As Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping readied to assume the Chinese presidency in 2013, U.S. intelligence was already at a disadvantage due to a lessened ability to understand the inner workings of the country during its biggest political transition in decades, Foreign Policy reported in a study of Beijing's hacking prowess.
The Office of Personnel Management hack, which helped the Chinese identify undercover U.S. intelligence officials, as well as the eradication of the CIA's network of Chinese assets served as twin disasters that significantly "affected the quality of insight" into that country, according to a former U.S. national security official.
As this was happening, Beijing was significantly boosting its hacking abilities that would see unprecedented amounts of data stolen and fed into an increasingly sophisticated intelligence apparatus.
The trend continued as Xi consolidated power, often in a brutal fashion, at the same time Chinese spies continued ransacking Americans' data at an almost Olympian scale.
In response, U.S. national security officials were becoming increasingly incensed and the Obama administration started to take more aggressive steps against Chinese cyberspying.
But even with a more aggressive stance, senior U.S. officials under Obama still believed they could find mutual cooperation in certain areas with the Chinese, which Foreign Policy said led to more opportunities for Beijing to increase espionage activities.
By the end of the Obama administration, it was clear China had overtaken Russia in its hacking abilities, and by 2016, senior U.S. national security officials had fought back, for example by increasing scrutiny of the Chinese telecommuincations giant ZTE.
This set the tone for the Trump administration to focus on the symbiotic relationship between China's security apparatus and its private sector giants.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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