CIA: China is Waging a 'Quiet Kind of Cold War' Against US

[خره مينه لګته وي]

Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, left, gestures to Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, after reviewing the Guard of Honour at the Presidential Palace in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, on July 20. (AP Photo/Malak Harb)


ASPEN, Colo. -- China is waging a "quiet kind of cold war" against the United States, using all its resources to try to replace America as the leading power in the world, a top CIA expert on Asia said Friday.

Beijing doesn't want to go to war, he said, but the current communist government, under President Xi Jingping, is subtly working on multiple fronts to undermine the U.S. in ways that are different than the more well-publicized activities being employed by Russia.


"I would argue ... that what they're waging against us is fundamentally a cold war -- a cold war not like we saw during THE Cold War (between the U.S. and the Soviet Union) but a cold war by definition," Michael Collins, deputy assistant director of the CIA's East Asia mission center, said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.

Rising U.S.-China tension goes beyond the trade dispute playing out in a tariff tit-for-tat between the two nations.

There is concern over China's pervasive efforts to steal business secrets and details about high-tech research being conducted in the U.S. The Chinese military is expanding and being modernized and the U.S., as well as other nations, have complained about China's construction of military outposts on islands in the South China Sea.

"I would argue that it's the Crimea of the East," Collins said, referring to Russia's brash annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, which was condemned throughout the West.

Collins' comments track warnings about China's rising influence issued by others who spoke earlier this week at the security conference. The alarm bells come at a time when Washington needs China's help in ending its nuclear standoff with North Korea.

On Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said China, from a counterintelligence perspective, represents the broadest and most significant threat America faces. He said the FBI has economic espionage investigations in all 50 states that can be traced back to China.

"The volume of it. The pervasiveness of it. The significance of it is something that I think this country cannot underestimate," Wray said.

National Intelligence Director Dan Coats also warned of rising Chinese aggression. In particular, he said, the U.S. must stand strong against China's effort to steal business secrets and academic research.

Susan Thornton, acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said increasing the public's awareness about the activities of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese students or groups at U.S. universities could be one way to help mitigate potential damage.

"China is not just a footnote to what we're dealing with with Russia," Thornton said.

Marcel Lettre, former undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said China has the second-largest defense budget in the world, the largest standing army of ground forces, the third-largest air force and a navy of 300 ships and more than 60 submarines.

"All of this is in the process of being modernized and upgraded," said Lettre, who sat on a panel with Collins and Thornton.

He said China also is pursuing advances in cyber, artificial intelligence, engineering and technology, counter-space, anti-satellite capabilities and hypersonic glide weapons. Army Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told a congressional committee earlier this year that China is developing long-range cruise missiles -- some capable of reaching supersonic speeds.

"The Pentagon has noted that the Chinese have already pursued a test program that has had 20 times more tests than the U.S. has," Lettre said.

Franklin Miller, former senior director for defense policy and arms control at the National Security Council, said China's weapons developments are emphasizing the need to have a dialogue with Beijing.

"We need to try to engage," Miller said. "My expectations for successful engagement are medium-low, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try."



https://www.military.com

 

[خره مينه لګته وي]

CIA official: China wants to replace US as world superpower

RELATED: Xi Jinping heads to Africa to clinch China's hold over the continent

"At the end of the day they want every country around the world, when it's deciding its interests on policy issues, to first and foremost side with China and not the United States, because the Chinese are increasingly defining a conflict with the United States and what we stand behind as a systems conflict."

By looking at the writings of Xi, whose "thought" or world view was recently enshrined in China's constitution, it's clear, Collins says, that the threat China presents is the greatest global challenge the US currently faces.

"It sets up a competition with us and what we stand behind far more significantly by any extreme than what the Russians could put forward," Collins said.

Collins' comments on the third day of the forum echoed those of other senior US officials there, including FBI Director Christopher Wray and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, who both pointed to China as the most significant danger for the US today.

"I think China, from a counterintelligence perspective, in many ways represents the broadest, most challenging, most significant threat we face as a country," Wray had told his audience on Wednesday.

"And I say that because for them it is a whole of state effort. It is economic espionage as well as traditional espionage; it is nontraditional collectors as well as traditional intelligence operatives; it's human sources as well as cyber means."

Coats said Thursday that the US needed to decide if China was a "true adversary or a legitimate competitor." He criticized Chinese state efforts to steal business secrets and academic research. "I think that's where we begin to draw the line," he said.
China's growing defense posture

Marcel Lettre, a former undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said that influence operations -- in which the ruling Communist Party uses political, financial and military strategies to establish and solidify its presence in countries in its region and beyond -- were only one tool China deploys as part of a larger effort to expand and grow.

"It's a country that has the second largest global defense budget, the largest standing army of ground forces, the third largest air force in the world, a navy of 300 ships -- including more than 60 subs -- all of this is in the process of being modernized and upgraded," he said, adding that those upgrades were "oriented around the innovations we've been taking on the US side for the last decade or two."

China unveiled its first homegrown carrier, a 50,000-ton ship, in May. The carrier's maiden sea trial followed a speech by Xi on April 12 in which he announced plans to build a "world-class" navy under the banner of the Chinese Communist Party. While the new carrier will enhance China's military power in the region, experts said it was still outdated and lagged far behind the standard of American aircraft carriers.


At the same time, China has established ports along the Indian Ocean that extend to Djibouti, where last year it dispatched two warships carrying an undisclosed number of troops to its first overseas military base.

Susan Thornton, who serves as the acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, pointed to the impasse in the South China Sea as an area where the US presence might press Beijing to negotiate with other nations in the region that claim territory in the disputed waters.

In recent years, the Chinese government has built a number of artificial islands in the South China Sea with military installations, including radar facilities and airstrips. Beijing asserts that much of the South China Sea is its sovereign territory, claims most of the internationally community view as spurious.

"Will China be bound by rules and will it negotiate with ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) multilateral partners or will it try to pick off one by one each individual and get more leverage that way?" she asked.

Thornton, who was initially President Donald Trump's nominee for the assistant secretary position, resigned in June when she was notified she was no longer his choice. She told Friday's audience that her service would conclude at the end of the panel discussion.

'Our soft power is ... more powerful than their soft power'

Part of Trump's new national security strategy announced in December includes moves to combat China on the technological and cyber fronts, but also to work with partners around the world to contest Chinese practices and persuade Beijing to agree to international conventions and standards.

While much of the world's attention has been focused on crises including the terror attacks of 9/11, the Chinese have maintained a singular focus for years.

"They are learning to be more coercive, learning to be more aspirational, learning to be more assertive by what they're getting away with," said the CIA's Collins. "9/11 is one example where the international community had to shift its attention to something else and the Chinese drove through that decade to especially expand where they are, so it's a long way of saying that there are things that happened in the international system, things that ... helped to explain to some degree the speed and expanse of where the Chinese have gotten to where they are today."

Both Thornton and Collins pointed to events over the past decade to partly explain China's rapid expansion and growth.

"The Chinese are very good at taking advantage of opportunities, which they may have been able to do in the recent past with our focus on the Middle East for the first part of the 2000s and following that the financial crisis," Thornton said. "We have to get back to doing what we do well. Our soft power is incredibly more powerful than their soft power. They don't really have that same kind of attractiveness that the US system has, and I think that's because our partners around the world know we stand by them and know we won't impose our will on them, that we'll work together with them."

Collins said that even China's partners would not want to subscribe to the country's way of life.

"I too am optimistic that in the battle for norms and rules and standards of behavior, that the liberal national order is stronger than the repressive standards that the Chinese promulgate," he said. "I'm confident others won't want to subscribe to that."


-----------------------------------------------------------

CNN's Ben Westcott, Steven Jiang and Joshua Berlinger contributed to this report.

https://edition.cnn.com/