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By Root 711 0

to HUMINT, China has an array of Earth-based SIGINT platforms, some of which are located in Cuba, where China began operating in the mid-1990s. China also has a space-borne imagery capability. More problematic, from the standpoint of the United States, was the Chinese ASAT (antisatellite) test in January 2007. Not only do U.S. military and intelligence activities depend on satellites; so do large portions of the economy, beyond that of telecommunications itself. In August 2007, Lt. Gen. Kevin Campbell, head of the U.S. Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command, also warned about Chinese jamming and computer attack capabilities as a threat to U.S. space-borne systems.

Allegations of Chinese computer intrusions have become the other main concern, alongside classic espionage. As noted, the head of Britain’s M15 warned British firms about this specific threat. There have been many press reports over the last few years about computer hacking attacks and intrusions alleged to have emanated from China, including against defense and national laboratory sites. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Mike McConnell, in his February 2008 threat assessment, listed China as one of two main cyber threats. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in its counterintelligence role, has put increased emphasis on Chinese economic espionage, which the FBI says focuses on ways to gain access to Western technology and then use China’s cheaper labor market to “leapfrog” foreign rivals in that sector. In 2007, Geng Huichang was named the new minister of State Security. According to press accounts, Geng has expertise on the United States, Japan, as well as commercial intelligence. [The head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) told a Canadian Senate committee that China was Canada’s top intelligence concern, with half of Canada’s counterespionage effort devoted to Chinese spies. Technology and corporate secrets were again seen as the main targets.]

In November 2007, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a bipartisan congressional group formed in 2000 to monitor the national security implications of U.S.-China economic relations, said that Chinese espionage was the largest threat to U.S. technological secrets. (In December 2007, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said that China opposes hacking attacks, that China itself had been the victim of such attacks; a spokesperson said that the M15 warning was “slanderous.”)

The U.S.-Chinese intelligence relationship serves as a barometer of the larger political relationship. The United States and China were hostile until President Richard M. Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. That event, plus the shared fear of growing Soviet power, led to some level of intelligence cooperation. Gaining access to sites in far western China, the United States was able to recover capabilities it had lost in Iran, after the fall of the shah’s government, to track Soviet missile tests. China and the United States also cooperated on the operational level, both supporting the Mujaheddin against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to new fears on the part of China about U.S. hegemony, leading to a deterioration in relations. Chinese assertiveness prompted the prolonged captivity of a U.S. reconnaissance plane crew, which was forced to land in China after colliding with a Chinese military jet. The incident occurred after the bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, in May 1999—a mistake caused by the use of outdated information on that city, which did not record the embassy’s new location. In January 2002 news reports alleged that the United States had planted multiple listening devices in a plane being outlitted in the United States before delivery to China’s president. China played down the reports, bolstering the view that such intelligence incidents were largely a means of expressing official attitudes about the relationship with the United States. According to subsequent press reports, some U.S. analysts believed that the listening devices