Chinese intelligence probably knows where you live. "Chinese hackers that gained access to U.S. telecommunications networks in a sweeping cybersecurity breach were able to use their positioning to geolocate millions of individuals and record phone calls at will, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology Anne Neuberger told reporters." The expertise to achieve this may have come, in part, from elsewhere.
China has its own "H1B" program, known as TT, or the "Thousand Talents" program. The New York Times described how "for years, China’s Thousand Talents recruitment plan attracted U.S. scientists with its grants." Georgetown documented six different Chinese talent recruitment plans, all designed to entice foreign researchers, academics, administrators, or entrepreneurs to relocate to the PRC to enhance China’s strategic science and technology capabilities.
The FBI described how these talent plans worked. "China oversees hundreds of talent plans. All incentivize its members to steal foreign technologies needed to advance China’s national, military, and economic goals. ... Individuals with expertise in or access to a technology that China doesn’t have are preferred. Participants enter into a contract with a Chinese university or company—often affiliated with the Chinese government—that usually requires them to: Subject themselves to Chinese laws ... recruit other experts into the program—often their own colleagues ...Talent plan participants are offered multiple financial, personal, and professional benefits in exchange for their efforts."
This is not a new game. The USSR initially acquired Nazi expertise at gunpoint, under Operation Osoaviakhim. Following the end of World War II, the experts of a defeated Germany were abducted en masse to the USSR. "Soviet officers accompanied by a translator as well as an armed soldier stopped by the homes of German specialists, ordering them to pack their belongings. Trucks and trains had been prepared and were standing ready for the immediate transport of around 6,500 people against their will." Operation Osoaviakhim was rivaled by the American Operation Paperclip, "a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II." In comparison to the prison-like conditions of Osoaviakhim, Paperclip recruits lived well and rose to respected positions in America. One Paperclip alumnus, Wernher von Braun, played a key role in the Cold War space race, including the development of the Saturn V which landed the first men on the moon.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, it not only lost much of its ability to recruit Western scientists, but actually lost a part of its talent pool as STEM people left for the West, particularly the United States and Israel, where they could continue their research with better financial support and resources. It is widely believed that the US won the Cold War against the USSR in research and development labs and startup companies, rather than on "hot" battlefields. Cold War II against China may prove to be the same story. Just as there was an Operation Osoaviakhim versus Operation Paperclip, there is an H1B vs "Thousand Talents." But the end of this new story is yet unwritten.
Constantinople famously fell to the Ottomans because it lost the technology race. The Byzantines felt safe behind the Theodosian Walls, whose massive thickness proved proof against the Huns, Goths, and later, the Avars and Slavs. The inner wall was 16 and a half feet thick, and was itself girded by an outer wall nearly seven feet wide. The whole was surrounded by a moat. For 800 years, they stood against the world. But eventually times changed. The Hungarian Orban, an iron founder and engineer from Brassó, Transylvania found a way to cast large-caliber artillery. The walls were no longer proof.
Orban was Hungarian ... some scholars also mention his potential German ancestry. Alternative theories suggest he had Wallachian roots. Laonikos Chalkokondyles used the term Dacian to describe him. ... He had offered his services to the Byzantines in 1452, a year before the Ottomans attacked the city, but the Byzantine emperor Constantine XI could not afford Orban's high salary nor did the Byzantines possess the materials necessary for constructing such a large siege cannon. Orban then left Constantinople and approached the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, who was preparing to besiege the city.
Mehmed hired him, and Orban cast his monstrous gun. Named the Basilic, it was capable of firing stone balls weighing around 1,200 pounds (540 kg) — equal to a World War II 12-inch battlecruiser projectile — over a distance of about one mile (1.6 km). It was built within three months at Adrianople, and was so large that it required 90 oxen and 400 men to move it to Constantinople. The walls came down, and Byzantium was doomed. In the present Cold War against China, there's a political and national security argument for increasing the percentage of native-born STEM talent vis-à-vis foreign born. It is in some respects this is an onshoring problem, a supply chain precaution. But for as long as the education system fails to produce domestically, there will be imports.
Fewer than one in five US university graduates chooses the STEM field. While the percentage is growing, it still represents a minority of the total degrees awarded in the United States, with the majority going to other fields including liberal arts, business, and social sciences. The National Science Foundation says scores stalled, for reasons yet unknown, ten years ago. "This low international ranking of the United States in mathematics is consistent with the lack of improvement in student achievement for more than a decade. Mathematics scores for Black, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaska Native students persistently lag behind the scores of their White and Asian peers. Among fourth graders in 2019, scores in mathematics were 18–25 points lower for students in these racial or ethnic minority groups than for White students; this gap was even wider (24–32 points) among eighth-graders (Figure 2). Asian students consistently outperformed all other groups in both grades 4 and 8."
For years, the New World has sheltered behind two great oceans, confident in their impregnability. What could breach those Theodosian Walls? No one can say, except to be sure that some foe is working on it.
