The U.S. intelligence community needs to deepen its understanding of China by leveraging more diverse technologies and approaches, such as artificial intelligence, to address the multifaceted challenges posed by the Communist regime to global freedom and security, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said Monday.
If the United States cannot accurately predict and understand Beijing’s intentions and character, we will continue to have difficulty understanding how and why the Chinese Communist Party leadership makes decisions,” Adam Schiff, a Democrat, said Monday at a videoconference hosted by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. As a consequence, we will be unable to develop effective policy responses.”
Schiff said the U.S. intelligence community has neglected to pay attention to the growing threat posed by China in recent decades. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he said, the U.S. intelligence community has devoted resources to countering terrorism and defending the U.S. homeland.
While these (counterterrorism) measures have been necessary and largely successful, our ability and resources to devote to other important missions, such as China’s affairs, have diminished during this period,” he said. China, for its part, continues to reinvent itself, focusing on its own goals and placing its revitalization at the center of domestic and foreign policy. This laid the groundwork for the growth of China as a competitor to the United States. China has simultaneously shown economic dynamism and political retreat. Most worrisome is China’s pursuit of totalitarian tactics, which pose a direct challenge to the notion of liberal democracy.”
Schiff said the biggest misunderstanding the United States has about China is the assumption that China’s economic growth and integration into the world will lead to political liberalization. He said, “It has taken us a long time to fully realize that the Chinese government has found a way to both raise the economic standard of living of its people and to control the country in a regressive way, both politically and rhetorically.”
The U.S. House Intelligence Committee released a report in late September assessing the intelligence agencies’ ability to deal with China. The report says the global impact of the new coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan last year underscores how a crisis originating in China can have far-reaching transnational effects.
In a videoconference Monday, Schiff re-emphasized the report’s recommendations for the U.S. intelligence community, calling on it to use open-source information and high-technology tools such as artificial intelligence to fully understand the workings of the Chinese bureaucracy from the inside out.
He said the amount of open-source information coming from China is increasing dramatically. “We need to be confident that our intelligence agencies can simultaneously comb through and determine which of these vast amounts of information are truly of intelligence value, and then use well-trained technical means to effectively make qualitative assessments.”
Schiff emphasized that the U.S. intelligence community must be able to identify how Chinese officials are interacting internally and any changes in nuance.
He said, “While those views that are at odds with Xi are increasingly being muted within the Chinese government, exploring and understanding any different ideas that emerge within the Chinese bureaucracy is a worthwhile endeavor, particularly regarding the consultative relationship between the CCP (central government) and the local leadership.”
The House Intelligence Committee’s assessment said that the early emergence of the Xinguan epidemic in Hubei province, from the first unidentified cases of pneumonia in Wuhan in mid-December 2019 to the CCP’s decision to seal the city on Jan. 22, 2020, was marked by a variety of opaque practices that raised questions about China’s ability to respond to a domestic crisis with international reach.
What Xi and other key leaders in Beijing knew, and when they learned of the seriousness of the situation, the report says, is controversial among outside analysts.
The emergence of the Xinguan epidemic in China has created a possible scenario in which the provincial leadership and government fail to act for fear of punishment from their superiors,” the report says. The fact that these provincial departments are, in practice, responsible for large numbers of people deserves further attention and analysis by international observers because of the potential for it to affect global affairs. …… The Xincrown epidemic highlights the importance of the ability of U.S. policymakers to have a deep understanding and insight into the dynamics of provincial government in China, particularly between the central leadership and the Provincial departmental relationships.”
On top of that, Schiff said, the intelligence community can leverage artificial intelligence to analyze large amounts of public data and gain insight into public health crises like the new coronavirus.
“If you go and study the public advisory of commercial satellite imagery of hospital parking lots in parts of China and combine that data with other relevant data, you can get an idea of whether a pandemic is breaking out.”
A more thorough understanding of the Chinese government’s intentions by the intelligence community would help U.S. diplomacy on global issues, such as climate change, he said. “We can’t be naive. China likes to portray itself as a leader on climate issues. We know that they are doubling down on exporting fossil fuel-dependent energy technologies because it’s in their own direct economic interest to do so,”
Adam Schiff played a leading role in House proceedings to impeach President Trump earlier this year and has been accused by the president of being a “corrupt politician.”
In response to the House Intelligence Committee, which Schiff heads, recently stepped up its focus on the Chinese threat, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said in late September, “I’m pleased to see that Congress recognizes what I’ve been saying since I was nominated, which is that China poses more of a national security threat to the United States than from any other country The threat.”
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