A new type of electric, fixed-wing drone last week achieved a world record for time in the air using thrust.
The flight shows what combat support by electric drones could look like, as the Defense Department works to connect more hardware under increasingly difficult conditions.
The 16-foot-wingspan drone, dubbed the K1000 ULE Rev-P, from Kraus Hamdani Aerospace, or KHA, completed a non-stop 26-hour flight under continuous thrust last week. It’s a world record for an electric drone in its size and weight category. The claim was independently verified by Mari Kooi of the tech advisory Gothams, which has no financial stake in KHA.
The company plans to take part in the U.S. Army’s next Project Convergence exercise set for later this summer, according to Fatema Hamdani, one of the founders of KHA.
​​Comparable drones flying up to 20,000 feet above sea level boast a much lower endurance time under thrust, about 5 to 8 hours or so. But the K1000 ULE is designed to remain aloft much longer, Hamdani said. Larger drones flying at much higher altitudes—where there is less gravity and air resistance—can stay up longer. But for smaller drones—which are harder for radars to pick up—staying aloft for long at 20,000 feet is very energy-intensive, hence the lower endurance.
The aircraft also can fly using the rising hot air called thermals, just as birds do. The drone’s avionics constantly measure the change in the environment and tenergy levels and decides which source of power is best given those conditions. Under the right environmental circumstances the drone can stay airborne for around 340 hours, fully autonomously, Hamdani said. She estimates that in regular flight, thrust is only needed about 20 percent of the time.
They didn't need the soaring technology during the 26-hour flight and completed it using full thrust.
The company has no plans to try and arm the drone, but an all-electric drone with that endurance could still have big effects on the battlefield, not only collecting intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data, but also potentially serving as a communication link between objects on the battlefield. It could serve as a sort of cell tower in the sky, as a link between Low Earth Orbit satellites and ground forces, or as an electronic warfare asset to block or disrupt adversary communications.
The breakthrough comes as the U.S. military and the Army in particular struggles with connecting an ever-wider array of weapons, vehicles, and objects on the battlefield, part of an overall vision for transforming and accelerating operations called Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2.
The military is also grappling with how to extend its range over the vast distances of the Pacific Ocean, and do so with limited runway space as it prepares to counter China.
The Army is partnering with data visualization company Palantir to see how the data that the drone collects on the battlefield could help fuel new machine learning tools to allow operators to better make sense of intelligence data.
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker


9. Women, Peace, and Security: Moving Implementation Forward
Conclusion:

Terrorists have already shown that they understand the link between gender and security and the advantages they can reap from Western biases regarding the assumed role of women in security by, for example, posing as women to avoid being searched by men and by using women as suicide bombers. U.S. military women were eventually brought in as part of Lioness and female engagement teams in Iraq and Afghanistan to counter cultural biases, both American and local. Islamic State also exploited gender equality to recruit and retain members, something they couldn’t have done were gender subordination not already accepted in their culture. Now, with U.S. government attention now shifted to great-power competition, integrating women into security sectors across the board can give the United States an important edge over China and Russia. Internal and external implementation of the WPS framework is a security imperative.

Women, Peace, and Security: Moving Implementation Forward - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Joan Johnson-Freese · July 23, 2021
What will it take for the key national security agencies in Washington to prioritize the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) framework, rather than just pay it lip service? Until the framework is embedded into all institutional mission goals, rhetorical support will continue to outpace actual support, as has been the case since 2000.
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 was passed in 2000. It and nine other supplementary resolutions adopted subsequently have formed the basis for what is known as the WPS framework. That framework recognizes the key role that women play in the advancement of security governance and mandates the integration of women leaders and women’s perspectives into security sectors, processes, and decision-making. Subsequently, many countries have developed national action plans for implementation, some more quickly than others.
The first U.S. action plan did not reach fruition until 2011. Implementation of that plan, and of the other commitments to WPS principles that have followed, within key public institutions in the United States has varied. Implementation is influenced by awareness of individuals in the institution on the very existence and nature of the framework, whether or not a champion has been put in place to support advancement, and on whether that advancement included embedding WPS into all institutional mission goals.
The Propensity Toward Rhetoric Over Action
In the Defense Department, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta directed implementation of WPS in 2012, noting that it is critical to U.S. national security. In 2016, then Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Ann Witkowski noted implementation steps that had been taken, including the development of a national action plan implementation guide and the naming of WPS as a special area of emphasis within joint professional military education. Yet a review of online joint professional military education material a year later failed to find any incorporation of the WPS framework into the core curriculum. As of this writing, it is still possible to graduate from a graduate-degree granting joint professional military education institution without ever hearing about WPS. Further, the Department of Defense did not develop an implementation plan until 2020, three years after Congress required it do so in the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017.
Feminist scholars have written about resistance to inclusion of gender considerations in international relations studies and policies, even in liberal academic institutions, for many years. Cynthia Enlow’s 1990 book Bananas, Beaches and Bases makes the case for viewing international relations through a “gendered lens” and suggests that this isn’t done because it threatens existing power structures. Not much has changed since then in terms of teaching and implementing international relations. When it comes to implementing the WPS framework in U.S. government institutions, in addition to a general reluctance to see women as agents of security rather than in a passive role, there are considerations of organizational and bureaucratic politics, as well as organizational culture. Several studies done in the interim period examine difficulties in implementation, with lack of awareness and little appreciation of the role women play in security and stability being among the reasons found for those difficulties.
Who Cares?
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Texas National Security Network conducted a 2016 survey of some 500 national security leaders (80 percent of the respondents were male). Only 13 percent of the respondents thought that gender inequality was a vital threat to U.S. national interests (20 percent of the women respondents and less than nine percent of the men thought so), and only 31 percent of respondents said women and girls’ full participation in their society is an important foreign policy goal (28 percent of the men, 45 percent of the women). A 2016 survey of security practitioners by the New America Foundation began by asking how much security practitioners consider the ways in which policies and programs impact men and women differently. The response was “not very much.” In fact, many respondents confessed that they found “women, peace, and security” a confusing triad of words.
Raising awareness and knowledge about WPS goes a long way in advancing the framework in many cases. You can’t implement what you don’t know about. Further, it is normal to experience “friction” when inserting a new effort into an organizational structure. But as James Q. Wilson examined in his 1991 book Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It, bureaucracies are not known to welcome or easily accept change. Consequently, outright organizational resistance has occurred as well. A 2018 survey of security practitioners, again by the New America Foundation, found that “across agencies and administrations, nearly all our interviewees saw most roadblocks to gender inclusivity emanating from two sources: the Department of Defense or from interagency rivalries.” Inside the Defense Department, respondents reported that the roadblocks often stemmed from the same kind of cultural biases that had kept women from many combat positions in the past. The survey report found evidence of Department of Defense resistance through a comparison of organizational strategic plans. “The State Department makes 18 mentions of ‘women’ and nine of ‘gender’ in its 62-page [Joint Strategic Plan 2018-2022, with U.S. Agency for International Development] report. The Department of Defense’s [Business Operations Plan for Fiscal Year 2018-2022] makes no mention of ‘women’ or ‘gender’ in its 38-page report.”
Not surprisingly, funding roadblocks have also made implementation difficult. WPS was not funded in the National Defense Authorization Act until FY2019, and then in the amount of $4 million out of a $1.3 trillion budget. If you believe that organizations spend their money on what they think is important, that relatively small amount is not an encouraging indicator. For comparison, an oft-cited 2015 Military Times article stated that the military spends some $84 million annually on erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra and Cialis. Notably, WPS funding was doubled in FY2021, to $8 million.
Even without specifically allocated funding, there have been individuals in the Defense Department who have quietly — or, in some cases, not so quietly — championed WPS. U.S. Africa Command, Southern Command, and Indo-Pacific Command have been particularly active in working on the external aspects of WPS implementation through security cooperation programs, including tools to measure progress. These commands recognize that gender equality is a good indicator of a strong civil society and overall community stability.
After the 2020 Department of Defense Women, Peace and Security Strategic Framework and Implementation Plan was released with requirements for reporting WPS-related activities, organizations began to pay attention, and an increasing number of individuals genuinely cared about real progress. Initially, the department held one-hour meetings once a month among commands to discuss WPS implementation. Though often backed by little organizational commitment or support, many participants devoted time and energy toward creating a critical mass of likeminded individuals and organizations who have worked together and contributed to the U.S. government’s foundational efforts in advancing the WPS agenda, including provision of critical inputs to various policy documents over the years. It is through the internal implementation, however, that gender empowerment becomes an embedded principle with a life beyond individual leaders. The Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, one of the five regional centers for security studies that fall under the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, sets an example for other Defense Department institutions to follow in that regard.
Embedding WPS Principles: A Defense Department Success Story
Air Force Lt. Gen. (retired) Daniel “Fig” Leaf served as director of the Daniel K. Ionuye Center from January 2012 to October 2016. According to its mission statement, through education and training programs the center “builds resilient capacity, shared understanding, and networked relationships among civilian and military practitioners and institutions to advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.” While at the center, Leaf “spearheaded” the embedding of the WPS framework into the center and the curriculum, making it his top priority. The strategy for framework implementation took an across-the-board approach, reaching into all aspects of center operations, policy, and planning.
Internally, Leaf established a working group of center faculty and staff to administer the WPS program, with the chair rotating among involved individuals. The program was also embedded into the center’s annual program planning and explicitly addressed in its budget request. The center made a concerted effort, which continues today, to raise female course and workshop enrollment to 33 percent, in order to create the critical mass needed for women to feel able to speak freely, with positive incentives to reach that goal endorsed. The center’s commitment to build the capacities of women security practitioners and their visible inclusion in its programs effectively signals the importance accorded to this objective by the U.S. government to friendly and partner nations. The increased enrollment of women creates a congenial environment to meaningfully integrate the gender perspective into critical thinking and dialogues on security. WPS is prominently featured in each course, through core lectures, elective offerings, and seminar discussions.
Facilitating free-flowing professional discourses among male and female participants has, according to faculty interviewed who have watched the process, facilitated positive movement in perspectives about women’s relevance and valuable contributions to security among many students and faculty. These conversations sometimes inspire men in decision-making positions to recruit more women, diversify their roles, and promote them to leadership positions in their organizations. In the same vein, workshops and dialogues are organized, both in-region and in-residence, to build the capacities of international and U.S. security practitioners, women and men, in advancing an enhanced understanding of gender inclusion and its nexus with national security. Faculty publications, as well as podcasts on WPS topics, evidence the breadth of faculty involvement, and bring a gender perspective to topics as counter-terrorism and de-radicalization, public health, disaster managementCOVID-19 and women healthcare workerswomen’s integration into the defense sector, economic security, and societal violence.
Externally, international fellows at the center who are interested in WPS are assigned faculty mentors toward the design and implementation of a a related capstone project. These projects provide opportunities to address a security challenge in fellows’ home countries and organizations, and so are both relevant and serve to expand knowledge regarding the benefits of the WPS framework. Successful capstone projects have included a Gender Action Plan for the Project Coherence Unit at the U.N. Office for Project Services in Kathmandu, Nepal, designing the implementation framework for the WPS National Action Plan in the Republic of Moldova, integrating female border security guards in Lebanon, building women’s capacities in countering terrorism in the Maldives, establishing protection mechanisms for victims of honor killings in Pakistan, promoting women’s engagement in the peace process in Myanmar, and ensuring female leadership in drafting Samoa’s first National Security Policy. The center’s partnerships with like-minded Department of Defense agencies, such as U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and state National Guards, have been instrumental in advancing U.S. policy objectives to promote women’s participation in security-sector governance in partner nations. What this across-the-board approach has meant is that when Leaf left in 2016, the program had been successfully institutionalized and has emerged as an organizational core competency.
Recognizing the Importance of Education and Data to Implementation
Education has been found to be a key venue for making broad inroads of awareness and appreciation of the WPS framework. NATO, an early adopter of WPS principles with their first WPS policy in 2007, has made the framework part of their educational curriculums. Some U.S. War Colleges are following suit. It is not enough to have WPS as an elective, or part of an elective, since only a very small portion of students may take that class. It should be integrated into the core curriculum. The Naval War College will begin integrating WPS into the national security affairs curriculum in 2021 to 2022, as well as hiring a WPS chair. In October 2020, the Army War College issued a WPS Charter, acknowledging the need to integrate WPS principles into joint professional military education curriculums. Named chairs are most effective when they can act as an internal champion of the subject matter to leadership and are part of curriculum planning. It then becomes up to those with supervisory ability to convince middle managers — often a sticking point even when leadership is rhetorically committed — to the importance of embedding the program.
Convincing leadership and middle managers of the linkage between gender and security can be difficult. But while the 2016 New America Foundation survey showed knowledge about WPS was low, 75 percent of those surveyed said supportive data regarding the link between gender and security would lead (security-oriented) workplaces to focus more on inclusivity. Gender-differentiated data, however, has often been difficult to find and gathering such should be a priority of all U.S. organizations in the future. Nevertheless, researchers Valerie Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen make a strong case for that linkage in their 2020 book The First Political Order. Using data gathered and compiled over two decades for the WomanStats Project, under a grant through the Department of Defense Minerva Initiative, they assembled data on every country with a population over 200,000 (then 176 nations). Their findings were clear: Countries that subordinate women are also more likely to be unstable, corrupt, and violent. More specifically, for example, a nation that subordinates women is twice as likely to be a fragile state, and over three times as likely to have an autocratic, less effective, and more corrupt government than a nation that does not subordinate women.
A Champion Is a Necessary But Not Sufficient Step Forward
The Defense Department has by no means been the only U.S. government institution to struggle with integrating WPS into its ethos. It is not surprising that the first U.S. national action plan was adopted during the 2009 to 2013 tenure of WPS champion Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. Clinton has been a strong advocate for gender empowerment throughout her life and career, perhaps most notably shown in her 1995 speech in Beijing at the World Conference for Women. Consequently, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development had WPS implementation strategies in place by 2012. Clinton strove to mainstream gender considerations into State Department policymaking rather than leaving them as a stovepiped afterthought. In what has become known as the “Hillary Doctrine,” Clinton advanced women’s empowerment as a way of advancing peace and prosperity, rather than as a social justice or human rights issue that could be too-easily ignored as something that was nice to do, but less important than central policy concerns.
By the time Clinton left the State Department in 2013, she had linked women and security in the inaugural Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, weaving gender equality into policy prescriptions. She said, for example, that “the status of the world’s women is not simply an issue of morality — it is a matter of national security.” Recognizing as well that there would be skeptics within the State Department and beyond, Clinton incorporated WPS into policy considerations within the context of “a growing body of evidence” that shows that “women bring a range of unique experiences and contributions in decision-making on matters of peace and security that lead to improved outcomes in conflict prevention and resolution.” But, perhaps unsurprisingly, when Clinton left the State Department the focus on the WPS framework diminished.
The 2015 book The Hillary Doctrine is especially critical in its coverage of the U.S. Agency for International Development, an independent federal agency that receives overall policy guidance from the State Department. The problem, as stated in the book by a woman with longtime experience in the agency, is that “It’s stacked with old white guys.” When the agency turned most project supervision over from career employees to contractors some years ago, many of those jobs were filled by retired military, many of whom see their roles more through a military lens than a developmental lens. Though a requirement was put in place in 2011 that all projects undergo a gender analysis, resistance was significant. With Samantha Power now the administrator, the agency has stated a commitment to enhancing diversity, inclusion, and equity within the agency and as part of the agency’s mission. To be truly effective, though, institutional changes should live beyond an individual leader.
It’s a Matter of Security
Terrorists have already shown that they understand the link between gender and security and the advantages they can reap from Western biases regarding the assumed role of women in security by, for example, posing as women to avoid being searched by men and by using women as suicide bombers. U.S. military women were eventually brought in as part of Lioness and female engagement teams in Iraq and Afghanistan to counter cultural biases, both American and local. Islamic State also exploited gender equality to recruit and retain members, something they couldn’t have done were gender subordination not already accepted in their culture. Now, with U.S. government attention now shifted to great-power competition, integrating women into security sectors across the board can give the United States an important edge over China and Russia. Internal and external implementation of the WPS framework is a security imperative.
Joan Johnson-Freese is a professor in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. She has authored multiple articles on WPS and Women, Peace and Security: An Introduction (2018). The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect the views of the U.S. government, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy, or the Naval War College.
The author would like to thank Dr. Saira Yamin at the Daniel K. Ionuye Center for Asia Pacific Security Studies for specific information on the center’s programs, and to thank Dr. Yamin and Dr. Miemie Winn Byrd for allowing her to interview them about the Women, Peace, and Security program there.
warontherocks.com · by Joan Johnson-Freese · July 23, 2021



10.How the Party Commands the Gun: The Foreign-Domestic Threat Dilemma in China

I came across this on social media and this would be of interest to China watchers.



How the Party Commands the Gun: The
Foreign-Domestic Threat Dilemma in China
Daniel C. Mattingly*
July 21, 2021
Word Count: 9,769
Abstract
The leaders of one-party states face a dilemma between building a loyal military to guard against domestic threats and a competent military that can guard
against foreign threats. In this paper, I argue that leaders respond to increasing domestic threats by increasing an emphasis on officer loyalty. I draw on a
new dataset, the first of its kind, of over 10,000 appointments to the People’s
Liberation Army of China. The data shows that factional ties to leaders are
key for promotion but that leaders generally attempt to balance loyalty with
competency. Yet in periods of high domestic threat, civilian leaders promote
unusually large numbers of officers with factional ties to themselves. Doing
so erodes the competence of the officer corps, potentially leaving the regime
more vulnerable to foreign threats. The article challenges the conventional
wisdom, showing how autocrats face a trade-off between guarding against internal and external threats.

Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Mao Zedong, Problems of War and Strategy, November 1938 

The party must command the gun... We must enhance the political loyalty of the armed forces [and] strengthen them through the training of competent personnel. Xi Jinping, Speech on the CCP’s 100th Anniversary, July 2021


11. US Playing Long Game To Pressure China On Cyber Ops: Experts 
Excerpts:
Asked how effective economic sanctions can really be, given the US’s longstanding sanctions on Russia haven’t changed that country’s behavior, Lin said, “What we know is that the economic sanctions [we have imposed] haven’t worked. We have not exhausted the list of possible economic sanctions, not by a long shot. You just have to be willing to do them.”
Still, Lin acknowledges there remain broader questions about the effectiveness of any type of economic sanction to deter nation-state cyberspace operations. “To say that there are combinations of sanctions [and] response measures that will eliminate this entirely is just absurd. It’s like saying you’re going to stop crime. You’re never going to stop crime. Maybe you can reduce the frequency of it, maybe you can reduce the severity of it, maybe you can make it easier for people to recover, but you can’t deter it in the sense you’ve deterred nuclear war.”
And besides, Lin notes, “The problem with deterrence is that you can never tell when you’ve been successful because what you’re measuring is non-events. You don’t know why something doesn’t happen.”
“What you can do is maybe delay the time in between, but that’s not a satisfying answer,” Lin continued. “One of the [issues] in all of this is that people think there’s a decisive solution to it. And there isn’t any decisive solution. This is just going to go on forever. It may happen less frequently, but it’s just going to go on forever. There’s no getting around that fact.”
US Playing Long Game To Pressure China On Cyber Ops: Experts - Breaking Defense
"It's part of a larger diplomatic strategy," cyber policy expert James Lewis said of the US attribution to China for Microsoft Exchange hacks earlier this year.
breakingdefense.com · by Brad D. Williams · July 22, 2021
Chinese military officers watch during a parade to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in a 2019 photo. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON: Leading cyber policy and strategy experts say that while the US’s Monday formal attribution and response to China for a widespread cyberespionage campaign earlier this year may not be as strong as some would like, it must be viewed as just the first step in a longer campaign to pressure China on its cyberspace activities.
“It’s part of a larger diplomatic strategy,” James Lewis, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Breaking Defense in an interview. “And so, this is better seen as a first move. Some people are looking at too short a timescale. They say there weren’t consequences this time, but I think [the US government] is looking at all the parts of strategy that will put pressure on China.”
The next step in that diplomatic strategy could happen as soon as Sunday and Monday, when Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman will meet with Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and other officials in the city of Tianjin, the State Department announced yesterday.
“These discussions are part of ongoing U.S. efforts to hold candid exchanges with PRC officials to advance U.S. interests and values and to responsibly manage the relationship,” the State Department said. “The Deputy Secretary will discuss areas where we have serious concerns about PRC actions, as well as areas where our interests align.”
Since Monday, when the US and a host of allies and partners attributed the hacking of Microsoft Exchange servers and rebuked the global cyberespionage campaign, China has strongly denied the allegations through official spokespersons. The country is also responding in its media, including the Global Times, an English-language Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece aimed at communicating CCP stances to the West.
Global Times op-ed published shortly after the attribution called the US and allies’ claims “a huge lie” and “slander.” The op-ed then warned, “If the US takes aggressive measures, carries out national-level cyber attacks on China, or imposes so-called sanctions on China, we will retaliate.”
Herb Lin, an expert on cyber policy and strategy at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, told Breaking Defense the attribution “caught [China’s] attention.” China’s reaction has been, “rhetorically, pretty strong,” despite the fact no consequences were imposed.
Still, Lin observed of the attribution, “The fact that something is symbolic doesn’t mean it’s worthless, and the fact of the matter is that we’ve managed to do something that we haven’t been able to do before, which is we’ve been able to get a whole bunch of different countries, Western allies, to condemn this as a bad thing to do. And we’ve attributed it to China, and that’s a non-trivial thing. It would have been a stronger statement if they had been willing to go out further, but they obviously weren’t willing to.”
Why Were No Consequences Imposed on China for the Hacks?
The lack of hard action against China on Monday stands in contrast to the US response to Russia in April, when the US government formally attributed the SolarWinds cyberespionage campaign to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and applied additional economic sanctions.
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, seen here in a 2015 photo, will be meeting with Chinese officials next week.
Russia has for years been under US economic sanctions for its cyberspace activities, but Lewis notes that the Russians “don’t care.” China is different in this regard, as evidenced by its aggressive pushback against Western nations for banning Chinese-manufactured telecommunications equipment for fear of vulnerabilities that would allow spying.
There are likely multiple factors underlying the dissimilar responses because there’s an “entirely different calculus” at play with China compared to Russia, Lin noted.
China is the second largest economy in the world (behind the US) and the second largest US trade partner (after the European Union). The US is China’s largest trade partner. China’s economy continues to grow at a healthy clip, even if less rapidly than in years past, and the country is aggressively investing to modernize and expand its military.
China has also been directly competing with the US for influence in emerging economies like Southeast Asia and Africa through its Belt and Road Initiative, which entails investments in domestic economies, as well as strategic and trade alliances. Such differences create a different geopolitical, strategic, and economic dynamic in US-China relations versus the backdrop of US-Russia relations.
But the US-China trade relationship is a primary point of tension underlying how the US should respond to China’s “unsanctioned global cyber operations,” as Monday’s White House statement characterized Chinese behavior.
“The relationship with China does complicate things, in part because the business community is much more leery about taking steps against them,” Lewis observed, adding that there are already people in the tech community and in the IT business world saying the US shouldn’t do anything.
“It’s incredible,” Lewis said, but added, “The politics are a little more favorable, because if there’s one issue that the Hill is united on, it’s that they don’t like or trust China. So the political fight gets covered, but you’ve got businesses mumbling about how bad this is for business, and that’s a bit of a problem.”
Lewis also pointed to European hesitancy over confronting China in contrast to, more or less, US-European solidarity against Russia. “[The Europeans] are worried about Russia,” Lewis said. “They’re worried about China, too, but they’re not as far along. And so you’ve got people who want to do business with China that don’t like taking action, and that could be in the US, that could be in Europe, but that doesn’t apply to Congress.”
To Lewis’s point, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to President Biden yesterday urging action. The letter specifically calls for Biden “to impose significant sanctions using the authorities in Executive Order 13694, criminal charges, or other punitive measures against the People’s Republic of China and the state affiliated actors responsible for the cyberattack on the Microsoft email exchange.”
“A failure in this situation to punish the People’s Republic of China in a manner comparable to our response to Russian hostilities creates an unacceptable double standard in this era of great power competition,” the letter notes.
Lin pointed to potential responses that would be viewed by the Chinese as escalatory, but cautioned such actions could “poison the well,” negatively impacting a range of other areas where US-China cooperation is desired or needed.
Lin acknowledged many people want responses that “have more teeth. Sure, I’d like that too,” he explained, but “How much pain you’re willing to inflict? That’s very, very hard to answer.”
The US government has identified China as being behind a series of hacking efforts. (File)
What is the Significance of NATO’s Reaction?
There are other noticeable differences between the China and Russia attributions. This includes the number of allies and partners that joined with the US to condemn China’s activities, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, the European Union, and — perhaps most notably — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
On Monday, NATO released a statement saying it “stand[s] in solidarity” with countries affected by the Microsoft Exchange campaign and that it “acknowledge[s] national statements by Allies… attributing responsibility for the Microsoft Exchange Server compromise to the People’s Republic of China.”
Monday’s NATO statement marks the first time the 30-member nation-state military alliance has publicly endorsed a member nation’s attribution of hacking to another country.
Notably, the carefully worded statement stopped short of NATO itself attributing the campaign to China. This is consistent with the position laid out in a Joint Communique issued following a June meeting, in which NATO said, “Individual Allies may consider, when appropriate, attributing hybrid activities and responding in a coordinated manner, recognising attribution is a sovereign national prerogative.”
The Joint Communique went on to say that, “We will make greater use of NATO as a platform for political consultation among Allies, sharing concerns about malicious cyber activities, and exchanging national approaches and responses, as well as considering possible collective responses. If necessary, we will impose costs on those who harm us. Our response need not be restricted to the cyber domain.”
“It’s a huge step forward, and so the Europeans are moving in our direction,” Lewis said of the NATO statement on the US attribution to China. “We probably could not get the European Commission to say that. We couldn’t get the Germans to say it. The fact that NATO came out is a major step. It’s a major signal to Beijing. [NATO’s statement] probably shook Beijing.”
Lewis added that the latest attribution once again highlights China’s cyberspace activities and ultimately influences countries’ perceptions. “Think about all the discussion of Chinese espionage. It’s had a global effect. Those things hurt China. Those are penalties or costs.”
Asked if NATO’s statement is significant, Lin said, “Absolutely, I think there’s no question about it. What it shows [China] is that the efforts they have been making towards the West to appear more friendly haven’t worked. They would like to appear to the West to be non-threatening.”
Lewis also pointed to the potential effect this could have on China’s use of so-called “wolf-warrior diplomats,” which Lewis characterized as “exceptionally aggressive.” Lewis added, “I love the wolf-warrior diplomats because every time they open their mouths, the Europeans move a little closer to our position.”
Lewis said China’s leader Xi Jinping has noticed that. “[Xi is] worried about the fact that Europe is drifting towards the US, and so he’s paying close attention to the diplomatic effect of Chinese activity,” Lewis observed. “The debate is, can he afford to change? Some people say no, the wolf-warrior diplomats will be back, but the Chinese have started to realize that their public image isn’t so good.”
What’s Next?
Lewis and Lin agreed that the attribution is likely not the last chapter in this saga, so what lies ahead?
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and President Joe Biden.
In addition to diplomacy, there are also questions around potential economic sanctions. Lewis noted that already “There are economic penalties being leveraged against China. They’re not the same as the Russian’s though, but when you go after the Chinese’s ability to sell to foreign markets, it begins to put pressure on.”
Lin said economics does and will continue to be part of the discussion and possible future actions. “Economics plays a large part because you can apply economic leverage in a way that hurts a country without actually going to war.”
Asked how effective economic sanctions can really be, given the US’s longstanding sanctions on Russia haven’t changed that country’s behavior, Lin said, “What we know is that the economic sanctions [we have imposed] haven’t worked. We have not exhausted the list of possible economic sanctions, not by a long shot. You just have to be willing to do them.”
Still, Lin acknowledges there remain broader questions about the effectiveness of any type of economic sanction to deter nation-state cyberspace operations. “To say that there are combinations of sanctions [and] response measures that will eliminate this entirely is just absurd. It’s like saying you’re going to stop crime. You’re never going to stop crime. Maybe you can reduce the frequency of it, maybe you can reduce the severity of it, maybe you can make it easier for people to recover, but you can’t deter it in the sense you’ve deterred nuclear war.”
And besides, Lin notes, “The problem with deterrence is that you can never tell when you’ve been successful because what you’re measuring is non-events. You don’t know why something doesn’t happen.”
“What you can do is maybe delay the time in between, but that’s not a satisfying answer,” Lin continued. “One of the [issues] in all of this is that people think there’s a decisive solution to it. And there isn’t any decisive solution. This is just going to go on forever. It may happen less frequently, but it’s just going to go on forever. There’s no getting around that fact.”

12. SOCOM Members Got an All-Star Crash Course in AI

Excerpts:
The participants “were very interested in the robustness and ethical aspects… they were very careful with: How do they take AI and fit it into the ethical framework that they already have at DOD?” Karaman said.
But the participants also had a lot of questions about how high-tech adversaries might deploy AI in new and surprising ways, particularly on future battlefields against adversaries not bound by any ethical guidelines. Questions like, “What is the best way to counter that? How do we understand what kind of capabilities [adversaries] might deploy? How do we stay ahead so that we don’t get… blindsided by our adversaries?” Karaman said.
It’s the sort of course that could expand to other areas of the Defense Department, where Karaman hopes it will go on to influence aspects of acquisition, one of the key points he made during the course.
SOCOM Members Got an All-Star Crash Course in AI
Over a unique six-week course, participants met virtually with tech leaders to talk about AI's future.
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
Troops and civilians with U.S. Special Operations Command participated in a unique course this summer with MIT academics and other technology leaders to discuss AI and how it might shape the future of combat and other areas of human activity.
The six-week course allowed more than 300 SOCOM representatives, including members of senior leadership as well as other, lower-ranked officers and civilians, to understand broad future trends in AI development, commercial deployment, and more.
“What we did for them is bring together at MIT some of the best known thought leaders in the world of AI and have them provide their unique perspective,” Sertac Karaman, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT and one of the course’s organizers, told Defense One. Those thought leaders included longtime Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Defense Secretary Ash Carter.
The discussion included how operators might use tools like computer vision in the near future, “not just to detect vehicles here or there, but try to make sense of the imagery in a conceptual way,” Karaman said.
They also discussed other emerging AI capabilities, like the near future of natural language processing, which is a key focus area for SOCOM.
Other portions of the course were devoted to AI safety and how to pursue new capabilities while adhering to the Pentagon’s AI ethical principles. On Wednesday, SOCOM head Gen. Richard Clarke told lawmakers that one of the key features of the course from a SOCOM perspective was to help senior and mid-tier SOCOM personnel “learn what the AI principles were so that they could ask the right questions.”
The participants “were very interested in the robustness and ethical aspects… they were very careful with: How do they take AI and fit it into the ethical framework that they already have at DOD?” Karaman said.
But the participants also had a lot of questions about how high-tech adversaries might deploy AI in new and surprising ways, particularly on future battlefields against adversaries not bound by any ethical guidelines. Questions like, “What is the best way to counter that? How do we understand what kind of capabilities [adversaries] might deploy? How do we stay ahead so that we don’t get… blindsided by our adversaries?” Karaman said.
It’s the sort of course that could expand to other areas of the Defense Department, where Karaman hopes it will go on to influence aspects of acquisition, one of the key points he made during the course.
“I did tell them, for example, China is able to acquire any technology that’s built by any company inside China, but that’s not the case for the United States,” he said.
“We [meaning the United States] are still quite far ahead in terms of deploying some real AI capability that would really tilt the scale. But there’s a whole issue of integrating new technologies into DOD.”
It’s an area where the Defense Department must urgently catch up to the commercial world, he said.
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker


13. China has a ‘lying flat’ youth problem

I wonder if some of the young social media experts at the GEC are developing memes and themes and messages that support the lying flat movement (or lack of movement - Dad joke I know)

Get jobs, get married, or just participate in the lying flat movement?

China has a ‘lying flat’ youth problem
asiatimes.com · by Frank Chen · July 23, 2021
A passive depression is taking hold among China’s disillusioned Generations Y, Z and millennials, as many quit the rat race, shrug off societal norms and expectations, and close their ears to the state’s preaching about stamina and self-realization.
These youth have chosen to leave their underpaid jobs, forgo most consumption and withdraw socially to instead lie around the house – a repose that has given rise to the movement’s “lie flat” credo.
Their ranks are reportedly swelling as more become disenchanted with what likely lies ahead in terms of career, relationship and social mobility. Many express on social media that they feel they can no longer endure the hardships, frustrations and emptiness of trying to get ahead in China’s workplaces.
While they lie flat and live off their parents or meager social welfare, they are becoming increasingly bold and creative in their self-mockery, dissatisfaction and lackadaisical lifestyle.
Some refer to themselves as “chives,” online argot that likens the state’s and their employers’ perceived exploitation to “cheap chives being chopped.”

“If we chives lie flat, then it’s hard for them to cut or chop us,” read one post trending on Chinese social media since earlier this year. From that perspective, lying flat is as much about rebellion as lethargy.
With the kind of hard, menial and dull work that has become the new normal as the nation still reels from Covid-induced malaise, many young job starters and fresh graduates have little choice or bargaining power but to work long hours for peanuts.
‘Involution’ is the new social media buzzword among ‘lying flat’ Chinese youth. Image: Chinese state media
One example of the intensifying “involution” – a trending buzzword that speaks to China’s declining social and economic mobility for younger generations – is that up to a quarter of the take-away deliverymen employed by China’s dominant Meituan platform have at least a tertiary degree, according to the company’s 2020 annual report.
Some of Meituan’s workers reportedly make about 40 yuan (US$6.19) for a 12-hour work day. This was revealed by an investigation into the plight of these workers by China Central Television earlier this year.
For those “better chives” graduating from prestigious universities who are fortunate to beat their competition and land a job in one of China’s top tech firms, they are paid better but they must adapt to the notorious “996 culture” – meaning they must be ready to work 9am to 9pm six days a week.

Many are pensioned off once they reach 35 and their jobs are filled by “younger chives” if they are not promoted to management positions.
Meanwhile, even the average pay of tech and other higher-tier workers is still inadequate to purchase property in any big city. For example, Tencent’s average monthly pay is 50,000 to 70,000 yuan yet the average home price in Tencent’s home city of Shenzhen was 3.5 million yuan in 2020.
“I often find it difficult to turn up at my job in the mornings after getting off at midnight and with my pay, it’s still unrealistic for me to own a home and raise a family in Shenzhen, where the cost of living is becoming exorbitant,” said one former Tencent app developer in a WeChat group whose members are still caught up in the rat race and not yet lying flat.
“I know that I cannot continue to live a lie about perseverance or anything because the harsh reality is the opposite of what we have been taught to believe because hard work seldom pays off well.”
Young Chinese choose to lie flat in silent protest against China’s lack of upward mobility and fair competition, real or perceived. Photo: WeChat
With dim hopes for a better or meaningful future, more and more of China’s lying flat youth are descending into what they refer to as a “low desire life”, similar to Japan’s apathetic and lethargic youth who have rejected their country’s similar work-around-the-clock culture.

In a report about lying flat youth, the China Youth Daily said they have sought to take a page out of the “no consumption, no home ownership, no marriage, no sex, no kids and no zeal about anything” lifestyle first lived by some Japanese youngsters.
In long social media tirades attacking the rising trend of defeatism in China’s ultra-competitive society, the official broadsheet has sought to implore young people to strive for self-actualization and contribute to China’s “great rejuvenation.”
The paper now regularly runs rags-to-riches stories about young and rising officials and entrepreneurs who achieve success at a young age. But the state mouthpiece’s claims still ring hollow with most lying flat youth who continue to resist Beijing’s calls to rouse from their torpor.
“Beijing is realizing that it may soon have fewer ‘chives’ to cut when more born in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s lie flat, as young people know that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is getting smaller and even disappearing,” said Eric Mer, a Peking University associate professor of political science.
“The actual number of the ‘lie flat’ youth is hard to estimate, but we see high staff turnover in many industries already.

“They hole up at home and lie flat because they cannot see a way out or up in a society that seems to make their efforts irrelevant. If the trickle [of lying flat youth] becomes a flow, then the Chinese economy will suffer as more people do not want to possess or consume.”
Beijing is mulling new policies to make those lying flat to stand up and contribute.
Policies ranging from maximum working hours, statutory minimum wages, rental controls and caps on engagement and martial payments are being rolled out or updated by regional governments to entice lying flat youth into the workplace and down the wedding aisle.
A couple take the escalator at a mall in Beijing on May 17, 2021. Photo: AFP / Wang Zhou
This week, Beijing outlined a policy drive to encourage babymaking by gradually making all childbearing costs tax-deductable. Young couples may also receive housing subsidies and cash handouts, according to Xinhua.
“But the hope deficit is already there and the state propaganda has failed to indoctrinate them. [Lie flat youth] have even stopped ranting and raving. They are too tired or disheartened to want to do anything and too depressed to care.
“Beijing must find ways to ensure its young people share the country’s rising fortunes, instead of mere piecemeal policies to address one or two of their common gripes,” said the PKU scholar.
asiatimes.com · by Frank Chen · July 23, 2021


14. A legendary Chinese dissident blogger has suddenly fallen silent

Did his or her excellent tradecraft fail? Was he or she arrested?

Excerpts:
Program-Think usually posts online once every 14 days, and also shares those links on a Twitter account that has more than 50,000 followers. But the blog has featured no new posts since May 9, prompting rights and speech groups outside China to express worries about the writer’s safety.
“A prominent blogger’s stopping of updates would prompt people to immediately worry that they have been arrested, instead of being on a long holiday. This has shown how everyone is living under far-reaching fear under authoritarian rules,” China Digital Times, a website that focuses on Chinese censorship, wrote in an article about the blogger this month.
In the past, when citizen journalists or others with a prominent critical online presence stopped posting, it wasn’t uncommon to see them later surface in detention. That happened to at least two people who went to Wuhan in the early days of the coronavirus to document what was happening. Despite the lack of any conclusive information that the same thing has happened to Program-Think, the mounting worry is a reflection of how China’s crackdown on speech is making it ever more dangerous to express dissent in the country.
...
“A prominent blogger’s stopping of updates would prompt people to immediately worry that they have been arrested, instead of being on a long holiday. This has shown how everyone is living under far-reaching fear under authoritarian rules,” China Digital Times, a website that focuses on Chinese censorship, wrote in an article about the blogger this month.
A legendary Chinese dissident blogger has suddenly fallen silent
Quartz · by Jane Li
For many Chinese internet users, it is not uncommon to see bloggers they follow fall out of their news feeds. Everyone guesses the reasons—censorship or pressure from authorities over critical remarks that crossed a red line. But the sudden silence of a legendary dissident blogger is raising the disheartening prospect that she or he may have been detained after years of evading the authorities.
Program-Think (编程随想) is the pseudonym of a blogger who has run a namesake blog since 2009 with hundreds of posts about techniques to bypass Chinese censorship, ways to resist state propaganda, and why supporters of a one-party state are essentially suffering Stockholm syndrome. In many posts, the blogger introduced basic political concepts, such as how to distinguish between the Party and the state—whose boundary has become increasingly blurry under current leader Xi Jinping—while in others, they criticized Marxism-Leninism, the guiding philosophy of the Chinese political system. They’re also a big fan of the movie V for Vendetta, in which a masked activist rouses British citizens to resist fascism in a heavily surveiled future, judging by the frequent references on the blog.
The blogger’s best-known work is a 2016 GitHub project that enlisted people with the programming skills to disguise their tracks to map the networks of family members of Chinese Communist Party leaders, including Xi. The effort covered some 130 families and several generations of “princelings,” and underscored how deeply tied personal wealth and business prowess are to Party connections.
Program-Think usually posts online once every 14 days, and also shares those links on a Twitter account that has more than 50,000 followers. But the blog has featured no new posts since May 9, prompting rights and speech groups outside China to express worries about the writer’s safety.
“A prominent blogger’s stopping of updates would prompt people to immediately worry that they have been arrested, instead of being on a long holiday. This has shown how everyone is living under far-reaching fear under authoritarian rules,” China Digital Times, a website that focuses on Chinese censorship, wrote in an article about the blogger this month.
In the past, when citizen journalists or others with a prominent critical online presence stopped posting, it wasn’t uncommon to see them later surface in detention. That happened to at least two people who went to Wuhan in the early days of the coronavirus to document what was happening. Despite the lack of any conclusive information that the same thing has happened to Program-Think, the mounting worry is a reflection of how China’s crackdown on speech is making it ever more dangerous to express dissent in the country.
While censorship itself isn’t surprising, Program-Think’s long-running anonymous presence made them a hero on par with the anti-establishment protagonist of V for Vendetta in the eyes of many. Managing to keep such an outspoken blog going for more than a decade from mainland China is an almost impossible achievement in a place with heavy surveillance and strong cyber police force.
In a 2019 article, Program-Think had described their experiences hiding from the prying eyes of the authorities, who they said had launched two “state-level” attacks in order to hack their Gmail in 2011 and 2017. “The related department has set their eyes on me for long; but unfortunately, there is nothing they can do about me!” wrote the blogger.
Now, this conclusion seems a bit more uncertain.
Quartz · by Jane Li



15. SOCOM Wants Four ‘Armed Overwatch’ Squadrons, With One Always Deployed


SOCOM Wants Four ‘Armed Overwatch’ Squadrons, With One Always Deployed - Air Force Magazine
airforcemag.com · by Brian W. Everstine · July 21, 2021

U.S. Special Operations Command boss Army Gen. Richard D. Clarke speaks during a congressional hearing July 21. Screenshot photo.

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SOCOM Wants Four ‘Armed Overwatch’ Squadrons, With One Always Deployed
July 21, 2021 | By
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U.S. Special Operations Command expects a future armed overwatch fleet to quickly reach full utilization, including one squadron deployed at all times, to meet a growing global need for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.
SOCOM wants to buy 75 of the aircraft, and Air Force Special Operations Command has said it wants procurement to start in fiscal 2022. SOCOM boss Army Gen. Richard D. Clarke, in testimony to the House Armed Services subcommittee on intelligence and special operations, said the armed overwatch program is coming on as existing systems are aging out, showing the requirement for the aircraft procurement to continue.
“Modernization of ISR is one of our top priorities,” Clarke said. “Not just armed overwatch, but we see armed overwatch as a very cost-effective, long-term approach to support our SOF teams in the future.”
Armed overwatch is expected to replace the Air Force’s U-28 Draco fleet. Clarke said these aircraft will soon require a complete re-winging, at a cost approaching that of the total armed overwatch effort.
Congress blocked SOCOM from procuring armed overwatch aircraft in its fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, but it authorized the command to continue with demonstrations. In May, SOCOM awarded $19.2 million to five companies for prototype demonstrations as part of the effort. The aircraft selected to proceed are:
This prototype effort will take place at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., and will be completed by March 2022. If successful, a company could be requested to provide a proposal for a follow-on award.
Clarke said he envisions four squadrons flying 15 of the aircraft each, with an additional 10-15 to be used for training. This would provide enough for a squadron to always be deployed. While Africa is typically used as an example location for where the aircraft could be used, Clarke said he could see it providing ISR, and [strikes] if needed, at places such as the Philippines, Thailand, and South America.
As SOCOM “looks globally, where SOF forces are deployed today and where [they will] be deployed in the future, we do think that the operating concept we have for these aircraft would, in fact, get to full utilization in the future,” Clarke said.



16. Strengthening Taiwan’s Resistance

Taiwan needs an unconventional deterrence and resistance operating concept adapted for its specific conditions to support, as one line of effort, an integrated deterrence posture.

My Recommendation: US Special Forces should re-establish the Special Forces Resident Detachment Taiwan which was established in 1957 and withdrawn in 1974 when the 1st Special Forces Group (AKA Special Action Force Asia (SAFASIA)) was inactivated with the drawdown of the Vietnam War. Special Forces have a historical relationship with Taiwan that has long been dormant. In May of 2020 a Special Forces Detachment from Okinawa conducted training in Taiwan with their special operations counterparts. The mission of a permanently stationed detachment would be to advise and assist the Taiwan Special Forces in developing a civil resistance capability to contribute to unconventional deterrence.

Strengthening Taiwan’s Resistance
New legislation could make the island harder for Beijing to control.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board

A soldier holds a Taiwanese flag during a military exercise aimed at repelling an attack from China in Hsinchu County, northern Taiwan.
Photo: Chiang Ying-ying/Associated Press

The best way to forestall a catastrophic Chinese invasion of Taiwan is to raise the costs for Beijing. That means ensuring Taiwan’s own forces are prepared for the worst. A new American legislative proposal aims to bolster Taiwan’s deterrence by improving the island’s ability to call up its reserve forces in case of an invasion.

The Taiwan Partnership Act, sponsored by Republican Sen. John Cornyn and Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth, is notable for its bipartisanship. The House version is backed by Rep. Mike Gallagher, plus one other Republican and two Democrats. The short bill instructs the Pentagon to study greater coordination between the U.S. National Guard and Taiwan’s military.
Specifically, American defense planners are encouraged to develop “programs for National Guard advisors to assist in training the reserve components of the military forces of Taiwan.” The reserve forces aren’t the front lines of Taiwan’s naval or missile defense, but they would provide additional manpower if the island’s population had to mobilize for war.
A 2017 Rand Corporation report on Taiwan’s reserves noted that “island warfare in the Second World War first demonstrated the need for an attacking force to have a large numerical advantage in order to secure victory.” Calling up reserves could multiply the size of Taiwan’s active-duty military of under 200,000 by a factor of 10.
An organized and equipped reserve force would make Taiwan more difficult to control even if People’s Liberation Army amphibious forces or paratroopers landed on the island. Broad-based resistance can help a smaller state hold out against a larger foe, perhaps buying time for U.S. and other forces to arrive. Lithuania, for example, relies on mobilizing its reserves in case of a Russian attack.
America’s National Guard commanders could train Taiwan’s reserves for contingencies. Perhaps more important, the cooperation could act as a deterrent simply by increasing the salience of Taiwan’s multiple lines of defense.
Modest legislation like this isn’t a substitute for a stronger U.S. Navy, and American defense spending is stagnant. Yet it’s a sign of growing bipartisan recognition that Taiwan’s independence could soon come under intense pressure, and that the U.S. has a significant strategic interest in helping the island defend itself.
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WSJ · by The Editorial Board
17. Prepare Now for War in the Pacific

As Eliot Cohen John Gooch wrote, all military failures result from a failure to learn, failure to adapt, and a failure to anticipate. Rep Gallagher is arguing for anticipation.

Excerpts:
This is a dark future, but it is one that is heading our way if we fail to act.
Theodore Roosevelt was one of our great sea power presidents. Under his leadership, the Great White Fleet announced the United States’ arrival on the world stage and set the foundation for American naval supremacy in the 20th century. As President Roosevelt himself put it, “We have no choice as to whether or not we shall play a great part in the world.”
A physics professor from the University of Berlin who was visiting the United States expressed a similar sentiment in 1931. He said, “The people of this country must realize they have a great responsibility in the sphere of international politics. The part of passive spectator is unworthy of this country and is bound in the end to lead to disaster all round.”
That professor was Albert Einstein, and he was right. Disaster came less than two years later when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.
If we remain passive spectators rather than passionate sea power advocates, not only will it lead to geopolitical disaster, at some point we will no longer be worthy of global leadership. We must fight for American naval supremacy: It is one ship we can never give up.

Prepare Now for War in the Pacific
The window to prepare for war in the western Pacific is closing quickly. The United States must build and prepare naval forces that can deter China, or defeat it if necessary.
By Congressman Michael Gallagher (R-Wisconsin)
July 2021 Proceedings Vol. 147/7/1,421
usni.org · July 22, 2021
When I served in the Marine Corps, I spent most of my time as far away from ships as possible in the middle of the Iraqi desert and as a Middle East expert. In what might have been the only successful pivot in recent U.S. foreign policy, since entering Congress, I have dedicated much of my focus to maritime security in the Indo-Pacific.
Since coming to Congress, I have spent a good deal of time speaking and writing on naval topics. I’ve had the privilege of speaking to the Surface Navy Association, CSIS, and the Naval Institute, and writing for War On the Rocks, for example. In these conversations, I have come to realize that we can no longer afford just to preach to the sea power “choir.” As Admiral Phil Davidson, the former Commander, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, recently warned, we may have six years or less before the People’s Republic of China (PRC) takes action against Taiwan. Some have taken to calling this the “Davidson window.” Other senior leaders, including Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday and Commandant of the Marine Corps General David Berger, agree with his assessment. Think about that for a minute. The United States may only have a few years to prepare for a war that could decide the course of the remainder of this century.
Geography dictates such a war would be waged first and foremost by the Sea Services. The United States cannot simply pay lip service to the idea of naval supremacy anymore; we have to earn it, every day. To avert disaster—and make no mistake, that is where our present course leads—the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon must act with a sense of urgency and advocate for, build, and resource American sea power before it is too late.
The 2018 National Defense Strategy is predicated on deterrence by denial. So, what, exactly, do we seek to deny? The most stressing and dangerous scenario is a PRC “fait accompli” attack against Taiwan, which the United States would seek to deny through the use of integrated sea power. If we are honest with ourselves, this is not a task we are up to today. We have six years. This is an “Apollo 13” moment—lock all the smart people in a room and do not let them leave until they figure it out.
The Davidson window will close rapidly. We must build a battle force that is ready for war—not in 2045, but by 2025. Preparing for such a war will require hard choices today. We must grow our naval presence in Japan, Guam, and Australia—even if that comes at the expense of naval presence elsewhere. We must ensure our amphibious forces can contribute long-range fires to the fight. The Marine Corps needs long-range weapons and forces distributed across every U.S. territory and possession in the Indo-Pacific. Naval logistics must be able to deliver weapons, spare parts, food, fuel, and people in contested environments. There is not a moment to lose in this race.
Last, and perhaps most important, we must communicate often and honestly with the American people about the stakes. If we fail to reverse current trends, we are going to wake up one day and we will have either lost a war or abandoned Taiwan. In so doing, we will have allowed the Chinese military to turn Japan’s flank, handed the Chinese Communist Party control over a commanding share of global semiconductor production, and broadcast to the entire world that the United States does not stand by its friends. We will have condemned 24 million Taiwanese people, who currently live by democratic principles, to suffer under an autocratic regime.
This is a dark future, but it is one that is heading our way if we fail to act.
Theodore Roosevelt was one of our great sea power presidents. Under his leadership, the Great White Fleet announced the United States’ arrival on the world stage and set the foundation for American naval supremacy in the 20th century. As President Roosevelt himself put it, “We have no choice as to whether or not we shall play a great part in the world.”
A physics professor from the University of Berlin who was visiting the United States expressed a similar sentiment in 1931. He said, “The people of this country must realize they have a great responsibility in the sphere of international politics. The part of passive spectator is unworthy of this country and is bound in the end to lead to disaster all round.”
That professor was Albert Einstein, and he was right. Disaster came less than two years later when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.
If we remain passive spectators rather than passionate sea power advocates, not only will it lead to geopolitical disaster, at some point we will no longer be worthy of global leadership. We must fight for American naval supremacy: It is one ship we can never give up.
This commentary is adapted from a speech Congressman Gallagher gave to the Navy League in June 2021.
usni.org · July 22, 2021


18.  Learning in the grey zone: how democracies can meet the authoritarian challenge |

Some very good advice and recommendations here;

Excerpts:
Leaders must shore up public trust in government and democratic institutions and avoid instrumentalising disinformation for political purposes, and civil society must promote information hygiene. The business, industry and education sectors need to become engaged stakeholders in ensuring transparency over hostile foreign influence and cyberattacks.
There are no easy ways to generate democratic resilience, but it is a crucial endeavour. Information sharing—rarely a strong suit for siloed government departments and businesses wary of negative press—will need to become the norm rather than the exception.
Counter-hybrid fusion centres, net assessment capabilities and other long-range tools and methodologies will be critical to building knowledge about vulnerabilities, identifying threat vectors, and devising appropriate countermeasures. So too will the experience of other nations with potentially useful models. These might include the Swedish notion of ‘total defence’, or Singapore’s ‘six pillars’ (incorporating military, civil, economic, social, digital and psychological components).
Taken together, a longer-term view of strategy characterised by earlier intervention, a flexible and adaptive approach to coalitions and partnerships, and a more integrated effort to unify governments with societies are the keys for democracies to effectively meet grey-zone challenges.
The task is not easy, but pursuing it may also help democracies rediscover that their supposed weaknesses—responsiveness, openness to change and the ability to build trust—are their greatest strengths.

Learning in the grey zone: how democracies can meet the authoritarian challenge | The Strategist
aspistrategist.org.au · by Matthew Sussex · July 22, 2021

Innovation by authoritarian nations in the ‘grey zone’ is becoming one of the most serious challenges facing contemporary democracies. It has long been recognised that future conflicts might be won before any shots are fired. But knowing that is cold comfort, because authoritarian states are continually evolving their capacity to develop and deploy offensive tools in their cyber-enabled, information and hybrid warfare arsenals.
Meeting this challenge requires democratic nations, including Australia, to reconceptualise how they think about strategy: its core purposes, its main instruments and capabilities, and what success or failure looks like. Democracy’s authoritarian rivals—chiefly China and Russia—play by different rules, have different ideas about vulnerabilities and strengths, and measure outcomes in broad wholistic rather than tight linear terms.
Strategy is a long game and democracies must overcome their tendency to view conflict as an end-state with a precipitating cause, rather than an ongoing phenomenon. Australian Defence Force chief Angus Campbell highlighted this, in a 2019 speech to an ASPI conference on future conflict, by tracing General Valery Gerasimov’s stages of war. Importantly, Campbell noted that Western powers tended to only react when a crisis point had been reached—when the war was already half-won.
Although there’s disagreement about a ‘Gerasimov doctrine’, much like China’s ‘three warfares’, authoritarian states do seem more suited than democracies to longer-term political warfare. Authoritarian leaders don’t have to face periodic elections (or if they do, the outcome is hardly in doubt), which aids continuity in strategic planning and execution. But beyond government structures, both Russia and China have long invested in weaponising political, economic, psychological and social tools for use in grey-zone activities.
This includes using civilian assets for quasi-military means, like China’s military–civil fusion efforts, or Russia’s use of ‘little green men’ and the Wagner PMC group as a transnational proxy defence asset. It also extends to using economic levers as strategic instruments, as witnessed by Beijing’s investment campaigns in the South Pacific, and the Kremlin’s manipulation of gas dependencies in Europe. In the information domain, reflexive control—getting your adversary to act in a way that suits your interests without being aware of it—is coupled with other hybrid tactics like adapting international law, mobilising diasporas, and employing useful idiots and cyber-proxies to spread misinformation and disinformation.
A longer view of conflict gives authoritarian states escalation control, allowing them to dictate the tempo of strategic interaction, and to achieve their objectives by presenting others with a fait accompli—as in the South China Sea and Crimea.
It’s false to argue that the West is helpless against such behaviour. But to combat it more effectively it must learn to intervene earlier, put more effort into ensuring a united approach, seize control of narratives, and be prepared to more frequently use coercive economic and other non-kinetic measures. All of these are necessary from an early stage, rather than eventually offering up sanctions and reprimands as responses to bad behaviour that has already accomplished its objectives. Democracies must act more strategically, and more proactively.
A common lament is that democracies lack freedom of action compared with authoritarian states in countering grey-zone activities because they’re bound by laws and norms. But assuming that the West’s challengers would forever be content to play by those laws and norms too, rather than sidestepping, adapting or ignoring them, remains a glaring oversight. Democracies must be flexible and adaptive.
Russia’s ability, with seeming impunity, to take over Crimea, attempt to kill dissidents abroad, co-opt politicians, bomb munitions depots in the Czech Republic, and launch adaptive cyberattacks and information operations against NATO members serves as a force multiplier. It suggests Russia is strong and assertive while democracies are flat-footed, reactive and incapable of firm united responses. It’s a similar story when Beijing changes the maritime geography of the South China Sea, targets diaspora communities with transnational repressionbuys influence in Australian society, and undermines the multilateral trading order with its deliberately bilateral Belt and Road Initiative.
This underscores the need for democracies to find ways to be adaptive without compromising their core values. Indeed, to alter an adversary’s behaviour in the grey zone—to deter it—will require a dynamic process with a variety of partners, rather than a static one in which the game and the players are fixed.
That doesn’t mean that laws and norms are useless, or that the West should abandon them. But it does mean that they’ll be increasingly unreliable as instruments to constrain behaviour, especially in a more fluid environment where varied interpretations of law will allow states to forum-shop to advance their interests.
Like laws, appealing to common values should be done with clear eyes rather than rosy spectacles. In many cases, coalitions to counter authoritarian states will be based on shared threat perceptions, rather than a sense of kinship that some potential allies don’t share (and even sometimes resent). In its recent integrated review, the UK has abandoned the term ‘rules-based order’, stressing that while it seeks to work with democracies, it also will also cooperate pragmatically with those with different values. We shouldn’t fear this. If liberal democratic theory is correct, then the shared habits learned through cooperation will reinforce stability, not undermine it.
Although Australia is a leader in recognising the threat of grey-zone activities, especially in terms of combatting foreign interference, democracies have often been slow to realise that building resilience goes beyond government. Protecting Australia from such pressures can’t be done by regulation and legislation alone. For democracies to successfully insulate themselves from cyber-enabled information warfare, attacks on critical infrastructure, attempts to undermine and fragment their societies, and efforts to marginalise them from their allies requires a whole-of-society effort.
Leaders must shore up public trust in government and democratic institutions and avoid instrumentalising disinformation for political purposes, and civil society must promote information hygiene. The business, industry and education sectors need to become engaged stakeholders in ensuring transparency over hostile foreign influence and cyberattacks.
There are no easy ways to generate democratic resilience, but it is a crucial endeavour. Information sharing—rarely a strong suit for siloed government departments and businesses wary of negative press—will need to become the norm rather than the exception.
Counter-hybrid fusion centres, net assessment capabilities and other long-range tools and methodologies will be critical to building knowledge about vulnerabilities, identifying threat vectors, and devising appropriate countermeasures. So too will the experience of other nations with potentially useful models. These might include the Swedish notion of ‘total defence’, or Singapore’s ‘six pillars’ (incorporating military, civil, economic, social, digital and psychological components).
Taken together, a longer-term view of strategy characterised by earlier intervention, a flexible and adaptive approach to coalitions and partnerships, and a more integrated effort to unify governments with societies are the keys for democracies to effectively meet grey-zone challenges.
The task is not easy, but pursuing it may also help democracies rediscover that their supposed weaknesses—responsiveness, openness to change and the ability to build trust—are their greatest strengths.
aspistrategist.org.au · by Matthew Sussex · July 22, 2021

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V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcastForeign Podicy
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcastForeign Podicy
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

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