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New
Delhi, 12 September 2005
In
earlier articles we had projected that in time to come the Indian
and Chinese Navies interests are likely to clash in the Indian Ocean
region. It was reported that the last US Naval Institute Proceedings
editorial had stated in its first line, “China is at war with USA
and USA will lose” and that was call to USA to wake up. China is
pumping dollars into USA and in turn USA is increasing its deficit
and pouring most of that money into emerging markets and India is on
top of the list. Economists can study this new cold peace
phenomenon, as we highlights two articles. First how China is
snooping on the world and India and the article states Indian Navy
and Singapore approached Taiwan for collaboration. This has been in
the air and needs verification. The developments and articles should
be of interest.
China
Cracks Secret MEA Communications
NEWS INSIGHT, SEPTEMBER 6, 2005
Using
by and large Indian software, the Chinese PLA’s cyber warfare unit
called “Web Army” has been regularly intercepting Indian foreign
office communications to and from its missions abroad, and our
penetrated embassies include those in Washington DC, Paris, Berlin,
Rome, Brussels, Singapore and Beijing, the high commissions in
London, Islamabad and Colombo, and most of the major consulates in
the US and other countries.
The
Chinese were remiss in alerting Indian intelligence to the
interceptions, when China sent a note about two months ago
protesting an “undesirable” meeting in Singapore between the
Indian and Taiwanese navies, and while first suspicions were of a
human leak, such was the detailed charge against India, that it
became apparent the entire communications of the top secret naval
meeting had passed to the Chinese.
More
than a year ago, through friendly back-channels, a third country had
alerted Indian officials to Chinese cyber interception, but the
tip-off was forgotten or dismissed, but it now transpires China’s
so-called “Web Army” has employed nearly four thousand software
companies and twenty-two thousand personnel for cyber warfare, cyber
attack, passive penetration of communication systems, and cyber
encryption.
Although
reputed US and European software companies have not taken up “Web
Army” contracts because of their military end use, rogue firms
have signed up for commercial reasons, plus smaller but advanced
software-making entities in India, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia,
Ireland and Israel and top sources said China has been downloading
at the rate of three thousand pages a month of top secret Indian
foreign office communications.
Sources
said the Chinese PLA pays out a software royalty of between $5–$50
per downloaded page, and the interception is passive, in the sense
that information can be extracted from local area networks even
after they are shut down.
Because
of the sensitivity, the third country that alerted India could not
share details without compromising its own operations, and India has
been greatly embarrassed by the leak of the sensitive meeting
between the Indian and Taiwanese navies while not being able to
protest about it either.
Secret
Weapon Inside Pentagon
A
scholar shapes views of China
Beijing,
Mr. Pillsbury says, sees U.S. as Military Foe
An
Optimist Turns Gloomy,
His
Direct Line to Top Aides
By
NEIL KING JR.
Staff
Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September
8, 2005
WASHINGTON
-- Michael Pillsbury, influential Pentagon adviser and former China
lover, believes most Americans have China all wrong. They think of
the place as an inherently gentle country intent on economic
prosperity. In that camp he lumps the lower ranks of the State
Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, most U.S. investors and
the majority of American China scholars, whom he chides as
"panda huggers." Mr. Pillsbury says his mission is to
assure that the Defense Department doesn't fall into the same trap.
"Beijing
sees the U.S. as an inevitable foe, and is planning
accordingly," warns the 60-year-old China expert. "We'd be
remiss not to take that into account." [Michael Pillsbury]
Mr.
Pillsbury's 35-year China odyssey, from fondness to suspicion,
parallels Washington's own hot and cold relations with Beijing
–– from the diplomatic warming of the 1970s, through the shock
and disillusionment of the post-Tiananmen Square era, to today's
growing economic and political tensions. That's hardly a
coincidence: Whether in public or in the policy-making shadows, Mr.
Pillsbury has been a persistent force in shaping official American
perceptions of a nation increasingly seen as the world's
fastest-rising power.
Washington
these days is a welter of emotions on China, many of them heightened
by the recent furor over Cnooc Ltd.'s failed bid to buy American oil
company Unocal Corp. President Bush came to office calling China a
"strategic competitor." He now calls relations with China
"good" but "complex." Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice has lately taken a dimmer view of China than her
predecessor, Colin Powell, saying it remains unclear whether China
will play a positive role in the world.
Thanks
in part to Mr. Pillsbury's nudging, the Pentagon has staked out a
particularly wary view of Beijing's global intentions. "We must
start with the acknowledgement, at least, that we are unprepared to
understand Chinese thinking," Mr. Pillsbury says. "And
then we must acknowledge that we are facing in China what may become
the largest challenge in our nation's history."
A
lanky patrician with bright blue eyes, combed-back gray hair and a
ready laugh, Mr. Pillsbury is known around the Pentagon as the
Sphinx. Independently wealthy, he spends most days working in his
two-story brownstone near the Capitol. He appears on no public
Defense Department roster, and top officials decline to speak on the
record about his work, noting that he is merely one of hundreds of
paid consultants.
Yet
Mr. Pillsbury, a fluent Mandarin speaker and author of three
esoteric books on Chinese military strategy, has become one of the
Pentagon's most influential advisers on China, with a direct line to
many of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's top aides.
After
decades spent nurturing contacts within China's military, Mr.
Pillsbury has amassed mounds of Chinese-language military texts and
interviewed their authors to get a grip on China's long-term
military aims. His conclusion has rattled many in Washington: China
sees the U.S. as a military rival.
"Mike's
core insight has been to plumb the subterranean anti-American
feelings within China's military," says Daniel Blumenthal, a
China specialist at the Defense Department until late last year and
now a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
"He takes the Chinese at their word, and that has given him
real influence within the Pentagon." Mr. Rumsfeld has sharpened
his posture on China in recent months. In June, he ruffled feathers
in Asia when he used an annual security forum in Singapore to charge
that China's military buildup could upset the region's delicate
security balance. The Pentagon then upped the ante with a report
warning that the Chinese military nurtures ambitions well beyond
defending its historical claim to Taiwan.
The
report laid out five "pathways" that could lead China to
develop "more assertive foreign and security policies" or
even provoke small wars to secure its growing energy needs. U.S.
China experts noted that these and other passages seemed lifted
straight from Mr. Pillsbury's scholarly work.
The
Chinese government disputes Mr. Pillsbury's assessments, as well as
the Pentagon's assertion that Beijing is dramatically increasing its
military spending. Asked to comment on Mr. Pillsbury, the Chinese
Embassy in Washington said in a statement that "any words or
actions that fabricate and drum up China's military threat are
detrimental to regional peace and stability."
Mr.
Pillsbury's numerous critics call him a charming but combative China
hawk whose work has overblown the thoughts and writings of a small
cadre of Chinese military officials. Even admirers note the
intensity with which he defends his views. "Michael has played
a singularly important role in surfacing Chinese attitudes toward
the U.S.," says Kurt Campbell, the Pentagon's top Asia hand
during the Clinton administration. "But as with all brilliance,
there is also a touch of madness."
Chu
Shulong, a leading scholar on US–China relations at Tsinghua
University's Institute of Strategic Studies in Beijing, questions
Mr. Pillsbury's conclusions. "All these ideas of the rising
power and inevitable conflict, I'm afraid, are very out of
date," he says, asserting that China is above all intent on
assuring its economic well-being.
Mr.
Pillsbury, who has nurtured ties with the Chinese military since the
early 1970s, insists he remains open-minded. "My core doctrine
is that the Chinese think differently than we think they do and that
it's imperative we understand what motivates them," he says.
Chinese
writings, Mr. Pillsbury says, show a military establishment obsessed
with the inevitable decline of the U.S. and China's commensurate
rise. On the economic front, he cautions that Americans shouldn't be
taken in by the profusion of fast-food restaurants in China or other
signs that make China look like the West. Beneath the growing trade
ties with U.S., he says, runs a nationalistic fervor that could take
American investors by surprise.
Mr.
Pillsbury got the China bug as an undergraduate in the early 1960s,
and later spent two years in Taiwan while earning a doctorate in
Chinese studies from Columbia University. In late 1972, just months
after President Nixon's famous trip to China, Mr. Pillsbury joined
Rand Corp. as a 27-year-old China scholar. At the think tank, he
began to do classified work for the U.S. government.
By
then, Mr. Pillsbury had already made his first contacts with the
Chinese military through a friendship with a People's Liberation
Army general, Zhang Wutang, who was posted at the United Nations. He
used the contact to understand
PLA
aspirations, and then passed along his conclusions to the Pentagon
and the CIA in a series of secret memos. "I was giddy with the
Confucian classics and all the magnificence of Chinese
culture," he says. He earned his first acclaim –– and a
handwritten letter from then California Gov. Ronald Reagan ––
with a 1975 essay in Foreign Policy magazine urging the U.S. to
deter Moscow by establishing military and intelligence ties with
China. At the time, that idea was almost scandalous. Later, under
Presidents Carter and Reagan, such liaisons became a standard part
of U.S.-China relations.
Mr.
Pillsbury came slowly to what he calls his epiphany on China.
Through the Reagan and first Bush administrations, he hopped between
jobs at the Pentagon and the Senate, working to enhance military and
intelligence cooperation with Beijing. In the 1980s, the U.S. began
selling China powerful new torpedoes, upgrades for its jet fighters
and advanced electronics for artillery –– arms sales that
officials say Mr. Pillsbury helped push. Then in early May 1989, Mr.
Pillsbury flew to Beijing for a low-key military mission, arriving
just as the Tiananmen protests picked up steam. He was unsettled by
the ruthless crackdown that ensued, and also by how Chinese
authorities blamed the U.S. for helping foment the dissent. "I
was stunned," he says. "Even some friends in the Chinese
military that I'd known for years began to describe us as a mortal
enemy, an evil force."
Following
Tiananmen, Mr. Pillsbury's conclusions on China became notably
darker. In one 1993 study, he noted: "China has the advantage
that many experts on Chinese affairs testify soothingly that China
today is a satisfied power, which deeply desires a peaceful
environment in which to develop its economy. They put the burden of
proof on others, defying pessimists to prove that China may ever
become hypernationalistic or aggressive." An inveterate
free-lancer, Mr. Pillsbury has never had to worry about steady
employment. He's a member of the Pillsbury flour family, and his
wealth has allowed him to pursue his research despite a knack for
championing unpopular causes and for landing in political scrapes.
Once, while helping funnel weapons to anti-Soviet forces in
Afghanistan and Angola in the 1980s, he lost and regained his
security clearance amid allegations of leaking secret information
to
the press.
Mr.
Pillsbury has also avidly collected high-level protectors, counting
Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch and retired North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms
among his patrons. His long-time mentor and current employer is the
Pentagon's Andrew Marshall, a mercurial figure who at 83 still runs
the department's long-term planning shop, the Office of Net
Assessment.
In
early 1995, Mr. Marshall sent Mr. Pillsbury to Beijing to gather
Chinese military writings. The Pentagon by then was promoting a new
generation of heavily computerized military hardware, and Mr.
Marshall wanted to see what the Chinese made of this so-called
revolution in military affairs. Mr. Pillsbury interviewed dozens of
authors, and returned after several trips with crates of books and
journals, more than 500 volumes in all. The haul formed the core of
his first two books, both published by the Pentagon's National
Defense University. Hardly light reading, the books got glowing
reviews from several neo-conservative thinkers, including Paul
Wolfowitz, Mr. Rumsfeld's former top aide and now president of the
World Bank.
In
his 1997 "Chinese Views of Future Warfare," Mr. Pillsbury
portrays a military hierarchy fascinated with information warfare
and the need for weapons systems to deliver "acupuncture"
strikes and take out satellites. A particular obsession: what he
claims to be the Chinese pursuit of "shashoujian," or a
secret "assassin's weapon" that China can use to surprise
a more powerful opponent.
"Mike
can make a good case that the Chinese are developing submarines to
sink our aircraft carriers or missiles to take out our
satellites," says James Lilly, a former CIA station chief who
served as ambassador to China in the early 1990s. "His whole
point is, 'Pay attention. Listen to what they are saying.'"
China's long-term strategy, Mr. Pillsbury argues, is to amass its
strengths while attracting as little attention as possible.
He
is increasingly convinced that China's military thinkers and
strategists derive much of their guidance and inspiration from
China's Warring States period, an era of pre-unification strife
about 2,300 years ago. This is the thesis of his latest book,
"The Future of China's Ancient Strategy," which the
Pentagon plans to publish this fall. Its core assertion is that
China's history and culture posit the existence of a "hegemon"
–– these days, the United States –– that must be defeated
over time.
After
President Bush took office in 2001, officials in the Defense
Department were quick to embrace Mr. Pillsbury's warnings on China.
His prominence became abundantly clear when China's then-vice
president, Hu Jintao, stopped by the Pentagon in May 2002 to visit
Secretary Rumsfeld.
The
State Department had opposed the meeting, arguing that the Defense
Department was not the proper place for the visit of a soon-to-be
president of China. When Mr. Hu's party arrived, Mr. Rumsfeld
dismissed the State Department interpreter and had Mr. Pillsbury do
the job instead. Defense Department officials, while declining to
elaborate, say that Mr. Pillsbury is now being considered for a
full-time post at the Pentagon. Chinese officials are also keeping
tabs on Mr. Pillsbury. In June, the Communist Party's People's Daily
tagged the China expert as the main force behind the Pentagon's
recent report on the Chinese military. "Mike Pillsbury always
sits beside Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld," at policy
sessions on China, the story said.
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