The Week in China Freakouts
Plus: ICE agents outed; Michael McFaul squirms; Trump’s maritime mayhem; Low-tech immortality; and more!
Save the date: On Saturday, Sept 20, at 1 pm US Eastern Time, I’ll be holding a Zoom call with any paid subscribers who would like to offer feedback about the ever-evolving Nonzero newsletter/podcast—or would just like to hear about some future evolutionary paths we’re pondering. I’ll be joined by fellow ponderers Nikita Petrov (who did some of this kind of pondering with me on a recent podcast) and Danny Fenster (who would play a prominent role on some of the pondered paths). A link to the Zoom meeting is at the bottom of this newsletter, and we’ll re-send it down the road.
This week an enterprising New York Times reporter elicited a provocative quote from a former FBI official about the “Salt Typhoon” cyberattacks, which last year hit major US telecom companies and have been attributed by US officials to the Chinese government: “I can’t imagine any American was spared, given the breadth of the campaign.”
This quote seems to be the basis for the story’s headline, which declared that “Chinese Cyberattackers May Have Stolen Data From Almost Every American.” And that headline seems to have been the basis for playing the story at the top of the Times’s home page. Never mind that, as the story itself went on to note, “It was unclear whether the Salt Typhoon hack was intended to store ordinary people’s data…” (or that the relatively small number of people whose personal data is known to have been targeted had names like Donald Trump and JD Vance).
But readers barely had a chance to reflect on the implications of that qualifier, because the next paragraph transitioned from cyberwar to real war. Salt Typhoon, the Times reported, “highlights China’s ambitions for global influence, which were on display on Wednesday at an elaborate military parade in Beijing that featured fighter jets, tanks and thousands of troops marching across Tiananmen Square.”
It’s true that China has ambitions for global influence. And it’s true they were on display in Beijing this week—but not only, or most importantly, at that military parade. The parade coincided with a gathering in Beijing of leaders from more than 20 nations, half of them (including Russia, India, and Pakistan) members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the rest (including Malaysia, Vietnam, and NATO ally Turkey) interested onlookers. China used the occasion to send a message that these and many other nations may find appealing: It wants to be a source of stability and order in the world.
Whether or not you find that message credible, you have to admit that it has more credibility than it would have coming from any other superpowers on the planet right now. (I won’t name names.) Below are some takes on the events in Beijing, and other China-related takes—along with my takes on some of those takes.
—Bob
—An editorial in the Economist magazine says this week’s gathering in Beijing signaled that a “new reality is taking hold”: Global power is shifting from the US toward China. And it’s happening fast: “The spectacle of China shepherding much of the world through Tianjin and Beijing was unimaginable even five years ago.”
The Economist’s editors, singing in tune with mainstream US media, blame this spectacle overwhelmingly on President Trump. And it’s true that his roller coaster tariff policies, along with his broader penchant for chaos, make China look like a pillar of international stability by comparison. It’s also true that his brutal tariffs on India (reportedly in retaliation for Prime Minister Modi’s having publicly contradicted one of Trump’s self-aggrandizing untruths) may account for this week’s jarring photo of Modi and Chinese leader Xi Jinping holding hands.
But the Economist’s editors work too hard to absolve past US presidents of responsibility for ceding the country’s role as anchor of the world order. They correctly note that most of the countries gathered in Beijing are fed up with America’s profligate use of economic sanctions. But they call this consensus a “newfound unity opposing sanctions”—sanctions that “Mr. Trump wields… with ever less restraint and without a predictable legal process or institutional framework.” Actually, the unifying effect of US sanctions isn’t “newfound” at all, but something that’s been increasingly visible as they’ve accumulated relentlessly (notwithstanding their consistent ineffectualness) over decades.
This newsletter has been saying since early in the Biden administration that Biden’s “autocracy versus democracy” framing of world affairs, would turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy—and that one reason was the use of sanctions to punish autocracies. The Economist now notes with alarm that “security cooperation between autocracies is deepening” but doesn’t consider the possibility that any American president (save maybe Trump) played a role in this.
The Economist mocks Xi Jinping’s professed commitment to “global governance” and to the “principles of the UN Charter”—phrases that are just “code words for a China-friendly world.” Well, maybe, but the core principle of the UN Charter is the prohibition of transborder aggression, and China hasn’t invaded a country since 1979, whereas the US has attacked a country in flagrant violation of the UN Charter at least once per decade since then (most recently this year, with Trump’s attack on Iran). And as for “global governance”: With Trump explicitly opposed to it, and Biden having failed to utter that phrase once during his presidency, or to honor the idea in practice, leaving this particular mantle of leadership to Xi Jinping has been a bi-partisan effort.
—The BBC lists five big takeaways from the display of new weaponry at Beijing’s big military parade on Wednesday. They can be boiled down to a single takeaway: China has a very powerful military, and it’s growing fast and undergoing rapid technological advance (as reflected in, for example, a 60-foot drone submarine, not to mention “robot wolves.”)
And, actually, this takeaway has been obvious for awhile now. That’s why some geopolitical analysts have long considered it crazy for the US to try to assert global military dominance over China—including in its own backyard—and have recommended that the US instead gracefully adapt to a “multipolar world.”
One such analyst, Hugh White, made this case recently on the 80,000 Hours podcast. Near the end of the conversation he was asked what advice he’d give America. He replied that, since Trump has implicitly accepted a multipolar world—and Secretary of State Rubio has explicitly accepted it—Trump should “help build that multipolar order, and recognize that’s going to require you to cooperate.”
Then he added this: “And for the most problematic group, which is the old US foreign policy establishment, the Bidens and the Sullivans and the Blinkens: Let it go. Stop kidding yourself. Stop talking as if you’re serious about preserving US primacy and doing nothing about it. It’s extremely dangerous. It provokes without deterring. The biggest problem we face is that the US foreign policy establishment is still in love with the vision of leading the world that seemed to beckon to them in the 1990s. Let it go. Get real.”
—This year is the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization Year of Sustainable Development,” and at this week’s SCO meeting China made various pledges to help develop solar and wind power in member states. Statistics compiled by the energy think tank Ember suggest that China indeed knows a thing or two about developing renewable energy:
“You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet.”
—White House AI Czar David Sacks on the All-In podcast, defending the thuggish tactics Trump used to extract financial concessions from Intel’s CEO, Lip-Bu Tan.
Background: Trump, having heard that Tan had once invested in Chinese companies, posted on social media that Tan was “highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution.” But it turned out there was another solution: Trump, in a subsequent meeting with Tan, asked him to give the US a 10 percent stake in Intel in exchange for the billions of dollars that, under the Chips Act, Intel should have gotten without surrendering any equity. Tan agreed. Trump later said that Tan had “walked in wanting to keep his job, and he ended up giving us $10 billion for the United States.”
Sacks said that the problem with the approach endorsed by All-In Host Jason Calacanis—negotiating with Tan without first threatening him—was that “maybe it wouldn’t work.” And, as Sacks put it, “American people like when Trump gets results. Me too.”
—Former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul recently gave an interview to one of Russia's biggest Youtubers, Yuri Dud (now labeled "a foreign agent" by Moscow and living in Spain, arrested in absentia). Much of the conversation revolved around what Dud saw as double standards that McFaul applied to Russians as opposed to Americans in the responsibility they bear for their countries' wars.
But so far, at least, McFaul doesn’t have to worry about many Americans sharing Dud’s judgment. The dubbed-in-Russian version now has 3.6 million views, while the one with the original English sound has around a thousand.
(Note: AI-powered search engines turned up no evidence that McFaul indeed, as he claims in the video, opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He did recommend, shortly before the invasion, that the Bush administration shift its rationale away from WMDs and toward regime change.)
—US immigration agents will soon have the tools to hack into cellphones, track their location, and use their microphones as secret recording devices. The Trump administration last week reinstated a contract between ICE and surveillance software company Paragon Solutions that the Biden administration had suspended to determine whether it violated a ban on foreign spyware, according to documents examined by independent journalist Jack Poulson and subsequently by the Guardian. Paragon, founded in Israel by a former Israeli intelligence officer, was sold to a Florida-based private equity firm last year.
—Activists are using AI to identify ICE agents, notwithstanding the masks they wear during raids, Politico reports. Drawing on migrant arrest videos, volunteers with the "ICE List" project are generating probable facial composites and using reverse image searches to match the images to social media profiles. About 100 ICE officers have been named so far. The project doesn’t violate current law, but it has spurred legislative countermeasures, including the introduction by Sen. Marsha Blackburn of the “Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act.”
—What is it about rich, powerful men and immortality? Silicon Valley potentate Peter Thiel has arranged to be cryonically preserved—and, for good measure, is funding research on life extension along with other tech billionaires. And this week we learned that Vladimir Putin, too, is interested in eluding the grim reaper—though Putin’s approach isn’t very high tech by Silicon Valley standards. While heading to a military parade with Xi Jinping (who, like Putin, is 72), he mused about living to 150 and "even achieving immortality" via the recurring transplantation of organs. Their exchange wasn't meant to be public, but it got into the official video translation of the parade:
—Acting under Trump’s designation of drug cartels as terrorist organizations, the US military bombed a Venezuelan boat that was in international waters, killing 11 people. The Trump administration said the drugs that were allegedly on the boat constituted a national security threat, but the Wall Street Journal reported that this claim “was sharply disputed by legal experts and some lawmakers, who said that Trump exceeded his legal authority by using lethal military force against a target that posed no direct danger to the US and doing so without congressional authorization.”
—Elsewhere in the annals of Trump maritime military adventurism: The New York Times reported this week that during his first term Trump authorized a bizarrely complicated Navy Seal operation to plant eavesdropping equipment in North Korea. But the Seals, spooked by the site of a small Korean boat, killed everyone on it (who turned out to be civilians diving for shellfish) and aborted the mission.
—ChatGPT will tell you how to blow up a stadium if you ask nicely enough. The Guardian reports that, in safety testing conducted by rivals OpenAI and Anthropic on each other's models, GPT-4.1 provided detailed bomb-making instructions, advice on venue vulnerabilities, and tips for evading detection—all in response to prompts featuring flimsy pretexts like "security planning." Meanwhile, Anthropic revealed that its Claude LLM has already been exploited in real-world criminal efforts, including extortion schemes, job-application fraud, and ransomware operations.
—A closing challenge: Can you spot the AI author? This week, as an experiment, we used a large language model to generate the first draft of one of the above items. Of course, we then edited it, and that may stiffen the challenge of spotting it. However, we left the first sentence of the item entirely unedited. Can you spot the item? You can either leave your guess in the comments below or email it to us at nonzero.news@gmail.com.
Banners, images, and graphics by Clark McGillis.