China’s Military Preparing for ‘People’s War’ in Cyberspace, Space

China’s Military Preparing for

 ‘People’s War’ in Cyberspace, Space

China’s military is preparing for war in cyberspace involving space attacks on satellites and the use of both military and civilian personnel for a digital “people’s war,” according to an internal Chinese defense report.

“As cyber technology continues to develop, cyber warfare has quietly begun,” the report concludes, noting that the ability to wage cyber war in space is vital for China’s military modernization.

According to the report, strategic warfare in the past was built on nuclear weapons. “But strategic warfare in the information age is cyber warfare,” the report said.

“With the reliance of information warfare on space, cyberspace will surely become a hot spot in the struggle for cyberspace control,” the report said.

The new details of Chinese plans for cyber and space warfare were revealed in a report “Study on Space Cyber Warfare” by four engineers working at a Chinese defense research center in Shanghai.

The report presents a rare inside look of one of Beijing’s most secret military programs: Cyber warfare plans against the United States in a future conflict.

“Cyber warfare is not limited to military personnel. All personnel with special knowledge and skills on information system may participate in the execution of cyber warfare. Cyber warfare may truly be called a people’s warfare,” the report says.

People’s War was first developed by China’s Communist founder Mao Zedong as a Marxist-Leninist insurgency and guerrilla warfare concept. The article provides evidence that Chinese military theorists are adapting Mao’s peasant uprising stratagem for a future conflict with the United States.

A defense official said the report was recently circulated in military and intelligence circles. Its publication came as a surprise to many in the Pentagon because in the past, U.S. translations of Chinese military documents on similar warfighting capabilities were not translated under a directive from policy officials seeking to prevent disclosure of Chinese military writings the officials feared could upset U.S.-China relations.

A Chinese government spokesman could not be reached for comment. However, Chinese spokesmen in the past have denied reports that China engages in cyber attacks.

The study links China’s space warfare development programs with its extensive cyber warfare capabilities. Both programs are considered “trump card” weapons that would allow a weaker China to defeat a militarily stronger United States in a conflict.

“Cyber warfare is an act of war that utilizes space technology; it combines space technology and cyber technology and maintains and seizes the control of cyberspace,” the study says.

Because cyberspace relies on satellites, “space will surely be the main battlefield of cyber warfare,” the report said.

Satellites and space vehicles are considered the “outer nodes” of cyber space and “are clear targets for attack and may be approached directly,” the report said, adding that ground-based cyberspace nodes are more concealed and thus more difficult to attack.

Additionally, satellites have limited defenses and anti-jamming capabilities, leaving them very vulnerable to attack.

The report reveals that China’s military, which controls the country’s rapidly growing space program, is preparing to conduct space-based cyber warfare—“cyber reconnaissance, jamming, and attack”—from space vehicles.

Space-based cyber warfare will include three categories: space cyber attack, space cyber defense, and space cyber support. The space cyber support involves reconnaissance, targeting, and intelligence gathering.

“A space cyber-attack is carried out using space technology and methods of hard kill and soft kill,” the report said. “It ensures its own control at will while at the same time uses cyberspace to disable, weaken, disrupt, and destroy the enemy’s cyber actions or cyber installations.”

Soft-kill methods are designed to disrupt or damage cyberspace links using jamming, network cyber attacks, and “deceit” in the electromagnetic domain.

The cyber attacks include launching computer viruses, theft and tampering of data, denial of service attacks, and “detonation of [a] network bomb that can instantaneously paralyze or destroy enemy’s information network.”

“Soft kill measures are well concealed, fast in action, and the attack can be accomplished before the enemy even has time to discover it,” the report said. “Soft kill measures are deceptive and well hidden; they are difficult to detect and monitor.”

Hard-kill cyber attack weapons include missiles and other “kinetic” weapons along with directed energy, including lasers, radio frequency weapons, and particle beam weapons.

Chinese cyber warfare capabilities are one of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) most closely guarded secrets, along with its anti-satellite missile and jamming program.

The topic of military cyber warfare was recently discussed by U.S. and Chinese military and defense officials at a meeting earlier this month of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Washington.

The Washington Free Beacon obtained a copy of the recently translated report, dated December 2012 and published in the journal Aerospace Electronic Warfare.

The journal is a bimonthly publication of the Institute 8511, part of the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. (CASIC), a state-run missile manufacturer and high-technology aerospace research center.

Institute 8511 develops electronic warfare offense and defense weapons, countermeasure technologies, and command and control systems for aircraft and missiles.

The institute in the past also developed China’s DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile, a unique weapon that uses precision guidance to attack U.S. aircraft carriers at sea.

The defense official said Institute 8511 is located close to the PLA’s premier cyber warfare headquarters in Shanghai, known as Unit 61398. That unit was identified in a report last February by the security firm Mandiant as the main origin of widespread military cyber attacks on the West.

According to the report, China’s goal for cyber war calls for using high-technology weapons in cyberspace to achieve military objectives.

“Since cyberspace is boundless and transcends land, sea, air, and space, cyber warfare is not constrained by territorial land or territorial sea, and there is no difference between the front and the rear of the battlefield,” the report said. “The advantage of cyber warfare is its global nature; it has global alert, global resources, and global access.”

Additionally, war in cyberspace is not constrained by nighttime, weather, or geography and can be conducted at any time, key factors that have limited conventional warfighting in the past.

In line with Chinese military doctrine that calls for sudden attacks and the element of surprise, the report said cyberwarfare is ideal for rapid attacks that are difficult for an enemy to identify.

“This suddenness can often leave cyber warfare without a trace and without damaging the physical installation or personnel, and yet it can change the trend and outcome of war by affecting the operational effectiveness in an instance.”

A second recently translated military report by two PLA colonels calls for China to adopt a new military doctrine called “trump card and data link-centric warfare” that is based on the U.S. war fighting doctrine called “network-centric warfare.”

The two colonels, Sr. Col. Du Wenlong and Sr. Col. Xie Zhaohui, call for a new strategic concept designed to attack and defeat the United States using advanced command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, what the military calls C4ISR and the key to conducting combined arms warfare.

The colonels call for new weapons and other military capabilities “to penetrate and to strike as quickly as possible … and ensure that our military will win the warfare under the informatized conditions.”

“Should the United States military’s transformation model of ‘network-centric warfare’ become a success, it will undoubtedly and completely change the mode and means of warfare, making warfare even more sudden and its outcome even quicker to come, generating unmatched asymmetrical advantages,” the colonels said. “This will inevitably greatly strengthen its arrogance, enabling it to have its own way to an even bigger extent and to promote its politics of hegemony.”

Publication of the new cyber warfare report provides a more recent example of the contradiction between internal Chinese military writings and public statements. A 1999 book produced for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and edited by China specialist Michael Pillsbury first reveals the contradiction.

The book, “Chinese Views of Future Warfare,” influenced many senior Pentagon and military leaders’ views of China by showing that internal Chinese military writings discussed plans for war with the United States, considered China’s main enemy. The writings contrasted sharply with frequent public statements by China that its arms buildup is purely defensive and not directed at any country.

Richard Fisher, a Chinese military affairs expert, said the Chinese report reveals China’s merger of cyber warfare and space warfare efforts.

Fisher said the Chinese military understands that U.S. satellites are critical to relaying computer data traffic and are vulnerable to direct attack.

“China has already demonstrated two anti-satellite weapons: ground based lasers in 2006 and then the SC-19 [anti-satellite] missile in 2007. A higher Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) capable ASAT called DN02 may have been tested recently,” Fisher said.

China also is pressing for a space arms agreement at the same time it is building up its space forces, Fisher said.

“The bottom line today is that China’s first priority is building the means to win wars in space while using space diplomacy to disarm its potential enemies,” he said.

U.S. cyber warfare strategy was recently disclosed in a top-secret Presidential Policy Directive-20 that was made public by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The directive outlines the use of military cyber attacks that “can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance U.S. national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging.”

A third Chinese document from 2005 that was translated recently by the U.S. government reveals that Chinese military planners are preparing to destroy or disable up to eight Global Positioning System satellites. The satellites are critical for U.S. military precision guided missiles and bombs.

“Eliminating two groups of GPS satellites can prevent GPS satellites from providing navigation service around the clock,” the study stated. “The effect of dropping these GPS satellites on the navigation accuracy of GPS satellites is quite obvious,” the study, “Research on Voidness of GPS,” said.

Slaughtering a turtle Live

Meat safety problems

Regulation and the U.S.–China Dynamic

New regulations adopted by the United States will affect the international food supply chain

by By Eric D. Hargan and Kevin Qian

In the past, within living memory, food processing was largely a localized system with production facilities located near the source of the food product supply, the two linked by short and relatively simple logistics. Today the global food processing industry is estimated at more than $2 trillion in annual sales, with approximately 25% directly involving international import/export sourcing. Highly perishable foodstuffs like produce or seafood can reach processing facilities from other continents. New geopolitical demands are driven by food product safety fears about Salmonella contamination or terrorism, and these demands have created an extremely complex food supply and regulation dynamic.

Failure to understand the regulatory landscape can have dramatic repercussions on the food supply chain. Food product exporters must be well informed about food safety and the customs rules and regulations of every country to which their products are shipped, particularly any chemical tolerance, quarantine, or inspection requirements. The uninformed can incur significant, unexpected expenses, ranging from storage charges for quarantine to actual loss of a shipment that is rejected by inspectors or customs and safety officials.

China’s Importance in the Food Chain

China’s export of food to the United States clearly illustrates these dynamics. Of the $80 billion in food that the United States imports each year, about 15% of total U.S. food consumption, food and food products from China play an increasingly important role. China and the United States recognized the continuing increase in Chinese food imports with the negotiation of a Memorandum of Agreement in 2007. The agreement covered food and feed and called for wide-ranging initiatives by the two governments.

Nearly 3.5% of the total food supply sourced outside the United States comes from China, which has more food facilities registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration than either Canada or Mexico.

The European Union, Canada, and Mexico are the top food exporters to the United States, but China’s share is growing rapidly. In the past decade, the value of Chinese processed food and commodity imports has more than tripled, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Nearly 3.5% of the total food supply sourced outside the United States comes from China, which has more food facilities registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) than either Canada or Mexico. In the last year, the FDA established three new offices in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, and dedicated food regulatory staff there.

Chinese food exporters need to understand the details and implications of the U.S. food regulation approach, which focuses on quality at the production end and compliance at the import end.

U.S. Production Standards

All food manufacturing facilities exporting to the United States must comply with the FDA’s good manufacturing practices (GMPs), which include standards for worker sanitation, plant construction, and cleanliness. When the FDA conducts surveillance and investigation of a food processing facility for GMP compliance, it may review everything from production history and firm management to direct observation of “objectionable conditions” and “deficiencies,” terms used in FDA Form 483 inspection reports. Inspection is carried out by a complex regulatory system that includes the FDA center that regulates most processed food products, the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, and FDA’s Office of Regulatory Affairs, as well as the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which inspect meat and poultry.

The FDA may reject any food for import if it appears to be adulterated, misbranded, or in violation of the law. The agency may also require food that is noncompliant to be relabeled, reconditioned, refused, detained, seized, or destroyed. This rejection can be based on examination, the food producer’s prior history, or even the appearance of being in violation of FDA standards. Therefore, food producers in China and other countries who export to the United States should meet, as closely as possible, FDA production and safety standards in their own country.

Even though U.S. regulatory requirements are often confusing, Chinese food supply companies must meet U.S. sanitation and safety standards if they want to expand their presence in the American market.

In its inspections, the FDA now uses a standard for food safety, formerly used for food aesthetics, called “otherwise unfit for food.” Due to increasing public demand for food safety, as well as changing expectations at the FDA, food producers in China and other countries must now exercise more collective responsibility throughout the supply chain. They must know the origin of food commodities, verify production compliance with all applicable U.S. laws, and supply all required documentation, including the food manufacturer registration number.

Producers in China must also be prepared to deal with the growing regulatory shift to computer-assisted risk analysis, which includes systems such as the FDA’s Prior Notice System Interface and the anticipated Predictive Risk-Based Evaluation for Dynamic Import Compliance Targeting system. To pass such computer-assisted assessments, food exporters must be able to track and document, to the satisfaction of the FDA, the path of food products “from farm to fork.” This information is vital for compliance with the second half of the food regulatory equation: proper documentation for import into the U.S.

Import Standards

In May 2009, the FDA finalized a rule and compliance policy guide explaining the new requirements for food imported, or offered for import, into the United States. These new rules build on the FDA’s authority to reject imported food products. Differences between the FDA rules and those of the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency can be confusing and challenging for Chinese exporters.

The new rules require that the FDA be given prior notice of the importation of food: a minimum of two hours for arrival by road, four hours for arrival by air or rail, and eight hours for arrival by water. Maximum notice times range from 15 to 30 days.

The new rules also require facilities to register with the FDA if they manufacture, process, pack, or hold food for human or animal consumption in the United States. For example, food that is not in its natural state may not be imported into the United States unless the FDA receives the name of the manufacturer and either the registration number, city, and country of the manufacturer, or the full address and the reason the registration number is not provided. The FDA’s list of acceptable reasons for not providing a registration number is very limited.

Failure to provide prior notice of imports can result in the United States refusing entry of the food. If entry is denied, the food will be held at the port of entry, unless the CBP agrees that it may be exported under its supervision, or either the FDA or CBP directs delivery to another location. The FDA can also bring civil or criminal charges in federal court or seek debarment of an importer. Importers should remember that if they attempt to bring in food articles from a food manufacturer that is not registered (so that the importer cannot provide its registration number), entry might be refused because the identity of the facility is incomplete. Clearly, importers must know the identity of the manufacturer and its registration number.

The CBP’s requirement that the “country of origin” of the food be identified can be confusing. “Country of production” and “country of origin” are not the same. For example, if beans grown in the United States are sent to China to be canned and then exported back to the United States, the CBP “country of origin” is the United States, but the FDA “country of production” is China. In this case, the FDA defines the “article of food” as canned beans.

Another looming issue is that of food additives, a challenge illustrated by the melamine issue of 2006-2007. FDA approval is required for food additives. Even though many additives are generally recognized as safe, like sugar and spices, or are previously approved, some exporters fail to recognize that the standard applies to them. Some do not understand the stringency of the standard. A tough approval standard requires demonstrating with reasonable certainty that the additive presents no harm to consumers. More sophisticated scientific standards are making these approvals harder to obtain, and consumer attitudes also play a greater role than ever before. Consumer petitions or preferences, such as eating more foods that contain a certain additive, may lead the FDA to reconsider its prior approval of a specific additive.

Regulatory Integration

Even though U.S. regulatory requirements are often confusing, Chinese food supply companies must meet U.S. sanitation and safety standards if they want to expand their presence in the American market. The International Conference on Harmonisation of compliance standards, which focuses on the United States, Japan, and the European Union, is conducting outreach to producers in countries such as China, India, and Brazil to foster greater integration of regulatory standards among countries. In addition, the presence of FDA food experts in China will help transform the China-U.S. food system into an integrated whole.

As China and other countries begin integrating their food regulatory standards with those of the United States, the FDA is unlikely to accept as definitive the agency decisions of other countries. Even though the FDA is pursuing the use of third-party certification, which could include the Chinese government as a certifier for safety and manufacturing compliance overseas, it is much more likely that the FDA will cooperate with, and rely upon, other countries’ agencies in formulating its own decisions. Either way, food safety is the primary concern. The FDA’s regulation of the entire chain—from production to distribution to consumption—is one that food producers from China and every other country must accommodate in order to be a player in the U.S. market. ■

China’s Food Safety Problems

Why Americans Should Worry About China’s Food Safety Problems

By Stanley Lubman
If a diner in the U.S. consumes a lunch of tilapia, mushrooms and spinach, there’s a decent chance the entire meal was imported from China. And the overwhelming odds are that none of those foods were inspected by the Food and Drug Administration when they arrived in the U.S.
This week’s revelation that nearly half the rice sold in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou was found to be tainted with cadmium is just the latest in a long string of eye-catching stories that illustrate the dangers of eating in China. But lost in the exhaustive media coverage of the polluted foods that find their way on to Chinese tables are serious questions about what happens — or doesn’t happen — when Chinese food products make their way into the U.S.
Chinese food product imports to the U.S. are continuing to rise, but inspections in both China and the U.S. aren’t keeping pace, posing a growing danger to consumers. Many of the imports are used by restaurants, institutions and food processors; as a result, consumers see no labels, keeping them unaware of the origins of what they’re ingesting.

Getty Images

Chinese imports dominate some food categories to a striking extent. In a testimony before a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in May (pdf), food safety expert Patty Lovera noted that China accounted for 80% of tilapia, 51% of cod, 49% of apple juice, 34% of processed mushrooms, 27% of garlic and 16% of frozen spinach consumed in the U.S. in 2011.
Reports on the state of Chinese food processing establishments are discouraging. More than half of food processing and packaging firms on the Chinese mainland failed safety inspections in 2011, according to a report by Asia Inspection, a China-based food quality control company. Meanwhile, in the U. S., inspections of imported food products are minute compared to the total volume of imports. According to a recent study by the Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee in 2011, FDA inspections were a mere 2.3 % of the total of all imported food products (pdf).
The same study states that food imports generally have risen 10% annually since 2004, and are continuing to rise (imports grew from $399 million in 2011 to $426 million in 2012). The FDA estimates that food imports from China and India will grow by 9% annually between 2010 and 2020.
The flow of reports in recent years from domestic and foreign sources alike about serious violations of food safety in China has been continuous and alarming. In the last year alone, the country has seen thousands of dead pigs show up in a major river, faced multiple milk scandals and busted operations that were passing off rat meat as mutton. In addition, as Patty Lovera told Congress, there is “widespread smuggling of products like honey to avoid tariffs and food safety restrictions [and] mislabeled products ‘transshipped’ through another country but produced in China.”
Food safety problems are, of course, not only a concern to the U.S. The German magazine Der Spiegel recently posted online a list of “rejected food” imported into the EU from China during 2012, including insect-infested potatoes, rabbit meat loaded with antibiotics, oyster sauce with staphylococcus, salmonella-infected ginger, pumpkin seeds contaminated with glass chips and arsenic in frozen calamari.
American history of the late 19th and early 20th century reminds us that periods of rapid economic growth stimulate fraud and deception in food processing, which leads to increased regulation. As I noted in an earlier column, it wasn’t until author Upton Sinclair aroused public concern with “The Jungle,” his 1906 book on conditions in the Chicago meat packaging industry, that President Theodore Roosevelt moved to create the FDA.
An ongoing cooperative agreement between the United States and China on attacking common food safety should theoretically provide a foundation on which effective actions could be taken to help deal with quality issues in products destined for the U.S. First signed in 2007, the agreement between the FDA and China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine was renewed for another five years in December.
Under the terms of the agreement, the FDA conducts workshops on U.S. requirements for certain high-risk foods such as farm-raised fish and engages in outreach that enhances Chinese food safety officials’ understanding of American standards and practices. After signing the original agreement, the FDA also opened offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, but that has not led to significantly increased inspections of Chinese food facilities, which totaled only 85 in 2011.
The current relative coolness of U.S.-China relations suggests that prospects of increasing official cooperation, involving even the non-political issue of food safety, are slim. Against that background, Congress might do well to consider increasing the FDA’s budget for inspections. Meanwhile, U.S. foundations, NGOs and government agencies should explore the possibility of funding Chinese NGOs that focus on improving food safety in China. With Chinese regulators seeming unable to control contamination, it may fall to the country’s increasingly rights-conscious citizens to force better enforcement of food safety laws.
Stanley Lubman, a long-time specialist on Chinese law, is a Distinguished Lecturer in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. He is the author of “Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China After Mao” (Stanford University Press, 1999) and editor of “The Evolution of Law Reform in China: An Uncertain Path” (Elgar, 2012).

China condemns U.S. Senate over sea dispute resolution

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BEIJING (Reuters) – China said on Thursday it had lodged a formal complaint with the United States after the U.S. Senate passed a resolution expressing concern about Chinese actions in the disputed East and South China Seas.

The U.S. resolution, passed on Monday, listed several examples of worrying Chinese behaviour, including China’s issuing of an official map defining the contested South China Sea as within its national border and of Chinese surveillance ships entering waters disputed with Japan in the East China Sea.

China has repeatedly urged the United States not to get involved in either dispute.

“The above resolution proposed by a minority of senators took heed of neither history nor facts, unjustifiably blaming China and sending the wrong message,” China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“China expresses its strong opposition, and has already made stern representations with the U.S. side. We urge the relevant senators to respect the facts and correct their mistakes in order to avoid further complicating the issue and the regional situation,” it added.

Territorial claims by Japan and China over uninhabited islets and the resource-rich waters in the East China Sea, as well as China’s claims over the South China Sea, rank as some of Asia’s biggest security risks.

Chinese President Xi Jinping told his Politburo on Wednesday the country wanted to resolve its maritime territorial disputes peacefully and through talks, but would not compromise on sovereignty and had to step up its defensive capabilities.

Tension over the East China Sea has escalated this year, with China and Japan scrambling fighter jets and ordering patrol ships to shadow each other, raising fear that a miscalculation could lead to a broader clash.

The Philippines and Vietnam have also accused Beijing of becoming more aggressive in their disputes with China in the strategically located and energy-rich South China Sea.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard)