Future Timeline

(Axios) President Biden signed an executive order Wednesday on ensuring the security of American user data in regard to foreign-owned apps such as TikTok, revoking and replacing three Trump-era executive orders to impose a more structured "criteria-based decision framework" for potential bans.

Driving the news: It's the latest in a series of China-related steps Biden is taking ahead of his first overseas trip to Europe, where curtailing Beijing's abuses will be a top agenda item in meetings with G7 and NATO leaders.

I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, find that it is appropriate to elaborate upon measures to address the national emergency with respect to the information and communications technology and services supply chain that was declared in Executive Order 13873 of May 15, 2019 (Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain). Specifically, the increased use in the United States of certain connected software applications designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied by persons owned or controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of, a foreign adversary, which the Secretary of Commerce acting pursuant to Executive Order 13873 has defined to include the People’s Republic of China, among others, continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. The Federal Government should evaluate these threats through rigorous, evidence-based analysis and should address any unacceptable or undue risks consistent with overall national security, foreign policy, and economic objectives, including the preservation and demonstration of America’s core values and fundamental freedoms.

By operating on United States information and communications technology devices, including personal electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, and computers, connected software applications can access and capture vast swaths of information from users, including United States persons’ personal information and proprietary business information. This data collection threatens to provide foreign adversaries with access to that information. Foreign adversary access to large repositories of United States persons’ data also presents a significant risk.

In evaluating the risks of a connected software application, several factors should be considered....potential indicators of risk relating to connected software applications include: ownership, control, or management by persons that support a foreign adversary’s military, intelligence, or proliferation activities; use of the connected software application to conduct surveillance that enables espionage, including through a foreign adversary’s access to sensitive or confidential government or business information, or sensitive personal data; ownership, control, or management of connected software applications by persons subject to coercion or cooption by a foreign adversary; ownership, control, or management of connected software applications by persons involved in malicious cyber activities; a lack of thorough and reliable third-party auditing of connected software applications; the scope and sensitivity of the data collected; the number and sensitivity of the users of the connected software application; and the extent to which identified risks have been or can be addressed by independently verifiable measures.

The ongoing emergency...arises from a variety of factors, including the continuing effort of foreign adversaries to steal or otherwise obtain United States persons’ data. That continuing effort by foreign adversaries constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.

A police sting led by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, in coordination with other law enforcement agencies around the world, has resulted in the arrests of more than 800 people suspected of involvement in criminal activities.

The operation known as Trojan Shield led to police raids in at least 16 nations. More than 32 tons of drugs — including cocaine, cannabis, amphetamines and methamphetamines — were seized, along with 250 firearms, 55 luxury cars and more than $148 million in cash and cryptocurrencies.

...

(Marco Werman): So, the authorities clearly rounded up a lot of bad people in this operation. At the same time, on some kind of gut level, the whole thing sounds kind of, for lack of a better word, creepy, right?

(John-Scott Railton): Well, it does sound creepy. And I think the way that we should think about this, according to the Justice Department, all of the people who use this word "criminals." The message I think to take away, though, is, OK, this shows what happens when law enforcement gains access to a so-called encrypted chat tool, which is, they use it and they will use it profligately. Now, people are going to say, "Well, OK, look, criminals doing criminal business tricked by criminal influencers into using backdoored phones, this doesn't sound like it's a net-bad for society." In fact, this is thousands of tons of cocaine intercepted, criminals put in jail, murder plots disrupted. Whatever your views about encryption, it's hard not to see that as a kind of a win for law enforcement. But the really big question here remains, which is what happens next? Criminals are not going to trust, presumably, the next bespoke encryption app that is pitched to them. They may try to use the same apps that you or I use. Are we going to see an even greater law enforcement push now to gain access to our private communications in order to chase these criminals to where they go next?

Nato leaders meeting for a summit in Brussels have warned of the military threat posed by China, saying its behaviour is a "systemic challenge".

China, they said, was rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, was "opaque" about its military modernisation and was co-operating militarily with Russia.

Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg warned China was "coming closer" to Nato in military and technological terms.

But he stressed the alliance did not want a new Cold War with China.

Nato is a powerful political and military alliance between 30 European and North American countries. It was established after World War Two in response to the threat of communist expansion.

TAIPEI, June 23 (Reuters) - China condemned the United States on Wednesday as the region's greatest security "risk creator" after a U.S. warship again sailed through the sensitive waterway that separates Taiwan from China.

The U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet said the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur conducted a "routine Taiwan Strait transit" on Tuesday in accordance with international law.

"The ship's transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific."

The People's Liberation Army's Eastern Theatre Command said their forces monitored the vessel throughout its passage and warned it.

China appears to be building more than 100 new missile silos in the desert, according to an analysis of satellite imagery first reported by the Washington Post Wednesday.

Analyzing satellite images from Planet Labs, Jeffrey Lewis and Decker Eveleth, researchers at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, identified 119 apparent intercontinental ballistic missile silos under construction near Yumen in Gansu province.

BEIJING - China will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress or subjugate the Chinese people, and any attempt to divide the nation is bound to fail, said President Xi Jinping on Thursday (July 1), as he underpinned the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ruling legitimacy in a 70-minute speech marking its centenary.

Striking a defiant tone to sustained cheers and applause from a 70,000-strong crowd at Tiananmen Square, Mr Xi fanned the flames of nationalism, while emphasising the Communist Party’s role in China’s rise and its mission to achieve “national rejuvenation”.

The party has been on a campaign to reconstruct its history by focusing on its revolutionary spirit, downplaying past mistakes and drumming up its successes in improving the livelihoods of its people and transforming the country into a global power.

“We have never bullied, oppressed or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will,” said the Chinese leader as he stood atop the Tiananmen gate to the Forbidden City.

(Common Dreams) First Donald Trump and now Joe Biden have been playing with fire when it comes to policy with China.

Taiwan has become the most dangerous flashpoint of the emerging new Cold War between the U.S. and China. Neither side wants war, but accidents and miscalculations—like those that triggered the First World War—can happen.

Miscalculations being what they are, we now know with greater detail how in 1958 the Pentagon and President Dwight Eisenhower prepared for the possibility of nuclear attacks against China in response to its shelling of offshore islands, despite the fact that Mao Zedong had no intention of seizing Taiwan. Today, amidst the Pentagon's exaggerated claims that within five to six years Beijing will have the military capacity to reconquer its "renegade province," Daniel Ellsberg, who recently released a long-secret report on the 1958 nuclear crisis, has joined others in warning Taiwan cannot be militarily defended. Ellsberg stresses that, as in 1958, the received wisdom in Washington is that U.S. threats of a first strike nuclear attack remain the greatest disincentive for militarily enforced Chinese reunification.

Despite right-wing and Pentagon exaggeration of an impending Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the reality is that unless Taiwan crosses the red line of declaring de jure independence, China is unlikely to embrace the danger of a devastating—potentially nuclear—great power war. In addition to the immediate, unpredictable, and devastating costs of such a war, Beijing is not about to embrace the massive disruptions to its economy and armed resistance by Taiwanese that would inevitably follow an invasion of Taiwan.

But there is that red line, and Taiwanese support for independence is growing, especially among younger generations. First Donald Trump and now Joe Biden have been playing with fire. At the close of his disastrous reign, Donald Trump exacerbated U.S-Chinese tensions over Taiwan by approving more than $3 billion in new arms sales and sending high level administration officials to the quasi-independent Chinese entity which China sees as a last vestige of its century and a half of colonial humiliations.

China has won the artificial intelligence battle with the United States and is heading towards global dominance because of its technological advances, the Pentagon's former software chief told the Financial Times.

China, the world’s second largest economy, is likely to dominate many of the key emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and genetics within a decade or so, according to Western intelligence assessments.

Nicolas Chaillan, the Pentagon's first chief software officer who resigned in protest against the slow pace of technological transformation in the U.S. military, said the failure to respond was putting the United States at risk.

"We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years. Right now, it’s already a done deal; it is already over in my opinion," he told the newspaper. "Whether it takes a war or not is kind of anecdotal."

China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August that circled the globe before speeding towards its target, demonstrating an advanced space capability that caught US intelligence by surprise.

Five people familiar with the test said the Chinese military launched a rocket that carried a hypersonic glide vehicle which flew through low-orbit space before cruising down towards its target.

The missile missed its target by about two-dozen miles, according to three people briefed on the intelligence. But two said the test showed that China had made astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than US officials realised.

The test has raised new questions about why the US often underestimated China’s military modernisation.

“We have no idea how they did this,” said a fourth person.

WASHINGTON (AP via Courthouse News) — China is expanding its nuclear force much faster than U.S. officials predicted just a year ago, highlighting a broad and accelerating buildup of military muscle designed to enable Beijing to match or surpass U.S. global power by mid-century, according to a Pentagon report released Wednesday.

The number of Chinese nuclear warheads could increase to 700 within six years, the report said, and may top 1,000 by 2030. The report did not say how many weapons China has today, but a year ago the Pentagon said the number was in the “low 200s” and was likely to double by the end of this decade

(Common Dreams) Four congressional Democrats on Thursday urged U.S. President Joe Biden to make reducing nuclear weapons risks a "top priority" in his upcoming virtual summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, emphasizing the important context of the United States' huge arsenal.

The message to Biden from Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) as well as Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and John Garamendi (D-Calif.) came a day after the Pentagon projected that China's cache of deliverable nuclear warheads could increase fivefold to 1,000 by 2030 (see previous post - caltrek).

"The nuclear weapons stockpiles of both the United States and Russia are several times [the] size of China, even with the latest Department of Defense projection," notes the letter from the four Democrats, who co-chair the Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group.

"Nonetheless, China's latest test of a hypersonic glide weapon, its reported construction of 250 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) silos, and its refusal to date to engage in nuclear risk reduction talks," the letter adds, "are a mounting national security concern."

Though Biden and Xi have exchanged verbal blows in recent days over the Chinese leader's decision to skip the ongoing COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, the lawmakers still pointed to coordination on the climate emergency as a potential model.

(Reuters via The Asahi Shimbun) Japan's new foreign minister, Yoshimasa Hayashi, said on Saturday U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured him in a phone call that the U.S. commitment to defending Japan, including southern islets claimed by China, was unwavering.

Japan's ties with China have been plagued by a territorial dispute over a group of Japanese-administered islands in the East China Sea, called the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, as well as the legacy of Japan's past military aggression.

"Secretary Blinken stated that U.S. commitment to defending Japan, including the application of Article 5 of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty for the Senkaku islands, was unwavering," Hayashi told reporters.

The treaty's article 5 says each party recognises an armed attack on territories under Japan's administration would be dangerous to its peace and safety, and it would act to meet the common danger.

Hayashi said he and Blinken shared the view that the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait was important.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden opened his virtual meeting with China’s Xi Jinping on Monday by saying their goal is to ensure competition “does not veer into conflict.”

The two leaders are meeting by video amid mounting tensions in the U.S.-China relationship. Biden has criticized Beijing over human rights abuses against Uyghurs in northwest China, squelching democratic protests in Hong Kong, military aggression against the self-ruled island of Taiwan and more. Xi’s deputies, meanwhile, have lashed out against the Biden White House for interfering in what it sees as internal Chinese matters.

“It seems to be our responsibility as the leaders of China and the United States to ensure that the competition between our countries does not veer into conflict, whether intended or unintended, rather than simple, straightforward competition,” Biden said at the start of the meeting.

Xi told Biden the two sides need to improve communication. The two leaders traveled together when both were vice presidents and know each other well.

(Axios) U.S. markets stand to lose $2 trillion in value if D.C. and Beijing drift further apart.

Why it matters: Political chasms are showing up in new securities regulations that put companies and investors in a bind. The rules are also another reflection of how much relations between the world’s largest economies have cooled, even as they remain economically interdependent.

Driving the news: Ride-hailing giant Didi is preparing to delist from the New York Stock Exchange and to relist in Hong Kong following pressure from Chinese regulators.

• It’s the first — with more than 200 others potentially at risk for delisting — as Chinese and U.S. regulators simultaneously pull and push Chinese companies out of U.S. markets.

The details: SEC rules laid out last week require Chinese companies listed in the U.S. to face audits or risk delisting within three years — an escalation of a nearly two-decade old requirement.

(Axios) Harvard University professor Charles Lieber was convicted Tuesday in connection with lying to U.S. federal authorities about his ties to China…

Our thought bubble, via Axios China reporter Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian: The Lieber verdict comes as the DOJ's China Initiative faces intense scrutiny after a series of charges against ethnic Chinese scientists were dropped.

The big picture: Lieber had pleaded not guilty of all charges related to his affiliation with the Beijing-run Thousand Talents Program and China's Wuhan University of Technology (WUT).

• "Under the terms of Lieber’s three-year Thousand Talents contract, WUT paid Lieber a salary of up to $50,000 per month, living expenses of up to $150,000 and awarded him more than $1.5 million to establish a research lab at WUT," per the DOJ.

• "In 2018 and 2019, Lieber lied to federal authorities about his involvement in the Thousand Talents Plan and his affiliation with WUT."

(Counterpunch) American foreign policy today is in a reactionary death spiral. Never has a new “national security” policy paradigm been more desperately needed, yet there is not even a glimpse of salvation on the horizon—wherever you look you will find policies that speak to the past and offer little hope for a viable global future.

The paradigm that ensnares American diplomacy cemented some 75 years ago with World War II and the Cold War. Those cataclysmic events forged an enduring American national security state characterized by unlimited global intervention, cultivation of an ever-metastasizing “military-industrial complex,” and endless and often racialized enemy-othering followed by highly destructive yet ultimately losing wars replete with devastating blowback on the “homeland.”

Urgently needed is a new foreign policy paradigm of cooperative internationalism centered on combating climate change, population control, control of infectious disease, investment to deal effectively with poverty and global migration, dramatic demilitarization, and renunciation of arms as well as human trafficking. The United States should take the lead in resurrecting and strengthening the United Nations to better enable it to pursue the mission of promoting global security, anti-racism, and universal human rights.

Sound like idealistic liberal poppycock? Well, how do you like what the “realist” foreign policy paradigm has delivered—an endless series of forever wars, an utterly inept response to the existential threat of climate change, rampant destruction of animal and plant species, ongoing militarization of the planet amid poverty, epidemic disease, and little prospect of genuine national, much less international, security.

Still in the grip of the Cold War paradigm, the Biden administration is just as wedded to confrontation with China and Russia as Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and every other administration since 1945. The sheer hubris at the core of American national identity—typically referenced as American exceptionalism—cannot abide the existence other great powers. Yes, China’s takeover of Hong Kong, efforts to establish hegemony in the South China Sea, and egregious human rights record, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang, are disturbing. Over time a viable UN—which realists have long hamstrung and condemned as an outpost idealistic universalism—could put meaningful pressure on China on human rights, but at this time cooperation on climate change is the greater priority.

(New Zealand Herald) New Zealand's condemnation of Hong Kong's Legislative Council elections reflects a "hardening stance" towards China, says a leading defence analyst.

Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta on Tuesday joined her Five Eyes counterparts (Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States) to express "grave concern" over the erosion of democratic elements of the new electoral system.

(Director of 36th Parallel Assessments Paul) Buchanan said New Zealand, whose biggest trading partner is China, was positioned as the most vulnerable of the Five Eyes partners to any potential economic retaliation from China.

"It would be pretty easy to see that if the Chinese are going to retaliate against anybody in the anglophone world, it would more than likely be us because it'll cost them very little, people have to change their dietary habits amongst the Chinese middle class, but will have a dramatic effect on us because a third of our GDP is tied up and bilateral trade with China.

"But the government has clearly signalled that it's seeking to diversify. It has now signalled that on the diplomatic and security front, it sees the Chinese increasingly as a malign actor, and so whatever is coming on the horizon, this government at least appears prepared to weather the storm."

(The Indian Express) President Joe Biden-led Summit for Democracy was held on December 9-10 in a virtual format. As one of the flourishing democracies, Taiwan was seen in attendance, represented by Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister, and Bi-khim Hsiao, Taiwan’s representative to the United States. The summit was driven by the idea that in the face of populism, authoritarianism, and other forms of non-democratic systems looming large, it is critical to keep the “democratic” flock together.

The salience of this summit lies in a deeper understanding on the part of the Biden administration that democracy is not just a form of government, it is a goal in itself, a value that must be cherished, preserved and celebrated. It is this vision of democracy as a norm that has seemingly rattled authoritarian countries. That said, unlike other political systems, democracy is also a way of life — a work in progress that needs sustained attention and careful nurturing to make it more resilient.

Ideas like these are consistently echoed in Taiwan’s policy circles. For instance, during the 2021 Open Parliament Forum held in Taiwan, President Tsai Ing-wen reiterated Taiwan’s commitment to work with liberal democracies for forging an alliance to bolster collective democratic resilience and realise open governance.

These goals were highlighted during this year’s Yushan Forum, where Vice President Lai Ching-te articulated the three principal priorities that would shape Taiwan’s external cooperation in the post-pandemic world — recovering from the pandemic, restoring the economy, and safeguarding democracy. These goals are not only in sync with global priorities but also complement the objectives set forth in Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy (NSP), launched in 2016 to bring Asia closer to Taiwan and vice-versa. The NSP is aimed to be a pivotal tool to engage like-minded democracies in the region.

It is important for liberal democracies to acknowledge that they are facing similar challenges and view Taiwan as an indispensable partner. Deft diplomacy is in order since transnational challenges demand joint efforts by liberal democracies.