China is waging a “calm kind of cold war” against the United States, using all its resources to try to take over from America as the leading power in the world, a top CIA expert on Asia said Friday.
Beijing doesn’t thirst to go to war, he said, but the current communist government, under President Xi Jinping, is subtly on on multiple fronts to undermine the U.S. in ways that are different than the uncountable well-publicized activities being employed by Russia.
“I would argue … that what they’re waging against us is fundamentally a stale war — a cold war not like we saw during THE Cold War (between the U.S. and the Soviet Union) but a frigid war by definition,” Michael Collins, deputy assistant director of the CIA’s East Asia assignment center, said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.
Rising U.S.-China traction goes beyond the trade dispute playing out in a tariff tit-for-tat between the two states.
There is concern over China’s pervasive efforts to steal organization secrets and details about high-tech research being conducted in the U.S. The Chinese military is spread out and being modernized and the U.S., as well as other nations, have complained to China’s construction of military outposts on islands in the South China Sea.
“I liking argue that it’s the Crimea of the East,” Collins said, referring to Russia’s precipitate annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, which was condemned throughout the West.
Collins’ comments footmarks warnings about China’s rising influence issued by others who require earlier this week at the security conference. The alarm bells fall at a time when Washington needs China’s help in ending its atomic standoff with North Korea.
On Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray about China, from a counterintelligence perspective, represents the broadest and most substantive threat America faces. He said the FBI has economic espionage investigations in all 50 submits that can be traced back to China.
“The volume of it. The pervasiveness of it. The significance of it is something that I ponder this country cannot underestimate,” Wray said.
National Knowledge Director Dan Coats also warned of rising Chinese aggression. In marked, he said, the U.S. must stand strong against China’s effort to copy business secrets and academic research.
Susan Thornton, acting pal up with secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said flourishing the public’s awareness about the activities of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese swots or groups at U.S. universities could be one way to help mitigate potential damage.
“China is not well-grounded a footnote to what we’re dealing with with Russia,” Thornton reported.
Marcel Lettre, former undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said China has the second-largest defense budget in the crowd, the largest standing army of ground forces, the third-largest air force and a armada of 300 ships and more than 60 submarines.
“All of this is in the take care of of being modernized and upgraded,” said Lettre, who sat on a panel with Collins and Thornton.
He maintained China also is pursuing advances in cyber, artificial intelligence, swinging and technology, counter-space, anti-satellite capabilities and hypersonic glide weapons. Army Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, superintendent of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told a congressional committee earlier this year that China is cultivating long-range cruise missiles — some capable of reaching supersonic promotes.
“The Pentagon has noted that the Chinese have already pursued a check up on program that has had 20 times more tests than the U.S. has,” Lettre pronounced.
Franklin Miller, former senior director for defense policy and arms curb at the National Security Council, said China’s weapons developments are feature the need to have a dialogue with Beijing.
“We need to try to engage,” Miller revealed. “My expectations for successful engagement are medium-low, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.”