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How China turns members of its diaspora into spies

economist.com

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Re: How China turns members of its diaspora into spies

#191

Post by inglor_cz »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #132
inglor_cz wrote: post #76

As a non-Chinese and a non-American, I care less about the usual geopolitical games, including spying, and more about how the Chinese government treats its own citizens. No freedom of speech or conscience, no political freedoms: just work and be an obedient small truckle in the mechanism of the Leviathan. Plus the return of the Cult of Personality, which once even the CCP tried to abandon, but ultimately failed. Thes…

Have you actually ever been to China or spoken with any Chinese people in China? (Not expats, but, say, taxi drivers and businessmen.) Frankly, they're practically as free as Americans and Europeans. In some respects they're more free. There's far less violent crime and property crime, too, so living in the city feels more free in ways which should be obvious -- women can walk around alone at night and not fear for t…

Is Memphis representative of the Western civilization? I have never been to Memphis, but I just returned from Warsaw, Poland. (I wrote my previous comment literally on IC Sobieski.) It is very safe at night, even if you are alone and unarmed. So is Prague, where I lived for 26 years.

The average banker anywhere isn't likely a serf, but the average banker is not an average citizen.

An average citizen in China was, for example, subject to three years of Zero Covid policy gone wild. AFAIK it took some street unrest, very untypical for China, for the government to reconsider.

For all their faults, Western governments didn't stick to three years of nonsense during Covid. The people who would got voted out, because they could be voted out.

Re: How China turns members of its diaspora into spies

#192

Post by tokioyoyo »

popcalc wrote: post #167
tokioyoyo wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but also lumping every rich Chinese into a "part of a mob" is kinda funny. We talk about how we've outsources a buttloads of manufacturing to China, how they're making a killing out of their industrial policies and etc. Obviously there will be millions of people in China who are rich through their businesses. Just like in the states. Dirty money will always exist, and currently exists in every single co…

You cannot as a private person legally move more than about 100K USD out of mainland CN per year. You have to resort to criminal elements. Only they have the network. It's one of those things everyone does but lives in fear of being used against them by an enemy down the line.

I mean, 50K/year limit is pretty trivial to overcome. Those controls exist in a lot of countries, and anyone who has a decent amount of money is aware of ways of getting around it legally.

Re: How China turns members of its diaspora into spies

#193

Post by tokioyoyo »

alephnerd wrote: post #172
tokioyoyo wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but also lumping every rich Chinese into a "part of a mob" is kinda funny. We talk about how we've outsources a buttloads of manufacturing to China, how they're making a killing out of their industrial policies and etc. Obviously there will be millions of people in China who are rich through their businesses. Just like in the states. Dirty money will always exist, and currently exists in every single co…

It's a side effect of the currency controls Xi put in place in 2017-18. Around that time, the Xi admin began limiting the amount of currency outflow from a single household to around $50-100k a year. That isn't enough for international tuition in most cases in the US, or moving abroad. As such, anyone who wanted to move or pay tuition in the US began leveraging shadow banks.

It doesn't apply if you do direct bank to bank transfer to university, no? IIRC $50K limit per person is put on RMB USD conversion, and that's is usually enough for yearly living expenses. I might be wrong, but that's how it was explained to me by my Chinese colleagues back in the day.

Re: How China turns members of its diaspora into spies

#194

Post by djhn »

sandworm101 wrote: post #77
throw10920 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Soon enough anything that is even remotely a security threat [...] will require clearance and in office work. I think this is one of those things that sucks but may be necessary. You need to trust the knowledge workers that make up your economy to not send your research to a hostile nation so they can take advantage of your R&D investments. And you need to know that your critical infrastructure (beyond Internet and…

>> vulnerable to being slowly pwned and then shut down all at once in a catastrophic event A few years ago everyone thought that would happen to Ukraine, that Russian hackers would shut down everything from water delivery to weapon systems. The hackers almost certainly tried, yet the lights remained on. Imho we overestimate the power of "nation-state hackers" and underestimate the resilience of our systems.

Wasn’t the initial first day blitz overwhelming many border-adjacent units and military bases was largely due to pwned 4g/5g infra and having those troops accurate location?

Re: How China turns members of its diaspora into spies

#195

Post by qwezxcrty »

demarq wrote: post #187
qwezxcrty wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find the template of this report online by just Googling "出国留学人员学习/研修情况报告", it has English translation and appears to have a "Professor's Evaluation" section to be filled and signed by the foreign advisor. There might be something else but this looks like a progress evaluation form and is hardly concerning.

> There might be something else but this looks like a progress evaluation form and is hardly concerning. There is indeed something else > An online announcement from January 2019 by the Chinese consulate in Belfast even suggests recipients should report important papers published, patents obtained, and inventions made by those they work with at British universities. I was unable to load the url for this, but it's not…

If you presume innocence, this requirement can also be interpreted in a harmless way as the funder asking the student to report his/her achievement for an evaluation of the progress.

The level of detail and the scope would matter a lot. It's very different whether the student is required to show that he coauthored 2x Science, 1x Nature Photonics and have a patent about something pending, or he need to furnish detailed information about an on-going/unpublished work.

I would also expect these dodgy reporting to be done in a more delicate way if they do exist then what's shown on this PDF. Citing the report in my first reply suggests that PDF is simply not a good source.

Re: How China turns members of its diaspora into spies

#196

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

inglor_cz wrote: post #191
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually ever been to China or spoken with any Chinese people in China? (Not expats, but, say, taxi drivers and businessmen.) Frankly, they're practically as free as Americans and Europeans. In some respects they're more free. There's far less violent crime and property crime, too, so living in the city feels more free in ways which should be obvious -- women can walk around alone at night and not fear for t…

Is Memphis representative of the Western civilization? I have never been to Memphis, but I just returned from Warsaw, Poland. (I wrote my previous comment literally on IC Sobieski.) It is very safe at night, even if you are alone and unarmed. So is Prague, where I lived for 26 years. The average banker anywhere isn't likely a serf, but the average banker is not an average citizen. An average citizen in China was, for…

> The average banker anywhere isn't likely a serf, but the average banker is not an average citizen.

A banker is like any other professional. But we can go one step down: Is the average taxi driver more of a "disposable serf" in China than the West?

And consider your use of the word "disposable." If you travel to China and defraud Chinese citizens, they will throw the book at you. If you travel to China and murder a Chinese citizen, they will execute you, and quickly. I've personally been involved in a civil (commercial) legal case in China, and I walked away extremely impressed with the speed, low cost, and the fairness of their legal system, whereas the system in the West seemed almost completely broken to me. (That civil case in China cost less than $10k, start to finish, including trial. In US Federal Court, $300k+ before we even got to trial, thanks in large part to "discovery" and pretrial motions which were -- accurately -- deemed unnecessary in China. Ran out of money before trial and had to settle, lol.) Chinese people enjoy extremely robust legal protections. Their own government evidently doesn't consider them disposable; quite the contrary, it signals that they're not to be trifled with.

If you travel to Finland and murder a Finn, you'll probably get a statistically average sentence of 12 years.

In which country is the innocent life of its citizens more "disposable"? Are China's "disposable serfs" not afforded obviously better protection from evil and harm?

Look, my point is that the Chinese do an awful lot right. In the administration of law, commerce, industry, etc., we should look at them and realize that we in the West have a lot that we can still learn. It's not all bad.

As for Covid, that's a very particular matter and the US/EU/UK/Canada/Australia didn't exactly cover themselves in glory.

Re: How China turns members of its diaspora into spies

#197

Post by duxup »

tiahura wrote: post #3

There should be a substantial CIA effort to recruit at every US university with more than 2 Chinese nationals. Student loans forgiven and green cards for the family.

I suspect to some extent those students allowed to go are already filtered by China, and they have family back home.

Not that any given country wouldn't still try, but I think it would be difficult and it's not clear what you'd get out of it.

Re: How China turns members of its diaspora into spies

#198

Post by alephnerd »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #193
alephnerd wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a side effect of the currency controls Xi put in place in 2017-18. Around that time, the Xi admin began limiting the amount of currency outflow from a single household to around $50-100k a year. That isn't enough for international tuition in most cases in the US, or moving abroad. As such, anyone who wanted to move or pay tuition in the US began leveraging shadow banks.

It doesn't apply if you do direct bank to bank transfer to university, no? IIRC $50K limit per person is put on RMB USD conversion, and that's is usually enough for yearly living expenses. I might be wrong, but that's how it was explained to me by my Chinese colleagues back in the day.

From what I heard from friends, a lot of programs didn't support bank-to-bank transfers with Chinese banks, and a lot of family money was grey (not necessarily due to corruption, but due to the nature of business in China, which changed rapidly in just 30 years).

There were much less invasive ways to nudge businesses to convert black/grey money into white money but the method the Xi admin began enforcing in the 17-18 period also helped with solidifying control.

Kinda sad tbh because a lot of these reforms are needed, but they became politicized.

Re: How China turns members of its diaspora into spies

#199

Post by duxup »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #132
inglor_cz wrote: post #76

As a non-Chinese and a non-American, I care less about the usual geopolitical games, including spying, and more about how the Chinese government treats its own citizens. No freedom of speech or conscience, no political freedoms: just work and be an obedient small truckle in the mechanism of the Leviathan. Plus the return of the Cult of Personality, which once even the CCP tried to abandon, but ultimately failed. Thes…

Have you actually ever been to China or spoken with any Chinese people in China? (Not expats, but, say, taxi drivers and businessmen.) Frankly, they're practically as free as Americans and Europeans. In some respects they're more free. There's far less violent crime and property crime, too, so living in the city feels more free in ways which should be obvious -- women can walk around alone at night and not fear for t…

The crime aspect is always an interesting talking point. I see it a lot with folks saying things like "when I visited the US i had to wear my backpack backwards to avoid thieves". (a line like that got reposed several times on HN and reddit for a while, it was almost a meme at one point).

Living in the US, I never do that ... not worried about thieves. Somehow not robbed.

People see some articles or movies and they just assume every negative thing is an enormous / constant threat I think.

Re: How China turns members of its diaspora into spies

#200

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #128
RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It’s very different than Japan. Japan is more like the US, capitalist where some companies are cozy with the government. China is a communist state, where the state or affiliated entity is an owner or partner in significant enterprises. Many industrial commodities have national security interests. Chinese intelligence entities have embedded engineers in a variety of sectors… a few years ago a guy got caught embedding…

[flagged]
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