Year of the dog

Chinese President Hu Jintao gave an optimistic New Year’s address — especially for the West — in which he promised a list of nice things China would attempt this year. He said China would promote world peace and multilateralism, advocate democracy, respect diversity and push for a new “just and rational” international and political order.

In just the few weeks since Mr. Hu’s rosy message, however, China’s ubiquitous “Ministry of Public Security” has ordered sweeping new crackdowns because of “contradictions within the people” (more on this Maoist term later) and imposed pervasive Internet controls by restricting thousands of democracy related terms searchable by Chinese Google.

And, Mr. Hu’s vision for the New Year would be a quite a change from 2005, during which China distinguished itself in the “usual way”:

• China’s Gen. Zhu Chenghu began the year threatening us with a nuclear strike if we tried to prevent a Chinese attack on Taiwan. And, the Pentagon released an alarming report on the increasingly capable Chinese military forces and their clandestine build-up.

• Then, there was the diplomatic snarl around the defection of Chen Yonglin, the political affairs officer at China’s Consulate in Sydney, Australia, because he opposed China’s widespread persecution of dissidents. Mr. Chen also claimed “China had a thousand spies in Australia.”

Simply not true about the dissidents, said a shocked and offended Madame Fu Ying, the Chinese Ambassador to Australia. As for the spying charge, she said: “I stand to be enlightened by anyone who has knowledge — whoever has the names of spies I would like to know.”

Despite Madame Fu’s dramatics, everyone with a TV set knows China has a long history of killing off and imprisoning its dissidents: Mao Tse-tung’s regime alone killed 70 million people because of “contradictions within the people.” Not as well known perhaps is that China maintains, by far, the world’s largest external spy ring. Chinese spies operate everywhere in the world, with concentration in those countries with political, economic or military significance to China — especially the United States, where yet another Chinese spy ring was broken up in 2005 by the Los Angeles FBI field office.

Madam Fu — who has the inside track on being the next Chinese ambassador to the United States — is true to Communist China’s diplomatic form: Their officials always respond to spy charges by saying China has no external intelligence service, no CIA-like organization responsible for collecting intelligence outside the People’s Republic.

So how do they spy? Virtually every Chinese official visitor (and most Chinese visitors are “official”) to almost any country for almost any purpose collects targeted information and reports it — directly or indirectly — to some branch, office or agency of China’s intelligence service.

The many thousands of Chinese students are a problem of special concern worldwide, as are Chinese nationals who work in foreign science or technically based companies. In fact, two of the four suspects in the Los Angeles spy case are naturalized U.S. citizens (one is an electrical engineer, working for a U.S. defense contractor), and the other two are resident Chinese aliens in the United States. All are related.

While this pervasive spying is particularly targeted toward advanced research, science and technology with military applications, just as important are foreign trade matters and manipulating the internal political process of key governments to affect policies toward China. They even try to influence our national elections.

China’s tradition of stifling dissent at home has an equally nefarious past, and — like their vast overseas spying network — it depends on many thousands of spies and informants. So many that absolutely every social force in China — without exception — that could possibly compete with or oppose regime rule is penetrated and put down. Any organized religion and all forms of student activism are particularly suppressed using this vast network of political informants — and the government maintains absolute control over all media.

Internally, China is still run by powerful, corrupt and elitist families, a tradition that goes back long before there was a Peoples Republic. Communism was a convenient means for them to consolidate control and ensure elite families were given preference by the government in lucrative commercial activities, especially banking and foreign trade. And, because most high government officials are also connected to elitist families, there is virtually no separation between the two.

So, while we might hope President Hu was not giving us a beauty contestant-like New Year’s speech about “world peace” and other such fluff, we know better. Ironically perhaps, it is now the “Year of the Dog” in China — and the dog is already biting the millions of hands that feed it.

Daniel Gallington is a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute in Arlington, Va. As bipartisan general counsel, he directed the Senate Intelligence Committee’s staff investigation into China’s influence of the 1996 U.S. election cycle.