China, even more than Russia, is America's primary geopolitical rival at the moment. Yes, we trade with China; yes, we buy a lot of Chinese-made goods; and more alarmingly, we still rely on China for a lot of strategic minerals and raw materials. That's changing, but it won't happen overnight. And rivalries, we should note, can often flash into enmity.
What's really alarming, though, is China's increasing technological capacity, and their growing ability - and willingness - to use that capacity to track their own citizens' activity, even in the United States. What's even more alarming is the source of some of that technological capacity.
Which brings us to a Chinese subject (there are no citizens in China as we recognize the word) named Li Chuanliang, who exposed his boss's corruption - and who has been on the run ever since.
Retired Chinese official Li Chuanliang was recuperating from cancer on a Korean resort island when he got an urgent call: Don’t return to China, a friend warned. You’re now a fugitive.
Days later, a stranger snapped a photo of Li in a cafe. Terrified South Korea would send him back, Li fled, flew to the U.S. on a tourist visa and applied for asylum. But even there — in New York, in California, deep in the Texas desert — the Chinese government continued to hunt him down with the help of surveillance technology.
Li’s communications were monitored, his assets seized and his movements followed in police databases. More than 40 friends, relatives, and associates — including his pregnant daughter — were identified and detained, even by tracking down their cab drivers through facial recognition software. Three former associates died in detention, and for months shadowy men Li believed to be Chinese operatives stalked him across continents, interviews and documents seen by The Associated Press show.
Now this would appear to be a legitimate case for an asylum application. So, one might ask, what did Li Chuanliang do to merit this?
Li’s story is a rare firsthand account from a former Chinese official. Beijing has accused Li of corruption totaling around $435 million, but Li says he’s being targeted for openly criticizing the Chinese government and denies criminal charges of taking bribes and embezzling state funds. A review of thousands of pages of legal, property, and corporate records, interrogation transcripts, and Li’s medical and travel files obtained exclusively by AP, as well as interviews with nine lawyers, support key parts of his story, showing distorted charges, blocked access to evidence, coercive confessions, and altered legal records.
Li drew ire because as a former official, he knew well and exposed the inner workings of local politics, including naming names. While in the U.S., he also started what he called the Chinese Tyrannical Officials Whistleblower Center.
We won't litigate the case made against Li here. China has a long, long history of corruption among government officials, so it may well be that everyone involved in this case is up to some shenanigans or other. But the capacity China is demonstrating here, along with the various other nefarious activities China is up to, should concern every informed American.
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The Chinese government is using an increasingly powerful tool to cement its power at home and vastly amplify it abroad: Surveillance technology, much of it originating in the U.S., an AP investigation has found.
Within China, this technology helped identify and punish almost 900,000 officials last year alone, nearly five times more than in 2012, according to state figures. Beijing says it is cracking down on corruption, but critics charge that such technology is used in China and elsewhere to stifle dissent and exact retribution on perceived enemies.
Outside China, the same technology is being used to threaten wayward officials, along with dissidents and alleged criminals, under what authorities call Operations “Fox Hunt” and “Sky Net.” The U.S. has criticized these overseas operations as a “threat” and an “affront to national sovereignty.” More than 14,000 people, including some 3,000 officials, have been brought back to China from more than 120 countries through coercion, arrests and pressure on relatives, according to state media.
An IBM program called i2 - an American company's program, marketed to China, supposedly for law enforcement use, now being used against Chinese subjects to flag "corruption," by which the Chinese Communist Party has too often used to mean "anyone who speaks out against the regime." And they are not just tracking the individuals, but also their families.
Among the agencies pursuing Li and his family is China’s economic crimes police, which hunts corruption suspects domestically and abroad. IBM said in internal slides that it sold the i2 surveillance software program to this Economic Crime Investigation Bureau, and procurement records show Oracle and Microsoft software was sold to that same division. Leaked emails show i2 software was copied by a former IBM partner, Landasoft, and sold to China’s disciplinary commissions, which investigate officials. None of the sales violated U.S. sanctions.
China is tracking Li, even after he has fled to the United States. His assets were seized. Strange people are taking his photograph when he is out in public. Even in Texas, the Chinese government is still monitoring him. More than 40 of his family members and associates still in China are being tracked.
Consider the implications of this. Li's case may not seem like that much of a much; he remains a Chinese national, and we can't know, given the evidence at hand, whether or not the Chinese government has any legitimate gripe with him. But look at that capacity! If they can track one of their own people with this technology, technology they gained from the United States, they can track our people as well, and in so doing, conduct one of the greatest cyber-espionage operations in history. They could track American politicians, monitoring any and all activity - like, say, an American Congressman hooking up with a known Chinese spy, or a Congresswoman of Somalian ancestry possibly being involved in a massive healthcare fraud scandal. This could be used to gain leverage over American politicians, bureaucrats, senior military members, anyone at any level of government who has, at one point or another, pulled some actionable screw-up that the Chinese could learn of, and quietly send someone to talk to the person in question: "Nice career you have here, Congressman/General/Director/Whatever. Shame if anything were to... happen to it."
China is not our friend. They are our primary geopolitical rival. Now, this case, the case of Mr. Li's continued tracking and harassment even here in the United States, has revealed a horrifying capacity that the Chinese government could use to their everlasting advantage.
