There has been quite a bit about the China trade deficit. Trump has proposed tariffs on Chinese imports until China treats US products fairly. The recent trade talks with Mexico and Canada are based on the knowledge that much of this NAFTA trade is really with China that send products like steel to Mexico and Canada, which is then incorporated into products imported by the US as north American manufactures.
Now we have evidence that China is more than a trade rival.
But that’s just what U.S. investigators found: The chips had been inserted during the manufacturing process, two officials say, by operatives from a unit of the People’s Liberation Army. In Supermicro, China’s spies appear to have found a perfect conduit for what U.S. officials now describe as the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies.
One official says investigators found that it eventually affected almost 30 companies, including a major bank, government contractors, and the world’s most valuable company, Apple Inc. Apple was an important Supermicro customer and had planned to order more than 30,000 of its servers in two years for a new global network of data centers. Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards.
This was an espionage act that infiltrated US Defense computer systems.
I have been convinced for some time that Russia is a stalking horse form Democrat politicians, like the Clintons, who have been bought and paid for by China.
One government official says China’s goal was long-term access to high-value corporate secrets and sensitive government networks. No consumer data is known to have been stolen.
The ramifications of the attack continue to play out. The Trump administration has made computer and networking hardware, including motherboards, a focus of its latest round of trade sanctions against China, and White House officials have made it clear they think companies will begin shifting their supply chains to other countries as a result. Such a shift might assuage officials who have been warning for years about the security of the supply chain—even though they’ve never disclosed a major reason for their concerns.
I do sometimes wonder at the violent opposition to the Trump China initiatives.
America’s leading business lobbies, which represent every sector of our economy, have declared all out war against President Trump’s trade tariffs.
Manufacturers, corporations of every size and shape, retail businesses, agricultural industries, and consumer groups — 45 associations in all — have joined forces to defeat the president’s plans to impose higher trade taxes on our long-standing trading partners and most loyal allies.
The largest of these organizations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents more than 3 million businesses nationwide, is launching an unprecedented campaign against the tariffs.
Is this ignorance or what ?
I think though that this move, on the part of the PRC, may be counterproductive. Read a book several years ago by Thomas Friedman (I think) titled (maybe) The Flat Earth. One of his theseses was that actual warfare with the Chinese was unlikely because of their position in the supply chain, and that they were in constant competition with other countries on the same rung. If it looked like a shooting war, companies like Apple and HP would be essentially shift their sourcing to companies in more reliable countries. The problem here is that they have probably burned themselves on this rung on the manufacturing supply chain. The Apples, HPs, etc are going to look askance at any Chinese manufactured components capable of hiding PRC PLA back doors or related malware.
China has been shifting some production to Vietnam. Fox Conn will have to decide which way to go.