Commentary

We have been fools. We will continue to be fooled until our politicians fight communist China’s unrestricted cyber warfare against the United States with more than hot air. The latest evidence of such warfare is a newly published Microsoft report documenting the breathtaking scope of this particular form of communist Chinese aggression.

According to that May 2023 report, the Chinese regime is aggressively probing our military infrastructure in strategic locations like Guam as it prepares to take Taiwan by military force. The irony, of course, is that Microsoft is helping the Chinese military develop artificial intelligence to create weapons of unimaginable destruction.

Here’s the bigger backstory behind the regime’s unrestricted cyber warfare: China’s landmass is roughly the same size as the United States. Yet, it has a population nearly five times larger. Noting Stalin’s admonition that “quantity has a quality of its own,” China can overwhelm the United States militarily and economically if it is able to replicate our technologies and defense systems by stealing them.

This is exactly what communist China is quite successfully doing through its relentless and unrestricted cyber warfare. Every day, drawing from its vast population, China deploys equally vast cadres of cyber hackers to probe every conceivable institution of the American economy, society, and government.

The cyber game afoot with American businesses begins with the theft of intellectual property. Chinese state-owned enterprises can thereby beat American rivals with the added advantage of mercantilist tools like export subsidies and currency manipulation.

Yet the goal of business hacking is often to gain a competitive advantage over an international rival by acquiring confidential internal documents. Such expropriated proprietary information allows a Chinese competitor to underbid or undermine a U.S. competitor.

When communist China hacks our personal accounts, it seeks to build profiles on us, particularly those who are critics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Of course, criminal elements within the state-sponsored wing of China’s hacking brigades are also busy stealing our money or identities, creating untold havoc in American lives.

Within academia, when communist China hacks Harvard or MIT, or the University of California, it is attempting to steal cutting-edge research—the figurative corn seed of our technical innovation. When Chinese bandits hack the computers of farm-state universities in Iowa or Kansas, they are literally trying to steal our corn seed.

Through its cyber hacks, communist China has also acquired the blueprints of America’s most sophisticated weapons systems—thereby significantly narrowing the technology gap between our militaries. For example, China’s fifth-generation jet fighters are accurate knockoffs of America’s most advanced planes, the F-22 and F-35. With its manufacturing might, China can build far more of these fifth-generation fighters than American taxpayers can afford—giving its military both Stalinesque quantity and American quality.

Stealing our weapons systems is but one goal of Chinese hackers. They seek to embed Trojan viruses throughout our military software. In a war scenario, they will drop our planes and satellites from the sky and misdirect the navigation systems of our missiles and ships.

It is long past time for the U.S. government to draw a very clear line in the sand with the communist Chinese.

It is time for Congress to declare communist Chinese cyber hacks as acts of war punishable by appropriately measured responses in kind.

It is time for the FBI to treat China’s cyber hackers not as criminals but enemy combatants. While the J6 prisoners of war are stripped of their Constitutional rights, China’s hackers simply game our justice system and thereby clog up our courts.

It is time for Congressman Mike Gallagher’s House Select Committee on communist China to demand the release of all so-called top secret documents that will inform the American people of the real depth of the Chinese hacker threats. And if Gallagher et al. need any further evidence of the seriousness of the Chinese cyber warfare threat, they can read my 2015 “Crouching Tiger” book or, better yet, Frank Gaffney’s “The Indictment.”

Follow Peter Navarro at www.peternavarro.substack.com, where this article originally appeared.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.