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Federal officials have labeled Boston a major target of Chinese spies who are looking to steal trade and technology secrets from the US.
US Assistant Attorney General John Demers, who leads a federal force against Chinese espionage in America, said Massachusetts had become a focus of his team's work, the Associated Press reported.
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Massachusetts is home to top-ranked universities including Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It also hosts military contractors such as weapon maker Raytheon and defense system provider Mercury Systems.As part of the China Initiative, officials said they had met with local companies and colleges last week to encourage them to bring suspected instances of espionage to the attention of federal investigators.
Lelling said the large number of Chinese nationals living in Boston also made the city a potential espionage target, but officials added that most were in the US for legitimate reasons, such as study.
Technology workers should keep a close eye on Wang?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 10 2019, @10:48PM (1 child)
No, they're not better at playing the long game. That's an oft repeated truism, but it is not correct. Imperial China declined because their bureaucracy consisted of scholars who gained their positions through state exams on literature and poetry. The state ideology of Confucianism and later Neo-Confucianism coddled them into incredible institutional complacency and refused to acknowledge the sweeping threat that new technology posed. Even after the Opium Wars when the British navy annihilated the much larger Chinese fleets, they refused to change because their geopolitical practice had long been one of buying off "barbarian" encroachments on the Middle Kingdom. The Europeans, after all, were just a paler version of the barbarians they had always held at bay.
So, if the Chinese had been better at the long game, or even moderately competent at the medium-term game, they would have gotten a big-assed clue when the Europeans began to beat the crap out of the countries around them. Instead, they became a "fall-behind-ist" (their own term) country that was totally humiliated for the last several centuries.
China's leaders now comprise engineers and scientists, so they're working on correcting the technological gap. But the freedom gap remains huge, and freedom is ultimately the core strength of the West. That shows that once again China is not playing the long game, but rather going for round two of "fall-behind-ism."
Personally I've been curious to see if Hong Kong's repatriation will ultimately inject democracy into the Chinese bloodstream, or if Beijing will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs because they simply cannot wrap their heads around the concept.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday April 11 2019, @05:45AM
I don't think freedom is as important for conquest as you do, honestly. It may make it harder to hold the empire together in the long run, but that's about it. And the western world is very quickly devolving into a cluster of authoritarian hellholes, so our "core strength" is being sapped at an alarming rate. What then? I sense dark times coming, and am hoping like hell I'm wrong, wrong, wrong.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...