The world is increasingly headed toward a major ideological conflict, as the democratic and free people of the world watch authoritarians and tyrants gain power and influence on a global scale.
Of these worrisome lurches toward tyranny, perhaps few are as troubling as what we’ve seen from Beijing, where the CCP has not only begun to commit literal genocide of the Uyghur people, but as the Chinese military continues to push the possibility of invading Taiwan.
Now, two of the world’s preeminent intelligence agencies are offering up warnings about China’s growing international influence, even going so far as to suggest that Beijing could be looking to interfere in US elections.
MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said the appearance at his agency’s headquarters was the first time FBI and MI5 leaders have held a public event together. He echoed a point Wray and U.S. politicians from both parties have been making in recent years — that a long-standing hope about China’s evolution had been dashed by its behavior under President Xi Jinping.
“The widespread Western assumption that growing prosperity within China and increasing connectivity with the West would automatically lead to greater political freedom has been shown to be plain wrong,” McCallum said. “But the Chinese Communist Party is interested in our democratic, media and legal systems. Not to emulate them, sadly, but to use them for its gain.”
And then…
Not long after the two officials spoke in London, the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center — which is part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — made public an unclassified bulletin warning of a broad effort by China to influence state and local government officials in the U.S.
“Some of the goals of [Chinese government] influence operations in the United States are to expand support for [People’s Republic of China] interests among state and local leaders and to use these relationships to pressure Washington for policies friendlier to Beijing,” the report says. “Leaders at the U.S. state, local, tribal, and territorial levels risk being manipulated to support hidden [Chinese government] agendas.”
The report says China offers free trips to state and local officials, seeks to exploit city-to-city partnerships and dangles economic investments in front of struggling localities, as long as they support Beijing’s interests.
Of course, one has to ask who would benefit from such interference, particularly as the Biden family’s financial ties to the Chinese government continue to be explored by the alternative media.
