Crémieux on X - "The Actual, Real, Not-Messing-Around Chinese spies in Silicon Valley problem needs to be addressed. This has to be a priority of the next administration."
Samuel Hammond 🌐🏛 on X - "I was at an AI thing in SF this weekend when a young woman walked up. The first thing she said, almost verbatim: "I'm a Chinese national but it's not like I'm a spy or anything" *nervous laughter.* I asked her if she thought Xi was an AI doomer and she suddenly excused herself."
Meme - "r/SecurityClearance
Amount of Chinese Women on dating apps in DC
There are a massive amount of Chinese girls on dating apps. It's like 1/10 are Chinese. It makes me think, how many of them are spies?"
"Years ago I remember in our yearly security briefing our old, crusty exec telling us "Look around. None of you are lookers. If she is pretty and interested in you, she's a spy.""
"My Cl briefer said "Know your number. If you're a 5 and she's a 10 she's a foreign asset""
"Lol they should tell you your number when you get read in. "Seriously dude, 4, watch out""
-/Kapt’n Krunch/- on X - "this is the most realistic “foreign assets on US soil” shit because it DOES happen For us defense contractors we don’t wear our badges outside of work but you get the occasional pencil pusher at a bar right outside the corpo building get approached by the suspiciously loner Chinese woman immediately because shitass wore his bright “LOCKHEED-MARTIN” lanyard and badge"
Havoc Six on X - "When living in DC (and on dating apps at the time), there were a few instances where I truly felt like the individual I was talking to had an ulterior motive. Way too forward, or just asking bizarre questions that a person unfamiliar w/ defense or the military would simply not think to ask about."
-/Kapt’n Krunch/- on X - "And they always gas you up when you come up with generic answers “Woah you’re a Data Analyst Specialist uber hacker McFuckFace that’s so cool you’re so talented and amazing anyways what’s the specs on the Patriot missile tee hee don’t tell me haha”"
Fossil Locator on X - "Before I graduated in geospatial intelligence my LinkedIn was boring. After I graduated and published on Tearline I get about three connection requests from Asian women per week"
William Barrett on X - "You guys have no idea. For about 5 years I worked a counter-surveillance detail on a program designed to protect significant fixed assets and some human assets, domestically. SO MANY Asian Tiger-moms driving circles around critical facilities, or always taking their 'constitutional walk' near certain buildings, always, just by coincidence, with recording devices (this was before widespread smart-phones) It is FAR worse now. People don't understand that even many well-meaning Asian Americans have been turned by coercion. It used to be that having close family or friends still in China was disqualifying for a security clearance, because of the risk of coercive pressure from the CCP Now that's racist to suggest it. Counter-Intel is a fucking mess right now, and not in our favor."
Trying to protect national security is racist
Literally Chad on X - "So, this seems like paranoia, but if you are a college student and your campus has a Confucius center, you can upload pictures of yourself with your Senator and within a week you will have 2 Chinese girls hitting on you. Experienced this, then had a friend do it, it worked."
Thread by @soccertech17 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Picked up a Chinese girl in an Uber in DC one time and she was crying because her bf that worked in a three letter agency broke up with her. They told him if you wanna keep your job, you have to break up with her
When I arrived to pick her up at an apartment complex, she was standing outside talking to her boyfriend and already crying. From picking up many couples before I assumed it was because he was going on vacation or a work trip for a while. She did not want to leave him so she took forever to get in the car. When she finally did, she did not stop crying. And I thought to myself "Do I say something or do I just let her cry by herself this entire 15 minute ride cause it's none of my business? Nah I have to know what happened, she seems genuinely distraught." So I said something like "hey is everything ok?" And she said something like "yeah, I'm fine." So I knew I had to be more direct or I would keep getting short answers "I noticed you were talking to that guy when I picked you up and now you're crying, do you mind if I ask what happened?" at first she gave me the basic "yeah we broke up and that's why I'm so sad." But then I took a risk and said something like " did he cheat on you cause you're crying really hard" Then the floodgates opened and she started giving me all the details that she was a Chinese national and because of her bfs security clearance, his job wouldn't allow him to date her. I don't know how long those two dated, but this girl was head over heels in love with that guy based on her reaction. She was a 6/10 cute short girl, who was very serious about studying and her career, and she did not date to hook up she dated to marry. Anybody who drives Uber a lot knows that it is not uncommon for people to tell you detailed stories about their personal lives and you end up being like a bartender/therapist listening and giving advice "
Meme -Taiwan Freedom - 台灣自由: "Happy Taiwan National Day"
*Big China Shark intimidating Small Taiwan fish*
*Small Taiwan fish with bigger Australia, Japan, South Korea, US and EU fish vs Big China Shark*
This is why China is so keen on rejecting "foreign interference"
Meme - Perma Banned: "Lurkers, I would like to remind you... That GoG blocked me on X/Twitter All because I posted a poster of the Taiwanese Game "Devotion" on one of their posts. Since, they refused to list the game and rejected Devs request to, while lying to people that it was "gamers" who wanted it taken down. It will never not be funny how mask-off CD Projekt was at that very moment, before even all the ESG marketing."
Xi's China Has Become Powerful Before It Is Rich - "Despite the two leaders’ common goal of a powerful China, however, Xi’s strategy for achieving it markedly differs from Deng’s. By extending his reign as China’s paramount leader beyond the two-term limit favored by Deng and making no preparations for a transition of power during his lifetime, Xi has discarded one of Deng’s main ideas for ensuring long-term political stability. Whereas Deng emphasized market reforms, Xi is reasserting centralized control by the party-state. But the most remarkable change has been Xi’s abandonment of Deng’s famous dictum that China should keep a low profile in international affairs in order to build wealth. Instead, Xi has prioritized building military strength and competing with the United States for global power—with the result that China has become powerful before it is rich. Indeed, while China is the world’s second-largest military spender after the United States, its gross national income (GNI) per capita of $13,400 in 2023 was only one-sixth of the corresponding U.S. number of $80,300. On this basis, China is at about the same income level as Mexico and Argentina. The enormous gap between China’s global ambitions and its middling prosperity is about to become a serious challenge for Beijing as it grapples with mounting economic problems. One must ponder if Xi’s China has made a strategic blunder by placing too much emphasis on global superpower competition too early... once competition crosses from the economic realm into the geopolitical, security policy considerations start to influence trade and investment flows. Thus, with China now demonstrating the ambition and capabilities to seriously challenge U.S. interests, the United States and allies are responding by reducing their economic interdependence with China as part of a comprehensive policy of derisking. This reaches far beyond simply imposing tariffs on Chinese exports and includes limiting Chinese investments, home-shoring production from China, and denying China access to high-end and dual-use technologies. Even some emerging-market countries have begun to restrict some of their economic ties to China. Taken together, these policies could restrict China’s path to high-income status and undermine its future position as a superpower as a direct consequence of Xi’s choice for China to exert power before it becomes rich... A recent survey indicates that the mood among Chinese citizens is changing, from optimism about China’s economic prospects to a more pessimistic outlook and waning confidence in Xi’s economic leadership. In addition, the structural imbalances in China’s economic model that former Premier Wen Jiabao identified during his famous speech to the National People’s Congress in March 2007 largely remain unsolved. Primarily, Chinese investment has continuously been above 40 percent of GDP for the last two decades, which is extremely high compared to the G-7 countries, whose average investment-to-GDP figure was 23 percent in 2023. China’s model is extreme even when compared to the earlier experience of Japan and South Korea... In retrospect, could Xi have chosen another path? In short, yes. Of course, China would at some stage have become a superpower and peer competitor of the United States regardless of Xi’s policies, simply due to China’s size, vast resources, and four decades of economic growth. Still, by making different choices, Xi could have alleviated the threat perception associated with China’s rise and given his country more time to build a robust economy. First, Xi could have spent less on weapons platforms that are clearly offensive... Second, Xi could have chosen to pursue a less confrontational foreign policy."
Meme - Aaron Sibarium @aaronsibarium: "Interesting point: providing favorable treatment to Chinese students, regardless of how the university handles anti-Israel protests, is a presumptive violation of civil rights law."
John Doe @fedjudges: "If Harvard is enforcing disciplinary policies unevenly based on a student’s nationality, it is committing yet another violation of Title VI."
Aaron Sibarium @aaronsibarium: "NEW: Harvard punished a Taiwanese student, Cosette Wu, who disrupted a talk by China's ambassador. But it declined to punish a Chinese student who forcibly dragged Wu from the event. After video of the assault went viral, Harvard even gave that student a letter of apology .🧵"
Financial Times on X - "California-based Skydio is facing a supply chain crisis after being hit by Chinese sanctions meant to retaliate against US approval for the sale of drones to Taiwan."
Crémieux on X - "This should be a bigger story. What message does it send when China is blocking American drone manufacturing? What does it tell you when China is even capable of disrupting U.S. Military suppliers?"
Thread by @Chowpinglee on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In 2012, a cyber sleuth rigged up a fake water plant in his basement. Within 48 hours, he exposed how China stole America's $1.5 Trillion fighter jet. How? A thread about how China "borrows" what it can't build:
Meet Kyle Wilhoit. He created a virtual water plant — complete with fake measurements, documentation, and a website claiming to be in Arnold, Missouri. His goal? To see who would try to hack it. The experiment worked too well: Within days, the plant was swarmed by:
• North Korean military hackers
• Russian ransomware gangs
• Various international trolls
But one attack pattern stood out... Someone was methodically stealing equipment documentation and beaming it to servers in China. Following the trail, Kyle discovered something bigger: Unit 61398. A Chinese military hacking division that had been running "Operation Shady RAT" since 2006. Their technique... Simple but devastating. Send targeted emails posing as coworkers, wait for someone to open an attachment, then build "RAT caves": Hidden tunnels into company networks that could stay undetected for years.
In 2007, they hit the jackpot: Lockheed Martin's servers. Inside lay the crown jewel of American military aviation — complete technical plans for the F-35, the most advanced stealth fighter ever built. Price tag? $1.5 trillion. The breach remained undetected until...
In 2015, Edward Snowden's leaks revealed the truth: China didn't need sophisticated cyber weapons or undercover agents. Just a few convincing emails to the right employees. By then, it was too late. In 2012, China unveiled the Shenyang FC-31, a stealth fighter bearing striking similarities to the F-35. The copying was so precise; even the engine intake designs matched. The move accelerated China's military aviation program by 15-20 years. The cost: A few emails. The savings: Hundreds of billions in R&D. Sometimes the biggest heists don't need guns or masks. Today, Unit 61398 has evolved. They're more careful, using non-state actors and better hiding their tracks. But the strategy remains:
Why spend decades developing technology when you can steal it in seconds? And the F-35 theft was just one success story. As one expert put it: "Russia is like hurricanes. China is climate change." And that's a wrap."
Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In the U.S. and even Europe, smarter people are more likely to found businesses and for their businesses to succeed. But in China, smarter people are actually less likely to start businesses🧵
To be sure, in China, scores on the Gaokao are related to company performance. The smarter the founder, the more likely the firm is to expand, to get out of its founding province, to become listed on a stock exchange, and so on. The smartest kids in a school also produce businesses that are more likely to survive for a long time. But, the smartest kids are, in general, heading off to work in the government rather than to start businesses. That's just how China's incentives are set up!
The impact of this on Chinese innovation and growth is likely to be stunning, because China's bureaucrats, ministers, and other officials face stunningly bad incentives. In effect, China is sentencing its most capable to a career in which they'll generally just lie. China's best and brightest are going off to play games, to siphon off funds from the public purse, and, to be sure, to effectively govern, but that talent is wasted because the overhead on what government officials can produce is so low. We haven't yet seen an innovative China, and I doubt we will either."
China's Upside-Down Meritocracy - "Companies in the EU command a mere 5% of global venture funding versus over 50% for American companies. Because the EU has so much human capital, this obviously should not be the case. Europeans can innovate and they can found companies that are enormously profitable. We know that they have innovated and they will innovate in the future, and we know that plenty of them want to found big, successful companies, but European countries and the EU make it incredibly hard for Europeans in Europe to actually do these things at the scale Europeans in America are frequently able to. This is a considerable part of why Europe, despite its human riches, has fallen behind. As in Europe, there are worries that China has developed major problems innovating and building companies... Government isn’t the most productive place to put the capable in any developed nation, and China is no exception. But China not only wastes talent in government, it actively pushes highly-capable civil servants to do bad things. One of the bad things China’s civil servants are encouraged to do is to lie. In Chen et al.’s 2019 forensic examination of China’s national accounts, they described one way China’s government officials lie. Local governments in China report the data required to construct national accounts and the government rewards bureaucrats who succeed at hitting growth and investment targets, while punishing those who come up short. In line with those incentives, bureaucrats misreport, but the National Bureau of Statistics recognizes this and adjusts accordingly. This adjustment? Fine, until about 2008, whereafter the adjustments haven’t been sufficient because local governments have overreported by increasingly large amounts and the adjustments made by the National Bureau of Statistics haven’t kept up. The growth rate in China has therefore been considerably overstated. Others have confirmed the existence of this phenomenon, not just in China, but the world over. Using nightlights, we can see that GDP per person is generally accurately reported across free countries, but it’s highly discrepant in countries that are clearly not free, like China. Looking specifically at China, it stands out as one of the worst misreporters... China’s bureaucrats also act stereotypically, consuming out of the public purse, because they might as well. This corruption literally makes them fat because they use public funds to buy alcohol and luxurious food. When anti-corruption initiatives started in 2013, China’s ministers quite literally got skinnier. One of the more interesting examples of how China’s ministers are incentivized to act badly comes from its patent indigenization campaign... In 2006, China became positively obsessed with innovation because the government wanted desperately for the nation to become the global leader in innovating. The effect of this initiative on patent numbers is readily visible... As a result of ministers’ gaming of the system, eastern patents were substantially less creative than ones from the west... China systematically misallocates the people who should be best at innovating into being bureaucrats who compete in ways that make Chinese innovating less efficient. If I had to bet, if China had somewhat less competent bureaucrats and a more competent market instead, it would produce even more and better innovations.Why is America so seemingly singularly capable of dragging the rest of the world into the future? Because no one else is trying."
Danish Navy Stopped a Chinese Ship Suspected of Damaging Undersea Cables - "The Danish Navy has detained the Chinese bulk carrier Yi Peng 3, which is suspected of damaging telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea. The detention took place in the area of Danish territorial waters, in the Danish Straits at the exit of the Great Belt. The detention of the vessel was carried out by the Danish Navy patrol vessel P525. After a few hours, another vessel HDMS Soeloeven, which is specialised for underwater work, reached both vessels. The detention of the vessel occurred on the evening of 19 November. There is no information on whether there was an inspection of the vessel by the Danish MW’s boarding group. The Chinese vessel was sailing from the Russian port of Ust-Luga... This is not the first time that a Chinese naval vessel has been responsible for damaging strategic infrastructure in the Baltic. In October 2023, the Balticconenctor gas pipeline connecting Estonia and Finland was unsealed. The gas pipeline was damaged by an anchor dropped from the deck of the Chinese container ship Newnew Polar Bear. The vessel was suspected of being the perpetrator of that incident from the outset, but it was not decided to detain it and it escaped from the Baltic Sea without consequences."
Corporate exodus from China is gaining momentum | Fortune - " Based on a survey of 166 CEOs and COOs, Bain & Company found that the share of companies moving operations out of China jumped to 69% in 2024 from 55% in 2022. Where will they go? The top destination was the Indian subcontinent, with 39% of execs saying they were headed there. That was followed by 16% moving to the U.S. or Canada, 11% to Southeast Asia, 10% to Western Europe, and 8% to Latin America, rounding out the top five destinations. Meanwhile, more companies are “reshoring” operations to their home countries or “near-shoring” to neighboring countries. The survey, conducted in July, found that the share of executives whose companies have plans to bring supply chains closer to market soared to 81% this year from 63% in 2022. That also includes the emerging trend of “split-shoring,” where there’s a mix of offshore production and manufacturing close to home. Bain attributed the trend to growing geopolitical uncertainties and rising costs. But for U.S. companies, which made up 39% of the survey, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was another factor in reshoring operations, it added... foreign investment into China has been in a three-year slump that continued last quarter. Despite China’s efforts to revive growth, foreign investment is down by $13 billion for the first nine months of the year."
Report: Tokyo University Used "Tiananmen Square" Keyword to Block Chinese Admissions - "The student-led paper for Tokyo University says a graduate program used an HTML trick to prevent mainland Chinese students from applying. In a bombshell accusation, Todai Shimbum, the student-run paper of Tokyo University, alleges that a graduate admissions site embedded a keyword related to Tiananmen Square for over a year. The goal was apparently to prevent the page from loading in mainland Chinese and thus block Chinese students from attending, the paper alleges. Todai Shimbun reports that the keyword appeared on the website for graduate admissions to its Computational Biology and Medical Sciences Program (メディカル情報生命専攻). The keyword used was 六四天安門 (roku-shi tenanmon), or “June 4th Tiananmen.” June 4th was the date of the student Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989... The keyword is banned by China’s Great Firewall, which filters out any news critical of the ruling regime. That means there’s a strong possibility that the admissions page wouldn’t load for Chinese students"
While Xi reigns, China's economy is unreformable | The Spectator - " While president Xi Jinping has portrayed himself as China’s ‘supreme reformer’, the heir to Deng Xiaoping, his principal achievement since coming to power in 2012 is to put Deng’s reforms sharply into reverse. A property bubble continues to burst with slumping sales and prices, youth unemployment is soaring, and inward investment is plunging amid growing signs of social stress, including a spike in protests. Beijing has reacted by restricting data about the economy and criminalising pessimism. The Ministry of State Security, China’s main spy agency, has declared that gloom about the economy is a foreign smear and that ‘false theories about “China’s deterioration” are being circulated to attack China’s unique socialist system’. The announcement of these stimulus measures coincided with reports that Zhu Hengpeng, a prominent economist at one of China’s top think tanks has disappeared after criticizing Xi’s management of the economy in a private chat group. Zhu, who for the past decade has been deputy director of the Institute of Economics at the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has been placed under investigation, detained and removed after making comments about the flagging economy and referring to Xi’s mortality, according to the Wall Street Journal. An economic model that for four decades relied on cheap exports and massive, wasteful state-led investment in property and infrastructure is no longer sustainable. It produced dizzying rates of growth but has also led to soaring debt and diminishing returns, with China littered with ghost cities, containing 60 to 100 million empty or incomplete homes, while companies accounting for 40 per cent of China’s home sales have defaulted. It is widely agreed that China needs to rebalance its economy and that consumers need to spend more, since private consumption accounts for just 39 per cent of the economy – extremely low by world standards (the figure in the US is 68 per cent). But there is no consumer confidence, with 80 per cent of family wealth tied up in property and no meaningful social safety net. Xi hopes renewable energy technology can replace property as a new motor of growth, and mouth-watering subsidies have been thrown at industries ranging from solar panels to electric vehicles (EVs) and batteries. This has lead to massive over-capacity and vicious price wars. Yet the benign global environment that accompanied China’s earlier export splurges has gone: the world is much more wary. Xi’s longer term goal is to build a world-beating ‘innovation’ economy driven by domestic tech, but the most effective way of achieving this – giving more sway to the market and to private companies – runs counter to everything he stands for. Xi has prioritised security and CCP control, even over the economy. He has hobbled China’s most innovative technology companies, which have faced tightening restrictions. With the CCP increasingly in every lab and boardroom, the country’s start-up scene is on its knees, with one executive recently telling the Financial Times, ‘The whole industry has just died before our eyes … The entrepreneurial spirit is dead’. Last year, China led the world in the number of millionaires leaving the country, according to the Henley Wealth Management Report... The CCP has long cultivated the myth of the technocrat, claiming that its officials have risen through a meritocratic system and are superior to those in the West because they can plan rationally for the long term. That was always a highly tenuous claim and ignores the reality that even the most gifted technocrat can make little real difference in an autocratic system where ultimately the only thing that matters is the opinion of the leader. Indeed, such a system encourages fraud as underlings clammer to tell the emperor what he wants to hear or face the consequences of voicing unwelcome opinions – as the economist Zhu did."