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Highlights
id764469668
The Times tells us that the “balloon crisis…reflects a brazen new aggressiveness by Beijing in gathering intelligence on the United States as well as Washington’s growing capabilities to collect its own information on China.” Note that when China spies on us, it’s “brazen aggressiveness.” But we don’t have brazen aggressiveness. We just have “growing capabilities” to collect information.
✏️ More New York Times funny business. One country’s brazen actions is the US’s growing capability. Propaganda and agenda as always. Objective truth? Not so much. 🔗 View Highlight
id764470172
Part of the acceleration of Chinese paranoia and triumphalism, in 2010—this only came to light recently, in the last few years—the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] discovered that the CIA had extremely high-level human intelligence plants in the party apparatus, including in security and intelligence ministries. The PLA [People’s Liberation Army] saw that it was an extreme threat to regime security, and that it was the corruption of their political system itself that made them vulnerable to CIA infiltration. Xi Jinping came to power on the heels of this revelation and decided the whole regime is at stake, and that they have to get less corrupt and purge America out of their system. America is a threat—that’s the Chinese view at that point. You see this huge acceleration in Chinese assertiveness 2010-2012. Nobody in American foreign policy talks about the fact that China stumbled on to the CIA having infiltrated them at the highest levels. Talk about surveillance, we’re worried about a balloon! We’re not worried about China having our Vice President, I don’t think. And so, that’s a wild discrepancy in the spy versus spy stuff. It’s the price of rivalry, and we’re doing it times a thousand. But if they send a balloon, it’s a problem.
✏️ The hypocrisy and power dynamics behind US vs China espionage 🔗 View Highlight