TrendMI5 warns of growing Chinese cyberspace spy threat
Director-general of MI5 sends letter to 300 British companies warning them that their computer systems are under sustained attack from Chinese intelligence services; China engages in a systemic campaign to steal Western industrial secrets — and provide information to Chinese companies about Western companies with which these Chinese companies are doing business
China’s emergence as a major global power is helped by many attributes of that country — large pool of talented people, a culture which emphasizes education, attainment, and delayed gratification in favor of investment in the future, and a good education system which produces many scientists and engineers. China has another advantage over most Western countries: A certain ruthlessness. Here is one expression of this ruthlessness: China is one of the world’s leaders in executions (people typically complain about the United States in this regard, but the number of people executed in the United States every year pales relative to the number of people executed in China, even allowing for the disparity in the size of the relative populations of the two countries). People condemned to death in China have doctors examine the health and viability of their organs, and they are placed on death row and wait until there is patient who needs, say, a kidney or a lung. The Chinese authorities, working from a detailed list of condemned men, pick the most appropriate donor and execute him — often flying him for execution in a prison near the hospital of the waiting patient — then harvest his organs. Now, this is ruthlessness.
In the more benign realm of business, this ruthlessness finds expression in other ways. As business people doing business in China will tell you, no other business culture is so geared toward stealing industrial secrets of rivals as the Chinese business culture. This is typically done by the Chinese government coercing non-Chinese companies to license their technologies to Chinese companies as the price of being allowed to do business in China. As we have written during the past three weeks, the Chinese government has decided that this was not enough to bolster the performance of Chinese companies, so it has enlisted the considerable resources of the Chinese intellignece services to launch a wide-ranging, methodical campaign to steal industrial secrets and intellectual property of Western companies and deliver them to Chinese companies. The Chinese intelligence community is helping Chinese companies in yet another way: If a European company is considering buying a Chinese company or a stake in such a company, the Chinese intelligence agencies use all means at their disposal to find out, for example, what price the European company would be willing to pay for the Chinese company and how high it would be willing to go.
