As a U.S.-China trade deal hangs in the balance and the world’s two largest economies are locked in a race for technological supremacy, concerns have arisen about China’s counterintelligence threat to the United States. In July 2019, FBI Director Christopher Wray told members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that China poses the most severe counterintelligence threat to the United States than any other country, and described that national security and economic espionage threat as “deep and diverse and wide and vexing.” He noted that the FBI has to contend not only with Chinese officials but also with “nontraditional collectors,” including Chinese scientists and students who are looking to steal American innovation. There are currently multiple legislative proposals in Congress, all of which, in one way or another, are aimed at limiting university collaboration with Chinese nationals and the education of Chinese nationals in “strategic” research fields by U.S. higher education institutions.

These legislative endeavors, however, argues Arthur Bienenstock, co-chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Scientific Partnerships, may endanger the U.S. science and technology workforce and limit the effectiveness of U.S. academic research, thus weakening the very fields the nation is most anxious to protect.

Bienenstock is also a member of the National Science Board, the governing body of the National Science Foundation, and former associate director for science of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. At Stanford, he is special assistant to the President for federal research policy, associate director of the Wallenberg Research Link, and professor emeritus of photon science. At a recent lecture hosted by APARC’s China Program, Bienenstock discussed some of the proposed legislation and federal acts regarding international scientific collaboration with China and their implications for the U.S. scientific workforce. He cautioned U.S policymakers against an expansive interpretation of what constitutes “sensitive research” in strategic areas, such as artificial intelligence and quantum science, and offered a framework for determining when scientific research should be subject to greater control.

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We must come to terms with reality, claimed Bienenstock, presenting evidence that the United States is no longer the dominant funder of science and technology research; that Chinese nationals constitute a very significant portion of the U.S. workforce in computer science, engineering, and mathematics; and that the U.S. science and technology workforce is highly dependent on Chinese graduate students.

The United States must maintain and strengthen its scientific and technological efforts if it is to maintain a leadership position, Bienenstock said. To do so, he emphasized, U.S. universities must maintain their openness, and lawmakers, in turn, must thoughtfully understand the benefits of collaboration with Chinese scientists and engineers as well as keep the country attractive for Chinese students.

Listen to highlights from Bienenstock’s presentation on our SoundCloud channel. A transcript is available below.

Photo: Arthur Bienenstock (right) and APARC DIrector Gi-Wook Shin (credit: Andrea Brown).

For more than two weeks now, a stream of current and former U.S. officials, this week including Amb. Bill Taylor, have described to Congressional committees the White House’s sordid effort to outsource American foreign policy to the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who sought to advance the personal political interests of Donald Trump. Faced with compelling testimonies to the effect that the president subverted U.S. national interests to his own, the White House has begun to trash those officials.

Even for this White House, that is a despicable new low.

The testimonies make clear that President Trump insisted on a quid pro quo, as his Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney confirmed in an October 17 press conference (he later tried to walk it back, but watch the video of the press conference). The president wanted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate a long-debunked charge about former Vice President Joe Biden, his possible opponent in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. President Trump also wanted the Ukrainians to check whether the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail servers might have ended up in, of all places, Ukraine (no one has offered evidence to suggest that they have).

Smoking guns are the stuff of spy movies. In real-life intelligence-gathering, they are exceptionally rare. That’s why the business of intelligence typically requires collecting and analyzing fragments of information—putting together secret nuggets with unclassified information—to try to make sense of complex reality. If nothing else, the whistle-blower who filed a complaint against President Donald Trump clearly followed his or her training. SECOND PARAGRAPH I’ve spent 20 years reading intelligence reports and researching the U.S. intelligence community. And I’m not automatically inclined to believe the worst allegations about any administration; everyone has agendas and incentives to reveal information, some more noble than others. Trump and his allies have dismissed the complaint as hearsay and accused the whistle-blower of acting on political motives. But a close reading of the whistle-blower’s lengthy complaint, which accuses Trump of “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” yields a lot of concrete leads for investigators to follow.

Here are three things I learned:

Read the rest at The Atlantic

Formed in 1979, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) works to provide policymakers with the U.S. intelligence community’s best judgments on crucial international issues. As a locus for coordinated intelligence analysis, the NIC’s work reflects the coordinated judgments of multiple agencies and departments in the broader intelligence community. But while it may be less shrouded in secrecy than many other intelligence offices, in some respects it is less well known.

In Truth to Power, published by Oxford University Press, editors Robert Hitchings and Gregory Treverton shed light on this little-understood intelligence agency. The volume provides the first-ever history of the NIC as recounted through the reflections of its eight chairs in the period from the end of the Cold War until 2017. APARC Fellow Thomas Fingar, who chaired the NIC from 2005 to 2008, is one of the contributors to the book.

In his chapter “New Mission, New Challenges”, Fingar discusses some of the challenges during his service with the agency. In particular, he reflects on two specific obstacles he faced during his tenure: executing the intelligence reforms drafted in the wake of 9/11, and repairing damage done to the NIC’s credibility by the failures of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

During his tenure, Fingar wore not one but two hats; along with the NIC chairmanship, he concurrently served as deputy director of national intelligence for analysis (DDNI/A). He describes actions taken not only to restore confidence in the intelligence community, but also to effectively execute its expanded brief. For instance, having national intelligence officers take the DDNI’s seat at meetings afforded senior officials the opportunity to perceive their value and thereby rebuild confidence in the broader intelligence community.

The Council’s reforms would soon be put to the test by way of the production of an NIE on Iranian WMD. Fingar recognized that the estimate would be a strong indicator of whether the NIC had learned its lessons following the flawed 2002 Iraq WMD estimate, and that policymakers were certain to finely examine the end product for flaws (whether made unintentionally or with political purposes in mind). As such, Fingar needed to produce an NIE that was accurate, timely, and non-political, all while handling and incorporating newly received intelligence. Through the Iran NIE, Fingar found an opportunity to redress the often-fraught relationship between Congress and the intelligence community.

Fingar closes with a review of the NIC’s pathbreaking work in the area of climate change. At the behest of a U.S. senator, the NIC took on the task of producing an NIE on the strategic implications of climate change. The resulting study categorized countries according to both their vulnerabilities and ability to manage impacts, as well as the broader implications it had for U.S. national security over the next twenty years. And while policymakers ultimately did not use the report as Fingar had hoped, he takes justified comfort in pointing out how it laid the groundwork for additional reports that followed, such as the National Research Council’s 2013 report Climate Change and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis.

Read Fingar's Chapter

Thirty years ago this week, I watched the news from Beijing and started shredding my bedding. It was the night before my college graduation, I had been studying Chinese politics, and news had broken that college students just like us had been gunned down in Tiananmen Square after weeks of peaceful and exhilarating democracy protests—carried on international TV. In the iconic square where Mao Zedong had proclaimed the People’s Republic decades before, bespectacled students from China’s best universities had camped out, putting up posters with slogans of freedom in Chinese and English. A “goddess of democracy” figure modeled after the Statue of Liberty embodied their hopes—and ours—for political liberation in China.

On my campus back then were just a handful of students majoring in East Asian studies. Learning of the brutal crackdown in Beijing, we somehow found one another, gathered our friends, and stayed up making hundreds of white armbands for classmates to wear at commencement the next day. Grappling with the cold realities of the “real world” we were about to enter, we didn’t know what else to do. So we tore sheets and cried for what might have been.

The June 4, 1989, massacre was a horrifying spectacle that the Chinese government has sought to erase from national memory ever since. But, 30 years later, contemplating what might have been is more important than ever. In hindsight, Tiananmen Square serves as a continuing reminder about just how much China has defied, and continues to defy, the odds and predictions of experts. The fact is that generations of American policy makers, political scientists, and economists have gotten China wrong more often than they’ve gotten China right. In domestic politics, economic development, and foreign policy, China has charted a surprising path that flies in the face of professional prognostications, general theories about anything, and the experience of other nations.

Read the rest at The Atlantic

We are delighted to announce that APARC’s Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow David M. Lampton is the recipient of the 2019 John and Vivian Sabel Award for best article published in the Journal of Contemporary China (JCC), for his article “Xi Jinping and the National Security Commission: Policy Coordination and Political Power.”

Lampton’s article discusses the rationale for, and progress to date of, creating a National Security Commission in China. First announced in late 2013, the commission was part of Xi Jinping's drive to consolidate his personal power over the internal and external coercive and diplomatic arms of the governing structure. Lampton argues that it remains to be seen whether the institutional attempt to achieve coordination will improve, or further complicate, China's long-standing coordination problem.

The John and Vivian Sabel Award was launched in 2016 to celebrate publication of the 100th issue and the 25th anniversary of the JCC. Dr. Lampton’s article was published in Volume 24, Issue 95, 2015.

An award reception and dinner will be held at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver on April 30, 2019.