The "New" China Threat

Here is the challenge, presented by Huawei to the world: If you think we're a company of (potential) spies and a security threat, then publicly prove it!

Here is a not so polite, and rather hostile answer. But an answer that I factually don't disagree with.

In short: ““All organizations and citizens,” reads Article 7 of China’s National Intelligence Law, “must support, assist with, and collaborate in national intelligence work, and guard the national intelligence work secrets they are privy to.” All Chinese companies, whether they are private or owned by the state, are now part and parcel of the party’s massive overseas espionage campaign.”

This, the CPC, is why everyone is scared of Chinese companies, visiting scholars and students. The people (and likely most of the private for-profit companies) are not evil or even have any bad intentions. But the govt is actively weaponizing them. By law, it can force them to serve state interests even if the individuals themselves don't want too (and historically has used family detentions, public shame, arrests, threats, etc. to do ensure cooperation). Requests to pass on sensitive data from an employer become hard to ignore when the CCP threatens your mother's job or your father's freedom back home in China. Increasingly often, Chinese state security is “influencing” Chinese living abroad.

The weaponization of individuals starts innocuously, with the reality that most business people in China join the CPC (Huang estimates that it’s as much as 80% of C-level individuals), typically for better access to government officials, loans, permits, etc. The argument for joining not being a display of party loyalty, but that it’s just a practical reality of China—if you want to (return to) work in China you need the connections that the CPC provides its members. But a more complete understanding of this membership is that everyone that is committing to the CPC for practical and not ideological reasons is thus also in effect calling out the CPC, that their membership, and the CPC's rule, is only perfunctory: “We’ll commit on paper to your ideology but we neither believe it nor really want to participate in it; we simply recognize that we need membership in your organization to make money.” The result of this is that the CPC wins either way; members are a committed communist ideologues or they are trapped in a commitment with Leninist security state that can use their membership, however insincere, against them whenever they need. 

And the unfortunate reality is that this intimidation is extending to the larger PRC Chinese population as well. Chinese citizens' ability to travel domestically, get a passport and/or clear customs, fly, stay in top-hotels, ride bullet trains, get bank loans, buy a car or apartment, start a business, or even send their kids to a private school or public college are all linked to ideological status—social credit (at one of many different levels of tracking). The social and physical status of “normal” Chinese citizens, those without party membership, is increasingly tied to the CPC, and the influence of the CPC via corporations and individual foreign “assets” (CPC’s term for Overseas Chinese) is increasingly and rightfully regarded as potentially dangerous.

It sucks to be a PRC Chinese right now—and it’s the fault of the CCP.

P.S. Happy Birthday Mao.