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The Thing About China

Is that we are bound to have a war with them, but it is really not in our interest or theirs that we should do so. 

It could be a small war.  It could be a big war.  China has nuclear weapons. China is building its navy.  In the interest of protesting free trade, democracy, that kind of thing? Sure. China is very much interested in exerting its power in the western Pacific. China is also very much interested in the resources of the world. China doesn’t like our global dominance and frequently contests it. Fair enough. A lot of people resent our dominance. Who would you rather have dominating the globe? Us or China? China, a post-Communist autocratic nation of 19th-century peasants with a minicule privileged class, hasn’t changed that much from pre-Communist China.  China still figures it should be running the world. It also believes the current hype that it will be, soon enough. 

The thing about China is, no one ever tells China “no.” Not in language China understands.  I don’t mean the losers in Cambridge with “Free Tibet” bumper stickers who also do not care to see U.S. power exerted anywhere in the world. I’m talking about parties China might pay attention to. The United States government, the market forces the United States. China would respond well to “no.”  Just look at the hoops China is jumping through over a little bad publicity.  Money is important to China. China just executed its product safety chief. After that, a disgraced toymaker hanged himself pre-emptively.

Imagine what would have happened in April 2001, when China held our navy aviators captive, if George Bush had said, “Give them back, and the plane in one piece, or we stop unloading in the Port of Los Angeles and turn the ships back.”  Sure, Walmart would have bitched.  But China would have hopped to.  None of this apology and regret nonsense for our plane being forced down by their idiot pilot.

Going back to George Bush the elder, through Clinton, everyone wants to be nice to the Chinese.  They have this thing about losing face. Very bad.

So here we are six plus years later, and China is hacking into the Pentagon.  I don’t know about you.  But I don’t think I need cheap Chinese crap that much. Also not overly concerned about Chinese face. Concern about Chinese loss of face is sort of like concern about a child who intends to hold his breath until his face turns blue. When Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Jiang Yu says China has specific laws about hacking, takes hacking very seriously and is often a victim of hacking, it makes me think. Why are we letting China have an Internet, anyway?  Techies, please weigh in. If they don’t know how to be polite with it, why don’t we shut it down? A little shutdown … Internet, trade … could go a long way.  A little pain now could mean a lot less pain later. It would be interesting to see what would happen if we even hinted that we’re thinking about it.

MVDG: Don’t forget the Russkies. And don’t make the mistake of thinking they are our allies.

Welcome, RCP, etal. Good to see you, come on in.  We’re rounding up the Potemkin news out of Iraq. But here’s some happy Leb news.  You can toss around the historical analogies, but if al-Asad comes to mean even a small bit of what Gettysburg did, in some way, I’d be happy. First draft? Wrong.

Topics: China

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:19 am on Tuesday, September 4, 2007

13 Responses to “The Thing About China”

1. The_Real_JeffS Says:
   September 4th, 2007 at 2:32 am

   Why don’t we shut the INTERNET down on China? Money, Jules. Gobs and gobs of money. That’s why those freedom lovin’, Bush hatin’ pukes at Google help China censor the INTERNET.

   It’s not so much the cheap crap that gets foisted off on us (which I try to avoid simply because I dislike cheap crap) as the huge consumer market in China. Or, I should say, the potentially huge consumer market. I’m still wondering if (or when) their fiat driven financial system will crap out.

2. hrt Says:
   September 4th, 2007 at 3:10 am

   Always been a bit wary of this face thing.

   If it is so important, why do the Chinese enter Olympic and other sporting events when a loss by their athlete(s) would involve a loss of face?

3. Theo Spark Says:
   September 4th, 2007 at 9:01 am

   The Chinese enter the Olympics bacause they are very good at cheating.

4. RebeccaH Says:
   September 4th, 2007 at 10:02 am

   I expect China is making the rest of Asia very nervous too.

5. Bloodthirsty Liberal Says:
   September 4th, 2007 at 10:12 am

   Am I the only one who thinks there is more than enough prosperity to go around, if China just relaxed a little bit?

   Where in Chinese culture is the compulsion to cheat, steal, lie, dissemble, and pirate? I’m beginning to think Marco Polo brought pasta to China. They just mixed in some antifreeze and melamine, and claimed it as their own.

   BTL

6. Daily Pundit » Good Question… Says:
   September 4th, 2007 at 11:13 am

   [...] Jules Crittenden: (…) So here we are six plus years later, and China is hacking into the Pentagon. I don’t know about you. But I don’t think I need cheap Chinese crap that much. Also not overly concerned about Chinese face. Concern about Chinese loss of face is sort of like concern about a child who intends to hold his breath until his face turns blue. When Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Jiang Yu says China has specific laws about hacking, takes hacking very seriously and is often a victim of hacking, it makes me think. Why are we letting China have an Internet, anyway? Techies, please weigh in. If they don’t know how to be polite with it, why don’t we shut it down? A little shutdown … Internet, trade … could go a long way. A little pain now, a lot less pain later. It would be interesting to see what would happen if we even hinted that we’re thinking about it. [...]

7. steve Says:
   September 4th, 2007 at 1:26 pm

   This has been going on in earnest for years. It was called “Titan Rain”

   Titan Rain hackers gained access to many U.S. computer networks, including those at Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA.

   …

   It was another routine night for Shawn Carpenter. After a long day analyzing computer-network security for Sandia National Laboratories, where much of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is designed, Carpenter, 36, retreated to his ranch house in the hills overlooking Albuquerque, N.M., for a quick dinner and an early bedtime. He set his alarm for 2 a.m. Waking in the dark, he took a thermos of coffee and a pack of Nicorette gum to the cluster of computer terminals in his home office. As he had almost every night for the previous four months, he worked at his secret volunteer job until dawn, not as Shawn Carpenter, mid-level analyst, but as Spiderman–the apt nickname his military-intelligence handlers gave him–tirelessly pursuing a group of suspected Chinese cyberspies all over the world. Inside the machines, on a mission he believed the U.S. government supported, he clung unseen to the walls of their chat rooms and servers, secretly recording every move the snoopers made, passing the information to the Army and later to the FBI.

   The hackers he was stalking, part of a cyberespionage ring that federal investigators code-named Titan Rain, first caught Carpenter’s eye a year earlier when he helped investigate a network break-in at Lockheed Martin in September 2003. A strikingly similar attack hit Sandia several months later, but it wasn’t until Carpenter compared notes with a counterpart in Army cyberintelligence that he suspected the scope of the threat. Methodical and voracious, these hackers wanted all the files they could find, and they were getting them by penetrating secure computer networks at the country’s most sensitive military bases, defense contractors and aerospace companies.

   Carpenter had never seen hackers work so quickly, with such a sense of purpose. They would commandeer a hidden section of a hard drive, zip up as many files as possible and immediately transmit the data to way stations in South Korea, Hong Kong or Taiwan before sending them to mainland China. They always made a silent escape, wiping their electronic fingerprints clean and leaving behind an almost undetectable beacon allowing them to re-enter the machine at will. An entire attack took 10 to 30 minutes. “Most hackers, if they actually get into a government network, get excited and make mistakes,” says Carpenter. “Not these guys. They never hit a wrong key. . . ”

   The Invasion of the Chinese Cyberspies (And the Man Who Tried to Stop Them)

   2003

   http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1098961,00.html

8. steve Says:
   September 4th, 2007 at 1:39 pm

   Great point blood thirsty liberal, when was their last original thought? They have workers in our factories stealing our manufacturing processes as well.

   China will self destruct because of its own greed.

   “China’s rivers are sewers. Environmental problems make the Chinese economic boom unsustainable. That’s the recent assessment of China’s deputy minister for the environment in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel: “This miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace. Acid rain is falling on one third of the Chinese territory, half of the water in our seven largest rivers is completely useless, while one fourth of our citizens does not have access to clean drinking water.”
   Moreover, China will be the first country to get old before it gets rich. China’s one-child policy, so rigidly enforced in the 1980s and 1990s, will haunt the country as it finds itself without enough workers to support a geriatric population.”

   from “Bet on America”
   By Joel Achenbach

9. The New War « The Van Der Galiën Gazette Says:
   September 4th, 2007 at 2:02 pm

   [...] allies, they are enemies who realize that trading with each other is in the interest of both, as Jules Crittenden understands [...]

10. Vanguard of the Commentariat Says:
    September 4th, 2007 at 4:07 pm

    And the lesson the Left thinks it is learning here: See, Communism works! Just look at China!

    Man, this is going to be a fun century.

11. tanstaafl Says:
    September 4th, 2007 at 8:10 pm

    The current Chinese leadership is oriented towards the grand plan.

    At the expense of individual people.

    Thus (in the spirit of the Great Wall) there is the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, flooding & sinking ancestral villages in its building.

    Anyone or anything that might interfere Chinese “presentation” to the world in the ‘08 Olympics had best well watch its back.

    (Not all that different than “life” under Mao, just grandiosity focused on the Olympics instead of Mao.)

    As for the recent debacles in toothpaste, children’s toys, exported fish, lead in children’s jewelry, formaldehyde in clothing…(what else ?)…it seems to be symptomatic of the Chinese approach to business…sell it, and worry about any repercussions later.

    As for hacking and stealing software, secrets, whatever, China recently declared it was going to create its own technological base. But, hell, even the Russian guy who solved the “Poincare” had a rival mathematician in China who claimed the glory.

    I say “no” in not buying “made in China”. Of course, if you want some running shoes these days, that’s not always easy.

12. Robert Says:
    September 4th, 2007 at 9:43 pm

    It will cost them a Trillion Dollars to pick a fight with us. They won’t.

13. Michael Lonie Says:
    September 4th, 2007 at 10:27 pm

    I have thought for a long time that China looks on the US rather like Imperial Germany looked on Britain before 1914. They are seeking their Place in the Sun, and on every path they want to use they find the USA standing there in their way.

    China has advanced from Communism to Fascism. Is it too much to expect them someday to continue on to consensual government? It may be.

    There seem to be a lot of people in the world, the Chinese political elite among them, who think that the 20th Century was so much fun, with its genocides, mass murders in the name of insane ideologies, mass famines in the name of those same ideologies, rampant tyranny, and hideous world wars, that we should do it all over again in the 21st Century. Only this time, everybody will have nukes from the start. It sometimes seems that the only people who are trying to prevent such a new Dark Valley are George W. Bush, the dreaded Neocons, and the US armed forces.

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