China

I was one of them.One of the 147 million Americans who had their information compromised in the epic 2017 Equifax data breach. It was one of the largest hacks in history, leaking the names, social security numbers, addresses, and credit history of over a third of the country.At first, we were led to believe it was the result of sloppy cybersecurity and greedy hackers who wanted credit card data.But now, according to last week’s indictment from the Justice Department, we know it was the handiwork of four members of China’s military.To think it was a few renegade black hat hackers with expensive tastes was upsetting enough, but now to learn it was the long arm of the Chinese Communist party? This is serious.What do the Chinese communists want with my credit history?

The Chinese government would have the world believe that the coronavirus is under control and the risks of it spreading to the rest of us is minimal. But foreign governments and intelligence agencies believe that China has been lying about the extent of the epidemic and continues to deny the truth about the numbers of dead and infected.Judging by leaked videos on social media that purpotedly show the dead lying untended in the street, bodies wrapped in sheets lying on benches and crematoriums working 24/7 with bodies unceremoniously stuffed into ovens with no burial rites, millions of Chinese people appear to agree with the foreign assessments.

A successful dictator has to have ruthlessness, control, influence and competence. So how does China’s leader, Xi Jinping, rate as a dictator? Xi has been in power since 2012 and thus has enough of a track record to judge.On ruthlessness, he ranks highly. The concentration camps he has created for China’s Muslim minority in Xinjiang and the suppression of the movement in Hong Kong — in violation of the 1984 agreement with the UK — are the most tangible examples. The November 2019 leak of the 'Xinjiang Papers', more than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents, to The New York Times provided an unprecedented documentation of the origins and implementation of crackdown against Muslims of Xinjiang.

I woke up late on Friday, so missed the livestreamed assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the rolling barrage of tweet-commentary about the super-judicial martyrdom of Hassan Thingy and the start of World War Three. It was all over by lunchtime, bar the shooting, because there could only be one winner. Or was that two?The first winner, as always when it comes to American foreign policy, is Xi’s China. Anything that ties the United States into the open-ended shambles of the Middle East distracts the energies of the United States, and the eyes of America’s allies and clients, from China’s surreptitious campaigns to replace the United States as global patron. In war as in online shopping, China emerges as hegemon not despite American efforts, but because of them.

Like so many wars, this one began with an accident: a US naval vessel patrolling the South China Seas and shadowing the Chinese navy made a small navigation error in rough weather. The ships collided, five Chinese sailors died and their vessel was severely damaged. Beijing saw this as an act of war, the latest in a series of perceived insults by the US administration, and the response was swift. Cyber attacks against Washington DC and the headquarters of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor shut down power. Ironically, most of the 175 deaths in the first three hours came not from hospitals where emergency generators kicked in successfully, but from failed traffic lights and massive car pile-ups in both cities.