China Says Its Navy Is Spying On America

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As if massive Chinese cyberespionage wasn’t enough, now China is indicating that it will – and already has – send ships and aircraft to spy on U.S. territory.

Australian strategic analyst Rory Medcalf saysthat while attending a session on maritime security at the Shangri-La Asian security conference in Singapore last week, a Chinese People’s Liberation Army senior colonel openly announced that in retaliation for U.S. surveillance patrols off the China coast, “China had ‘thought of reciprocating’ by ‘sending ships and planes to the US EEZ [exclusive economic zone]‘, and had in fact done so ‘a few times’, although not a daily basis.”

Medcalf further notes that:

From discussions with several maritime security experts in the margins of the conference, that rumors have been circulating for some time of China sending ships on missions to waters off US territory – not the continental US, but probably Hawaii and possibly Guam too. Still, this is the first time any of us can recall this point being made on the public record.

U.S. commanders have also confirmed that China “had started reciprocating’ the US navy’s habit of sending ships and aircraft into the 200-nautical-mile zone off China’s coast,” according to the Financial Times.

Lest the paranoids arise over Chinese black helicopters over Wyoming and South Carolina, or Chinese troops in Mexico, it’s important to note that an Exclusive Economic Zone, which gives a nation rights over natural resources such as fish and undersea minerals, comprises more than 12 million square kilometers for the U.S., including the East and West Coasts, Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico, and various Pacific islands such as Guam, Wake and American Samoa. Thus China can tweak America’s nose by sending patrol flights off distant Pacific possessions rather than Honolulu or Los Angeles.

From an intelligence collection standpoint, one hacker with a laptop in Shanghai can probably learn more than a hundred Chinese surveillance flights off Guam. Unlike the Soviets who turned Cuba into a gigantic listening post, China doesn’t have bases near the U.S., but it does have spy satellites. Besides, I’d be less interested in Chinese warships and more interested in what all those Chinese merchant vessels in U.S. ports are really up to.

In other words, this is not a security and intelligence issue, but a political one, and one that the U.S. has no moral standing to complain about. Ever since the Communists took over China in 1949, the U.S. has been operating surveillance flights along (and sometimes inside) its territory. Sometimes they were shot down in Cold War days, but even as late as 2001, a U.S. Navy EP-3 radio intelligence aircraft collided with a Chinese J-8 interceptor, and there are still confrontations today. Which is why these kinds of surveillance operations have the potential to become something worse.