WASHINGTON—A top U.S. general said on March 21 that he was planning to sit down with Google in the coming week, if not that day, to talk about its business in China.
General Joseph Dunford says that he sees U.S. tech companies moving into China as a threat to U.S. national security because of how China is able to acquire intellectual property (IP) from companies that do business there.
Google has reportedly been working on a heavily censored search engine for Beijing, called Dragonfly, which sparked a protest within Google when it was first revealed. That, combined with the company’s declining work with the U.S. military, has brought the company under scrutiny.
Last year, Google said it was no longer vying for a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the U.S. Defense Department, in part because the company’s new ethical guidelines do not align with the project.
In June, Google said it would not renew a contract to help the U.S. military analyze aerial drone imagery as the company sought to defuse an internal uproar over the deal.
While Dunford didn’t elaborate on the work that Google is doing in China, he said that any time a U.S. company works in China, there are risks.
“Typically, if a company does business in China, they’re automatically going to be required to have a cell of the Communist Party in that company. And that is going to lead to that IP from that company finding its way to the Chinese military,” he said at an event at the Atlantic Council in Washington.
Dunford said he recently looked at the U.S. National Defense Strategy from 1998 and found that it did not mention China as a concern.
That is no longer the case. In the 2018 National Defense Strategy, China was the first country mentioned and was characterized as a “strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South China Sea.
“Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security,” it said in the summary.
Chinese Communist Party Dominance
More than just transferring IP to the Chinese military, Dunford says he is worried that American-made AI systems are helping the “authoritarian government” in China keep a tight rein on its own people.
Using facial recognition technology, the Chinese regime has been tracking the movements of more than 2.5 million people in Xinjiang, a region that is home to Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic groups, as well as in Tibet.
“Six percent of the people in China belong to the Chinese Communist Party,” Dunford said. “So there is no question in my mind, that China will leverage technology to assist the 6 percent of the Chinese population in controlling the other 94 percent.”
He called it a “distinction without a difference” between the Chinese Communist Party, the government, and the Chinese military, and says Chinese leader Xi Jinping is very aware of the advantages of working with civilian tech companies to improve the country’s military capabilities.
This, Dunford says, should also be the United States’ advantage.
“You go back, certainly from WWII to today, the partnership that the United States military has with industry in the United States, our ability to tap into the intellectual capital—human capital, if you will—of the American people, the innovative ideas, and the production capacity has been what has made the U.S. military strong,” he said.
Dunford has been frustrated by U.S. tech companies that have gone into China, framing it as a smack in the face to U.S. national interest.
While China has preached a policy of non-interference and peaceful growth, it has for years been asserting itself in regional waters claimed by its neighbors.
It has also used Chinese companies to gain a foothold in countries that it later uses to its military benefit, or to extract resources. This, Dunford says, is part of China’s strategy to “establish pre-eminence, if not hegemony in the Pacific, and have global influence, and more importantly, attempt to modify the world order as we know it.”
China has reportedly been expanding its military base in Djibouti, a small African country on the Red Sea at the southern gateway to the Suez Canal, just miles from the United States’ Camp Lemmonier military base.
When the Sri Lankan government found difficulty paying off a $1.5 billion loan it owed Chinese investors in December 2017, it leased the strategic port of Hambantota to a major Hong Kong-based Chinese firm for 99 years. Other countries, such as Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Pakistan—which are also located in regions where China has considerable interests—have also accepted heavy Chinese loans.
“I think they have intentions today of challenging the U.S. military’s ability to project power into the Pacific and meet our alliance commitments,” Dunford said.
Reuters contributed to this report
