China's Stealth War on the U.S.

Los Angeles Times ^ | July 20, 2005 | Max Boot

[montana233]

China's Stealth War on the U.S.

July 20, 2005 Los Angeles Times

Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu of the Chinese People's Liberation Army caused quite a stir last week when he threatened to nuke "hundreds" of American cities if the U.S. dared to interfere with a Chinese attempt to conquer Taiwan.

In 1998, an official People's Liberation Army publishing house brought out a treatise called "Unrestricted Warfare," written by two senior army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is available in English translation, is well known to the U.S. national security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the general public.

Their different approaches include financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), psychological and media warfare (manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will), international law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes or other natural disasters).

Cols. Qiao and Wang write approvingly of Al Qaeda, Colombian drug lords and computer hackers who operate outside the "bandwidths understood by the American military." They envision a scenario in which a "network attack against the enemy" -- clearly a red, white and blue enemy -- would be carried out "so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network and mass media network are completely paralyzed," leading to "social panic, street riots and a political crisis." Only then would conventional military force be deployed "until the enemy is forced to sign a dishonorable peace treaty."

[Travis McGee]

ChiPing

[M203M4]

Incorrect/missing article source.

The link to LATIMES only takes you to LATIMES homepage.

[M203M4]

Found a source:
http://www3.cfr.org/pub8259/max_boot/chinas_stealth_war_on_the_us.php

[beethovenfan]

If they nuke us, who will buy their cheap crap?

[Irish_Thatcherite]

China are following Iran's lead.

[Blue_Ridge_Mtn_Geek]

"If they nuke us, who will buy their cheap crap?"



Well, if Chinese enterprises paid their manufacturing workers a decent wage, then the Chinese domestic work force could buy it, or at least a whole lot more of it than is now consumed domestically.

Instead, the local Chinese work force is fed crumbs, and their work product is exported to the USA, where the Chinese government's financial agents, by funding the US Federal debt and buying large volumes of securitized US mortages, effectively loans money to Americans to buy their exported stuff, and eliminate many other Americans' decent paying jobs by driving US manufacturing enterprises into the ground, and then buying up the equipment at fire sale prices and shipping it abroad.

Very strange, though as a form of warfare it does make an odd kind of sense: help your enemy towards bankruptcy while encouraging them to dismantle their domestic manufacturing capacity, at which point they become easy pickings as they are both financially crushed by debt and incapable of keeping their military forces in the field with functional equipment and adequate supplies.


I don't think the Chinese will need to nuke us If we keep borrowing from them to buy their cheap stuff, and plowing our own productive capacity under in the process, generally continuing to behave like economic fools, then the PRC and its agents will eventually own the place, lock, stock, and barrel. As the new owners, they would have little incentive to destroy it, would they?

[defenderSD]

Good article. I get about 15 attempted hacker attacks per hour on my PC that are stopped by the McAfee Personal Firewall. When I trace these attacks back to their source, approximately 35% of the attacks originate in China. I think China is probing our internet infrastructure and looking for weak points, including servers and PC's that don't have proper security.

[Brilliant]

The Clinton Legacy.

[diamond6]

How are you able to trace them?

[defenderSD]

McAfee SecurityCenter has a personal firewall with a trace command that records the location of the source computer on the internet and displays a map with the most probable route taken from the source computer to my computer. It also displays the network information for the source computer and usually the registrant of the source computer. I think it records the IP address of the source computer and then works back through the internet to that IP address and shows you the most probable route. Here's the source of an attempted attack from this afternoon at 1:02 PM PST:

descr: CHINA RAILWAY TELECOMMUNICATIONS CENTER
descr: 22F Yuetan Mansion, Xicheng District, Beijing, P.R.China

In this case, the source computer attempted an unsolicited connection to UDP port 1027 on my computer. The Chinese are probing the internet very actively these days.

[TigersEye]

BTRL

[Doe Eyes]

The Clinton Legacy.

What an upside down world this would be, if we expected Republicans would change things.

[TigersEye]

During the situation where China allowed our crippled surveillance plane to land and took the crew hostage my Zone Alarm pings went way up. This was back when you could trace pings to their source with the free version of ZA. I was posting some rather harsh rhetoric about China FWIW.

Normally I got infrequent pings from internet research companies and universities and other rather benign stateside sources. But during this hostage episode I was getting a ping every few minutes and they all traced back to Taiwan, China or other SE Asian sites. Interesting.

[diamond6]

That is frightening.

[theFIRMbss]

>They envision a scenario in which a "network attack against the enemy" -- clearly a red, white and blue enemy -- would be carried out

Looks like the Chinese
can get Amazon to ship
Clancy books to them!

[razoroccam]

"The Clinton Legacy"

Only partly correct.

Nixon and Clinton legacy.

[dr_who_2]

They envision a scenario in which a "network attack against the enemy" -- clearly a red, white and blue enemy -- would be carried out "so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network and mass media network are completely paralyzed," leading to "social panic, street riots and a political crisis." Only then would conventional military force be deployed "until the enemy is forced to sign a dishonorable peace treaty."

At least these people are less grounded in reality than the military officers that Hitler relied upon in the beginning of WWII. Of course, Japan's government in the 30's was more or less taken over by these sorts of meglomaniacs, and we all know what the result was. I hope the WH and the pentagon is showing fewer of its cards than these news stories allude to, because there may soon come a time when these little s**ts in N.K. and the P.R.C. try to make good on their bluster beyond the occasional acts of piracy or espionage.

BTW, There was a good article out there suggesting all these people out there who were harping on about "information warfare" were full of it. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Links?

[defenderSD]

I'm not too concerned about it...yet. China probably has a million people working on intelligence gathering just inside their country and they have to keep them all busy. I'm sure these attempted hacker attacks are automated and run by computer programs, otherwise they would never hit my PC here in Phoenix, AZ so frequently. They're probably just sweeping throught he whole internet with computer software and researching the "security topography", if you will.

But if everybody uses good security software and firewalls then there isn't much China can do to us other than write new viruses to attack compupters throughout the world. But I would think it's difficult to write a virus that specifically attacks just the US or just the US and NATO. Viruses go everywhere now and would even return and attack computers in China.