China's State Terrorism

Fingers Point to China After Break-Ins Target New Zealand Professor

By Charlotte Graham-McLay

Prof. Anne-Marie Brady’s focus on the Chinese Communist Party’s growing influence overseas has prompted the February burglary of her home in Christchurch, New Zealand.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A burglary targeting a New Zealand professor who has examined the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in Western countries has drawn the interest of Interpol and other police agencies.
Prof. Anne-Marie Brady, a China specialist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, said her home was burglarized in February while she and her family were out. 

The thief or thieves ignored a glass jar of cash and other valuables, she said, in favor of an “old, broken” laptop, on which she had conducted her most recent research, and a “cheap” cellphone the professor had used on travels to China.
There was strong circumstantial evidence that agents of Beijing were responsible.
Peter Mattis, a former C.I.A. analyst and now a China Program fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, said the burglary, along with previous break-ins at her office, meant there was “only one likely culprit for this,” referring to China.
Ms. Brady’s high profile on matters of China’s influence worldwide meant “intimidating her into silence would in a sense be a major win” for the country.
Ms. Brady’s recent paper, “Magic Weapons,” was published last September. 

It identified categories of political-influence activities by China in Western democracies, laid out what Ms. Brady said was the Chinese Communist Party’s blueprint for conducting such activities worldwide, and examined New Zealand as a case study of Chinese influence across most spheres of public life.
When Ms. Brady returned home on the day of the burglary, bed covers were rumpled and papers strewn about, but her husband’s laptop was left untouched. 

She said that it appeared to be a “psychological operation” and the latest in a series of incidents targeting her over her work. 

She said her computer’s hard drive had been tampered with when she was previously in China, and that Communist Party officials questioned people she spoke with there.
Before the February burglary, she said, she received a letter warning her she would be attacked.
Clive Hamilton, a professor at Charles Sturt University in Canberra and author of a book on China’s influence in Australia, said that if evidence emerged that Chinese agents were involved in the burglary and office break-ins, it should act as “a cattle prod to the New Zealand body politic” about its relationship with Beijing.
That relationship has come under scrutiny over the past year among the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing partnership, of which New Zealand is a member, along with the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia.
Ms. Brady’s paper was published around the time that a New Zealand lawmaker, Jian Yang, was forced to deny he had been a Chinese spy. 

Yang, who said he had merely taught English to spies in China, remains in Parliament.
At the time Ms. Brady’s paper was published, New Zealand’s political leaders played down its findings, but those findings struck a chord globally. 

Her paper was cited in government committee hearings in the United States and Australia — which in June introduced national security legislation banning foreign interference in politics. 

Ms. Brady said she had received “more requests to speak around the world than I could fulfill in a lifetime.”
After the report’s release, Ms. Brady’s office at the university was broken into. 

After her house was burglarized in February, the police began investigating two previous break-ins at her workplace.
The New Zealand police said in a statement that Interpol was aiding in their investigation. 

The New Zealand Herald reported that the country’s Security Intelligence Service, which has a counterespionage mandate, was also involved in the inquiry and had swept Ms. Brady’s office for listening devices. 

But the agency itself declined to comment.
Paul Buchanan, a former Pentagon analyst who is the director of 36th Parallel Assessments, a security consultancy in Auckland, New Zealand, said the involvement of Interpol and the local security service meant that the perpetrators of the burglary and break-ins “are abroad at this moment, or are agents of a foreign entity.”
“Everything in the New Zealand government’s response points to a state, a state-sponsored entity, or a foreign criminal organization being involved with this,” he said.
Members of the China research community in the United States and Australia said they were rattled by the case and had beefed up their own security because of it.
“People advising me on my security have been quite alarmed,” Mr. Hamilton, the Australian academic, said of the burglary of Ms. Brady’s home. 

“If China is targeting her, there’s a good chance they’re targeting me.”
While Ms. Brady said she was not frightened and would not back down from her research, Mr. Hamilton said a harassment campaign against her could have a broader target.
“We have to think about the ripple effects of the intimidation, and part of the intention is to send a message to other people who might be critical of the Communist Party,” he said.
Han Lianchao, a former pro-democracy activist in China, who has since worked as a Senate aide and China commentator in the United States, called Ms. Brady’s case unusual, but added if China’s involvement was proved, it would reflect “a pattern of intimidation that is being expanded from the domestic to the international,” and included kidnappings of dissident Chinese citizens abroad.
He said the Chinese state news media had in the past two or three years started to openly advocate “a hooligan spirit” in protecting its national interests in foreign countries.
New Zealand has become increasingly dependent on China as a market for its farm products, especially dairy goods, and the two countries have been in talks to expand a free-trade agreement signed in 2008.
New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, would not comment on the case this week, citing the police investigation; she had earlier told The Herald that she would take action if evidence showed a foreign power was behind the break-ins.
The Chinese Embassy in New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, declined to comment on the case.
Ms. Brady said the government’s silence was “starting to look like procrastination.”
She said New Zealand’s government needed to reach a “level of respect” in its relationship with China “where we can point out things we don’t like.”

Mysterious factory break-in raises suspicions about Chinese visit

A burglary at an innovative Scottish wave-power company went forgotten, until a very similar project appeared in China
By Ewen MacAskill

Pelamis’s product, top, and the Chinese one.

It was an unusual burglary, in which four or five laptops were stolen from a Scottish renewable energy manufacturer in the dead of a March night in 2011.
So innovative was the company that it had been been visited by a 60-strong delegation led by China’s then vice-premier only two months before.
Nothing else was taken from the company and the crime, while irritating, went unsolved and forgotten – until a few years later pictures began emerging that showed a remarkably similar project manufactured in the world’s most populous country.
Then some people who were involved in the Scottish company, Pelamis Wave Power, started making a connection between the break-in and the politician’s visit, which was rounded off with dinner and whisky tasting at Edinburgh Castle hosted by the then Scottish secretary, Michael Moore.
Max Carcas, who was business development director at Pelamis until 2012, said the similarities between the Scottish and Chinese products were striking.
Speaking publicly for the first time, he said: “Some of the details may be different but they are clearly testing a Pelamis concept.”

The Scottish Pelamis wave-power device.

The Chinese device.

It might be that China’s engineers had been working along roughly the same lines as the UK engineers.
Or it may be that China attempted to replicate the design based on pictures of the Pelamis project freely available on the web.

Or there could be a darker explanation: that Pelamis was targeted by China, which pursued an aggressive industrial espionage strategy.
The answer matters, given security concerns raised by the government’s award of the Hinkley Point nuclear contract to China.
“It was a tremendous feather in our cap to be the only place in the UK outside of London that the Chinese vice-premier visited,” Carcas said.
“We did have a break-in about 10 weeks after, when a number of laptops were stolen. It was curious that whoever broke in went straight to our office on the second floor rather than the other company on the first floor or the ground floor.”
Carcas, who is now managing director of the renewable energy consultancy Caelulum, added: “I could infer all sorts of things but I do not want to say.”

The Pelamis device in the sea.

Ironically, Pelamis is now defunct but the Chinese product, Hailong (Dragon) 1, still appears to be under development.
Scotland has been at the forefront of the development of wave technology for decades.
Pelamis was one of the cutting-edge companies, originally named the Ocean Power Delivery company when founded in 1998 and renamed Pelamis Wave Power in 2007.
The company, which employed a staff of 50, developed a giant energy wave machine, which it named Pelamis.
It looked like a metal snake, facing directly into the waves, harnessing the power of the sea.
It had a unique hinged joint system that helped regulate energy flow as waves ran down its length.
Other revolutionary features included a sophisticated control system and a quick mechanism for releasing it into the sea and recovering it.
In 2004, it became the first wave-energy machine to generate electricity into the grid.
China expressed interest in December 2010 in an email to Pelamis: “It is decided that His Excellency, Mr Li Keqiang, vice-premier of the state council of China, and the delegation (60 people) headed by him will pay a visit to the Pelamis Sea Energy Converter between 16.40 and 17.00 on Sunday 9 January.”

Li Keqiang (centre) is escorted on a tour of the Pelamis factory on 9 January 2011 in Edinburgh. 

Li, who is now premier of China, was accompanied by other senior Chinese government officials and was shown round the key stages in the construction of Pelamis at the site in Leith, Edinburgh.
Moore was his host for the visit and recalled the Chinese had been very impressed.
Asked about the coincidence of the visit, the break-in and emergence of a similar Chinese project, Moore said: “I am afraid I am not going to speculate. It is intriguing.”
The day was rounded off with the dinner at the castle.
A Scottish government memo setting out the itinerary said: “Evening dinner at castle with whisky tasting, Scottish dancing, crown jewels.”
Any faint hopes that the Chinese might invest in the Pelamis project proved fruitless however.
Three years later, in November 2014, Pelamis went into administration, having run out of funding after 17 years developing the project at a cost of £95m.
Two months after the Chinese visit, on the night of Monday 22 March 2011, the Pelamis office was broken into.
The burglar – or burglars – managed to get through a perimeter fence and then the front door.
They skipped the first-floor office of the German engineering giant Siemens and continued to Pelamis on the second floor.
Police Scotland, in a statement confirming the break-in, said no one had ever been caught.
“Entry was forced to a business premises on Bath Road in Edinburgh between 11pm 21 March and 6.45 am on 22 March 2011,” the police said.
“A number of laptops, collectively worth a four-figure sum, were stolen from within.
Officers conducted extensive inquiries at the time and any new information received will be thoroughly investigated.”
Break-ins at dockyards are not unusual.
Pelamis had suffered before when copper cables were stolen from its site.
But theft of laptops from its office was a first.
The pictures from China, show that the product, as well as looking roughly the same, also seems to have specific features such as a similar-looking hinged joint system and a similar system for placing in and recovering the project from the sea.
Tests on the Hailong 1 were carried out in in 2014 and again in 2015 but on both occasions the tests had to be suspended because of rough seas.

The Chinese wave-power device in the sea.

The Hailong 1 appears to have been built at the No 710 Research Institute, part of the Chinese Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, a commercial operation.
The institute is also involved in developing military projects.
The Guardian sent a series of questions to the Chinese government asking for details about the origins of the Hailong 1 project but has had no reply.
There is no suggestion that the Chinese premier is connected with the company or that he knows anything about the burglary.
Despite the similarities, neither the UK nor Scottish governments has any plans to challenge China over the patent.
Calum Macfarlane, a spokesman for Wave Energy Scotland, said: “The IP [intellectual property] is not protected in China.”
Carn Gibson, who spent 15 years at Pelamis, where he was engineering manager, is disappointed that funding for the Pelamis project could not be found in the UK and appeared sanguine about the Chinese design.
Gibson, who is now senior consulting engineer at Quoceant, a new company that grew out of Pelamis, said he regarded it as a compliment that the Chinese may have thought it was an idea worth copying, especially if they were able to turn it into a viable commercial proposition.
He was rueful though that it was being developed in the South China Sea rather than the Atlantic.