While the recently flaunted Chinese J-20 stealth fighter prototype caught the world offguard with a seeming quantum-leap in technological prowess, it's similarities to the Russian T-50 made it appear to have been produced with the Kremlin's help- and indeed it was.
But now we hear that back in the Balkans in 1999, when a USAF F-117 Nighthawk was downed by a SAM missile over Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic allowed Chinese agents to fan-out into the countryside to purchase or otherwise obtain pieces of the top-secret stealth fighter from villagers -some as large as a small car- to be sent back to China for reverse-engineering of the design and materials technology.
But military is not the primary focus for Beijing's spying activities, and the scale of the Chinese government's wide-ranging industrial espionage efforts are coming more apparent all the time. With the new French Renault case, three top executives of the company have been suspended for allegedly selling Renault/Nissan's electric car strategy to Chinese agents. Recruiting such foreign agents with no ethnic ties to China marks a change in their increasingly sophisticated and aggressive strategies- as does the large sums paid the French corporate traitors.
Beijing's protection of foreign intellectual property rights is notoriously lax, so maybe we shouldn't be surprised now that the government itself is involved in IP theft on a massive scale... not just for strategic applications, but to provide it's key export industries with competitive advantage. And as illustrated in the Google hacking, Chinese espionage also involves a mosaic of intelligence gleaned from the efforts of it's many cyber-savvy code-crackers.
There were twelve Chinese spy cases uncovered in the US last year... most involving commercial technology. But here in the dark, deep depths of the grim Obammunist era -where the president allowed a Chinese anti-American propaganda song to be played at a WH state dinner- it was probably too much to ask Barack Obama to bring up these illegal, bad-faith attacks on the United States with Hu Jintao... even between bows.
