The press continues to pretend obliviousness to what’s been going on between the People’s Republic of China and the United States for many years. The headline and second sentence of a recent Wall Street Journal article lays out the sham ignorance quite clearly.
Breakdown in US-China Relations Raises Specter of New Cold War
…
Today, with economic relations between the two careening off the rails, China and the US are headed toward what could be a Cold War….
The fact is the PRC has been inflicting a cold war on us for 15 or more years, and we’re only just starting to respond to it. For instance,
• The PRC has coerced intellectual property and proprietary technology transfers to PRC businesses and companies as a condition of doing business with them or within the PRC
• The PRC has coerced partnering with PRC-domiciled companies as condition of doing business inside the PRC to facilitate those transfers
• The PRC has demanded placement of party apparatchiks into company management
• The PRC has demanded backdoors be installed into company operating software to allow PRC officials—those apparatchiks or others—to monitor company behavior and to copy data of interest
• outright theft of intellectual property and proprietary technology
• cyber espionage, data theft, sabotage of data, entry into cyber, energy, water network nodes, demonstrations against several of those nodes
Some of those actions the PRC claims to have discontinued or never implemented, but we have only the word of PRC government officials on that, or the word of company managers desperate to have access to the PRC domestic market.
It isn’t credible that the august publishers and news writers and commentators really haven’t recognized this, even as they cite examples from the long standing cold war. The news writer at the above link mentioned a couple in passing:
• data, call logs, and other information it [PRC] gathered from years of intrusions into computer networks at US ports, water utilities, airports, and other targets
• PRC acknowledgment of a series of cyber assaults on US infrastructure
The question, then, is why these members of the press have insisted on turning a blind eye toward this cold war of some duration, “worrying” about it only since President Donald Trump (R) has begun fighting back.