Commies gonna commie
Growing up during the Cold War, espionage was a big part of our entertainment. We had the Soviets as ideological enemies, and while we weren’t shooting at one another, we all knew it would happen sooner or later.
So, we spied on each other.
Commies have got to spy on capitalists because communists can’t create, only steal.
And while China might produce low-cost stuff and have something resembling private ownership to some degree, at heart, they’re still commies and they’re still eager to steal stuff from the West.
Which Stanford has been reminded of.
This summer, a CCP agent impersonated a Stanford student. Under the alias Charles Chen, he approached several students through social media. Anna*, a Stanford student conducting sensitive research on China, began receiving unexpected messages from Charles Chen. At first, Charles's outreach seemed benign: he asked about networking opportunities. But soon, his messages took a strange turn.
Charles inquired whether Anna spoke Mandarin, then grew increasingly persistent and personal. He sent videos of Americans who had gained fame in China, encouraged Anna to visit Beijing, and offered to cover her travel expenses. He would send screenshots of a bank account balance to prove he could buy the plane tickets. Alarmingly, he referenced details about her that Anna had never disclosed to him.
He advised her to enter China for only 24 to 144 hours, short enough, he said, to avoid visa scrutiny by authorities, and urged her to communicate exclusively via the Chinese version of WeChat, a platform heavily monitored by the CCP. When Charles commented on one of her social media posts, asking her to delete screenshots of their conversations, she knew this was serious.
Under the guidance of experts familiar with espionage tactics, Anna contacted authorities. Their investigation revealed that Charles Chen had no affiliation with Stanford. Instead, he had posed as a Stanford student for years, slightly altering his name and persona online, targeting multiple students, nearly all of them women researching China-related topics. According to the experts on China who assisted Anna, Charles Chen was likely an agent of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), tasked with identifying sympathetic Stanford students and gathering intelligence.
…
It is this pervasive silence that has compelled us to write. After interviewing multiple anonymous Stanford faculty, students, and China experts, we can confirm that the CCP is orchestrating a widespread intelligence-gathering campaign at Stanford. In short, “there are Chinese spies at Stanford.”
Stanford does a lot of research. Some of that research may well be classified, and all of it is groundbreaking to some degree or another. That’s going to be attractive to a hostile foreign power like China.
The problem is that, as the experts noted, China is looking for “sympathetic Stanford students.”
In this day and age, that’s not exactly difficult.
Even during the Cold War, there were always liberal students, but most liberals of those days weren’t interested in helping the Soviets or any of their allies. They were Americans, and while they might like some of what the commies were doing, they weren’t interested in crossing that line.
They likely did things like this, though without the benefit of the internet, but it didn’t work as well as this might.
After all, even liberal professors back in the day didn’t try to teach their students that America was awful and sucked so bad and literally anything is better than capitalism, freedom, and the United States Constitution.
Today, college campuses probably have more people who hate the United States than the Chinese Communist Party does. Some would eagerly work with the Chinese, and you wouldn’t need more than, “Hey, I’m with the Chinese government. What to screw over the United States?”
If it does, it’s only because they’re too skeptical of the direct approach like that.
That’s downright terrifying to me.
China has tried different approaches to get American science professors to work with them, but this is a little more troubling. It’s one thing when a biologist moves to China to teach at a college there, but this looks more like trying to groom someone for espionage.
Either way, it boils down to trying to steal what they can from the US because communism sucks balls.
The only reason that we’re not looking at a new Cold War is because China isn’t quite a near-peer military power yet, despite its best efforts.
If they steal enough, though, they might become one.
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Don't know why more folks don't think that multiple foreign powers would take everything they have if they thought they could get away with it.
You've touched on one of the many, *many* things that keep me staring at the ceiling at 4 a.m. My grandma always told me not to worry about the things you have no power to change. "You need to be here," she'd say, "tomorrow will take care of itself." She was mostly correct, but it's hard not to worry about the things that could kill us all quickly or torturously slowly when you have children. It's past time we stopped treating China as a beloved trading partner rather than the existential threat it is.