Hacks and other escalations
At the cutting edge of technological sophistication, 'China exceptionalists' are confronted by a modern nation state preparing for war
Image: Midjourney
IT HAS NOT escaped notice that in the weeks before president-elect Donald Trump's January 20 inauguration, China has upped the ante in its high-stakes pushback against US ring-fencing of its geopolitical and technological ambitions.
In short, China has hacked the US Treasury Department, carried out massive naval drills, deployed ships to the South China Sea, launched the world’s biggest amphibious warship, sabotaged undersea cables and imposed export controls and sanctions on US firms.
And that was before the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that China’s military and intelligence hackers have achieved deep penetration of US infrastructure and telecommunications networks, positioning Beijing to potentially paralyze American response capabilities in any future conflict.
China, we now know, has been enjoying access to Trump’s calls, for example, while methodically positioning itself to impede American response to any future Pacific conflict.
The two massive hacking operations have upended the West’s understanding of what Beijing wants, while revealing the astonishing skill level and stealth of its keyboard warriors – once seen as the cyber equivalent of noisy, drunken burglars.
China’s hackers were once thought to be interested chiefly in business secrets and huge sets of private consumer data. But the latest hacks make clear they are now soldiers on the front lines of potential geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and China, in which cyberwarfare tools are expected to be powerful weapons.
As for those cable attacks, one tweet that has yet to be verified claims that “China's systematic undersea cable sabotage [has been] patented as ‘Towed Undersea Cable Cutting Technology" by Lishui University.’
Taiwan is seeking the help of South Korea in investigating a Chinese-owned ship that Taiwan telecoms operator Chunghwa Telecom and the Taiwan Coast Guard say they believe to have caused damage to a communications cable on January 3.
As for whether China will actually invade Taiwan in 2027, the latest revelations suggest that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) may well be ready, as Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has reportedly commanded it to be. Meanwhile, Chinese planners seem to be hopeful that the US will be hamstrung from intervening. Bloomberg:
US officials have recounted in testimony and briefings how Chinese hackers are building the capacity to poison water supplies nationwide, flood homes with sewage, and cut off phones, power, ports and airports, actions that could cause mass casualties, disrupt military operations and potentially plunge the US into “societal panic.” The aim, US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly told Congress in January 2024, would be to take down “everything, everywhere, all at once.”
Perhaps it’s time to shrug off that ever-present counter argument that China, with its “5,000 years of civilization,” is “special” – unique and deserving of different treatment. As if China’s very existence challenges the possibility of universal applicability of Western international relations theory – because … well, standard models of state behavior don’t fully capture China's motivations and actions.
To the likes of Martin Jacques, whose civilization-state argument revolves around the idea that China fundamentally operates on a different historical and cultural paradigm than Western nation-states, welcome to the China that will shut down your plumbing to feed its revanchist territorial claims.
After all, presumably the aim of the hack of the century – so far – is that before a single bomb falls on Taiwan, China can potentially turn off utilities, disrupt communications, and create domestic havoc that would severely hamper any military response.
As Brandon Wales, a former top U.S. cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security, tells the Wall Street Journal “prepositioning and intelligence collection by the hackers …
are designed to ensure they prevail by keeping the U.S. from projecting power, and inducing chaos at home.
That chaos is a primary goal, not a side effect. And the methodical penetration of infrastructure since 2019 suggests this isn't just contingency planning – it's a core part of the strategy.
When the war comes to our kitchens – and it seems it is as likely to start there as on foreign soil – nobody is going to be thinking about giving China, the special case, the civilizational wonder, a break – but by then it will be too late.
Book Review
Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk*
Alison Young
Center Street (April 25, 2023)
352 pages
ISBN-10 : 1546002936
ISBN-13 : 978-1546002932
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
IN LATE 2021, a lab worker in Taipei was bitten by a mouse in a Biosafety Level (BSL) 3 lab.
In fact, she was bitten twice before quitting her job for unknown reasons, although it would be clearly understandable if she came to dislike working with mice.
On November 26, the researcher developed a cough that worsened over the week that followed. On December 9, she tested positive for Covid-19 after a PCR test. The authorities set about tracing 85 people the lab researcher was known to have interacted and shared spaces with.
It is unknown whether she was infected by the mouse bites, or whether some other breach of protocol had occurred at the Taipei lab.
Remarkably, no one was infected by the virus that had hitched a ride with her.
And unfortunately, it was not even a once-in-a-lifetime event.
If you’ve lived in China, gone to the trouble of learning its language and – let’s just imagine for a moment – even profess to be a “China watcher” you will have noticed how theologically tainted the words “lab leak” have become. It’s such that if you meet another China watcher and say you think there might have been an accident in Wuhan they either wrathfully dismiss you, block you (if its social media) or look at you strange, as if you’d admitted to giving some serious thought to whether the world is flat – and not in the Thomas Friedman way.
But why? I’ve never thought it strange – or, let’s get to the quick of this, a racist Trump smear on China – to consider whether an accident may have occurred in China’s leading coronavirus research lab, which happens to be in Wuhan. I’m even certain that China would have gone to every possible length to conceal it if there had been a leak – and even if there was US funding involved, but the latter is another story.
Back to Young’s very readable history of lab leaks – mostly not in China.
For a start, there were leaks of SARS-1 from labs in China, Singapore and Taiwan in 2003 and 2004 led the WHO to warn that a return of SARS would most likely emanate from a lab.
And in 2022 – yes, the year after a researcher was bitten twice by mice – another coronavirus researcher in Taiwan exposed 110 people, while in 2003 her supervisor had been infected with SARS in a lab.
Such near misses are documented in compelling but horrifying succession in health journalist Alison Young’s Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk, which basically posits: The only rare thing about leaks of potentially lethal pathogens from labs is the public hearing about them.
In 1977, for example, a decades-old strain of H1N1 influenza virus appeared in what was then the Soviet Union, where a 22-year-old man in Moscow fell ill on November 1, 1977.
By January 1978, this H1N1 flu virus was spreading around the world, with cases starting to be identified in the Philippines and United Kingdom
The flu virus was nearly identical to the H1N1 flu virus of 1950 – as if “preserved – truly frozen in nature or elsewhere,” wrote researchers in 1978.
Other experts were blunter, saying:
‘This virus from 1950 almost certainly escaped back into nature from frozen storage’ —or, more specifically, that it ‘probably escaped from a laboratory.’
Young is an investigative journalist who has covered biosafety issues for close on two decades, and her measured, meticulously researched book documents incident after horrifying incident in which public relations trump public safety when it comes to laboratory-acquired infections.
She talks to Karen Byers, “a biosafety manager at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston,” who has been maintaining running tally of reported incidents of lab-associated infections in the U.S. and abroad.
From 1979 through 2015, about 3,230 lab-associated infections with forty-one deaths had been publicly described in various scientific journal articles and other publications, her research has found. Of these known infections, most occurred in either clinical or research labs.
But the cases in Byers’s tallies are just a fraction of the infections that are actually occurring among lab workers. Underreporting is a widely acknowledged problem, with lab personnel fearing stigma and reprisal when incidents occur.
When it comes to studying lab accidents and assessing the evidence for various safety practices and equipment, “There isn’t any funding for it,” said biosafety consultant Rocco Casagrande.”Basically, almost all of the data on performance of these equipment, accident source terms, accident frequency … especially the things that are truly empirical where someone has set up the test to actually determine what the evidence is from 1980 and before.”
That’s the U.S.
When Young’s book turns to China, it’s not that we find a drastic uptick in accidents; we simply find the same kinds of accidents that Young’s sleuthing has liberated from bureaucratic shelves in the US.
In 2014, she writes, the National Institute of Virology in Beijing accidentally released the SARS virus, leaving …
… The WHO and Chinese health authorities scrambling to contain a growing outbreak of cases linked to the lab’s researchers, their family members, and the health care workers who had treated them.
By summer the outbreak that began at the National Institute of Virology had been contained—but only after three generations of transmission, with nine confirmed cases of SARS and one death. It was lucky that the toll wasn’t much higher.”
The problem:
To the best of our knowledge, there is no internationally maintained database or inventory for high consequence biological agents,’ Kazunobu Kojima, a World Health Organization biosafety expert, told me.
WHO has no access to such information on who’s doing what in terms of gain of function (GOF) or similar research work that comes with an elevated risk.’
Kojima said that countries’ annual emergency preparedness reports show biosafety approaches around the world are uneven, with resource-limited countries struggling to manage biosafety and biosecurity challenges.
Only a tiny fraction of countries around the world have any kind of oversight structure in place to limit who can possess especially dangerous pathogens, to screen buyers of synthetic DNA products, or to regulate so-called dual use research that carries risks of producing knowledge that can be used to cause significant harm, according to the 2021 Global Health Security Index, which examined biosafety and biosecurity capacities in 195 countries.
To return to the 1977 influenza pandemic that many experts suspect leaked and infected the world:
In recent years some researchers have downplayed the relevance of the 1977 influenza epidemic as a real-world example of a global epidemic caused by biological research. They don’t dispute that the origin of the virus almost certainly was not natural. But they say the event didn’t occur in the context of modern biosafety practices. And they essentially argue that if the type of research that led to the escape involved a ‘vaccine trial or vaccine development gone awry’ it is somehow not as relevant to debates over biosafety risks as other kinds of microbiological research.
One doesn’t need to be a virologist to know that this is an argument that simply doesn’t inspire confidence in face of the stakes – not to mention what we have been through over the past three or four years in the grip of a virus of indeterminate origin.
Young’s book, in short, is not only a wake-up call, but also a call to action. She argues that we need to have more oversight and regulation of labs that work with potentially pandemic pathogens. She pushes the rational argument we need more public awareness and engagement on biosafety issues. She maintains we need more ethical and responsible research, balancing the benefits and risks of studying deadly viruses.
There were two ways the SARS virus had the potential to cause a future outbreak, the WHO experts wrote [of the leaks in 2003 and 2004]. It could emerge from an animal reservoir, or it could be released by a lab doing research with live cultures or handling stored clinical specimens.
The report concluded:
The risk of re-emergence from a laboratory source is thought to be potentially greater.
On reading Young’s book, the reader is inclined to wonder, Why the stigmatization of a possible lab leak in Wuhan and how is it we have dodged the bullet of complacency for so long?
* Regular readers will notice that this is a reworking of a post from 1-1/2 years ago. I’m not reposting it to fill in the gaps, but to do the book justice and to point out that here in the early days 2025 we’re still no closer to consensus on what happened in the latter months of 2019 when a novel pathogen primed for human infection started its march to global domination. Many China watchers – who deep down know that accidents can happen anywhere and the only thing that is certain in the case of China is that it will be covered up –regard “lab-leakers” as tin-foil-hat conspiracy junkies. It’s a benighted view that should be abandoned as the evidence increasingly suggests that a lab leak is not only plausible but possible.