Defections reveal extent of China's espionage operations

"China is the biggest [espionage] threat to the US today," David Szady, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) head of counterintelligence, told The Wall Street Journal on 10 August. It is a concern fuelled by a number of Chinese defectors in recent months who claim Beijing is engaged in large-scale intelligence-gathering operations overseas.

Chen Yonglin, the first secretary of the Chinese Consulate General in Sydney, Australia, defected on 4 June. Chen told Australian authorities that Beijing had been overseeing a network of more than 1,000 spies and informers in Australia. These claims were mirrored in Canada in July when Han Guansheng, a former Public Security Bureau official in Shenyang who defected to Canada in 2001, stated publicly that Beijing manages informants in Canada's Chinese community and gathers intelligence on key economic areas.

A second defector in Australia, believed to be a low-level intelligence official named Hao Fengjing, who came over to the Australians shortly after Chen, confirmed that China has more spies in Canada than in any other country. The Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) will not comment on individual nations' intelligence activities, but CSIS officials told JIR: "Foreign countries who send students and visiting scientists often use them to obtain proprietary or classified information in Canada."

Europe is also said to be subject to China's scrutiny. The UK's Daily Telegraph reported in July that a Chinese intelligence defector in Belgium who had worked in European universities and companies for more than a decade, has given the Belgian security service (Sûreté de l'Etat) detailed information on hundreds of Chinese spies working at various levels of European industry.

I thought women made the move into the workplace during WWII, when all the men were off at war.

They did, but after the war, most of them did not stay in the workplace. Although more than many here might think did stay in the workplace. Many worked part time. I can't think of a woman of that generation that I know that never worked after her kids started coming. Except my mother in law. But then she had five of them. And of course by the time the fifth one was out of school, they no longer needed the extra money. Before the first one, my wife, she did work as a secretary though.

But, my mother, my Aunts, (although two were farmers wives, which is work believe me), the mothers of my friends, and the women friends of my parents, all worked at least part time. Some, like the farmers, worked in the family business, but many more worked in factories (like my mother) and stores. My aunt worked in a bar, which was also the family business come to think of it, and later was a cook at a frat house. Anther aunt, who had worked in a factory during the war, making fuses, later worked in an ammunition depot making shells and aerial bombs, by which I mean pouring the molten explosive filler into the casings. :) My wife's aunt was also a "Rosie the Riveter", although she didn't rivet she did work on ships in a west coast shipyard while her husband was in the Navy.

The reference is to lowered fertility rates after the 1950's as the Great Generation ended their progeneration, and the small Silent Generation (mostly "war babies" and "Depression babies") took over, providing a much-reduced production of infants whom we now call the "X Generation", who were born from about 1965 to 1980.

This should have been the time of the greatest proliferation of the children of the Baby Boom, but instead they largely deferred childbearing until many of them were approaching their later and less fertile (and safe) years. Result: the "baby echo" was very reduced and didn't begin to reflect what the Boomers should have been capable of producing if they'd had kids at the same rate their parents (families in the '40's and '50's usually had 3-4 kids each).

Instead, because the women wanted to work, or because they were picky about mates because they were career/status-oriented, Boomer women married at a lower rate than their mothers' generation had, married much later, and had a much higher divorce rate ("I am woman, hear me roar", et cetera). Result: family formation sucked, families sucked, and everything has generally gone to hell in a basket because of the liberal influence, especially the "women's movement" influence.

Bereft of the ravings of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin and Naomi Wolf and the rest of them, Boomer women would probably have been less family-oriented anyway because of the growing realization that women can do engineering, too, and because business would have continued to try to use women's labor as a wage-undermining alternative, gradually bringing more of them into the workforce. Competition for women's time from work has been the real slayer of family life and values IMHO, because the father/husband was already absent much of the time (in the 1920's, industrial workers, driven like slaves, pulled 12-hour shifts at hard labor in hazardous conditions and were very often barely able to function after a day spent in an open-hearth furnace, e.g.), and now the business community wanted the women to come to work, too. Leaving the kids at home (latchkey kids) to be babysat by television (values of the forum, materialistic and selfish).

With the dearth of children, business' appetite for foreign immigrant labor has gone up, both as a way to undercut wages and as a way to impose labor peace on the employer's terms in the workplace. As a result, blue-collar wages have stagnated in real, deflated terms in communities with a lot of immigrant labor. Night janitorial staff, in 1990, made $12/hr in New York, $10/hr in Pittsburgh, and $3.30/hr in Houston. Capiche?

Now it's spreading, and Andy Grove of Intel was just on Charlie Rose this week saying that he thinks U.S. workers' earning power is on the edge of an abyss, as management closes in on their goal of enforcing third-world wages (and first-world prices) on the country.

What happened in 1968?

The first rising wave of the "Baby Boom" girls started reaching age 20 and decided they wanted to put off family formation and/or children so they could find more "meaning in life" through work or study.

By the way, as a demographic factoid......in their political demographic surveys (1999 and again in 2003/4), the Pew Foundation has identified a particular political demographic that is the anchor of the DemonRat Party. That anchor is a very large group of educated women, usually with MA/MS degrees and sometimes higher (JD, MD, PhD, LLD), who are politically very literate, very activist, very liberal, ...... and very often childless, or with only one child at home, and very often single or divorced.

Of all the groups Pew mapped, this group is the most highly educated, the most politically vocal and active, and the most liberal.

This demographic did not exist in 1964. Its existence is almost wholly the creation of Fabian socialism, the New Left and the "women's movement", and the Democratic Party, which has exploited their energy and ability endlessly since the 1970's.

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