Chinese Espionage: U.S. Expelled Chinese Officials After Breach of Military Base

Chinese Embassy officials trespassed onto a Virginia base that is home to Special Operations forces. 
By Edward Wong and Julian E. Barnes

Spy nest: The Chinese Embassy in Washington. The expulsions show the American government is now taking a harder line against espionage by China.

WASHINGTON — The American government secretly expelled two Chinese Embassy officials this fall after they drove on to a sensitive military base in Virginia, according to people with knowledge of the episode. 

The expulsions are the first of Chinese diplomats suspected of espionage in more than 30 years.American officials believe at least one of the Chinese officials was an intelligence officer operating under diplomatic cover, said six people with knowledge of the expulsions. 

The group, which included the officials’ wives, evaded military personnel pursuing them and stopped only after fire trucks blocked their path.
The episode in September, which neither Washington nor Beijing made public, has intensified concerns in the Trump administration that China is expanding its spying efforts in the United States.

American intelligence officials say China poses a greater espionage threat than any other country.In recent months, Chinese officials with diplomatic passports have become bolder about showing up unannounced at research or government facilities, American officials said, with the infiltration of the military base only the most remarkable instance.
The expulsions, apparently the first since the United States forced out two Chinese Embassy employees with diplomatic cover in 1987, show the American government is now taking a harder line against espionage by China, officials said.

On Oct. 16, weeks after the intrusion at the base, the State Department announced sharp restrictions on the activities of Chinese diplomats, requiring them to provide notice before meeting with local or state officials or visiting educational and research institutions.
At the time, a senior State Department official told reporters that the rule, which applied to all Chinese Missions in the United States and its territories, was a response to Chinese regulations imposed years ago requiring American diplomats to seek permission to travel outside their host cities or to visit certain institutions.
Two American officials said last week that those restrictions had been under consideration for a while because of growing calls in the American government for reciprocity, but episodes like the one at the base accelerated the rollout.
The base intrusion took place in late September on a sensitive installation near Norfolk, Va. 

The base includes Special Operations forces, said the people with knowledge of the incident. 

Several bases in the area have such units, including one with the headquarters of the Navy’s elite SEAL Team Six.

The Elizabeth River in Norfolk, Va. The military base intrusion took place in late September on an installation considered especially sensitive in the area.

The Chinese officials and their wives drove up to a checkpoint for entry to the base, said people briefed on the episode. 

A guard, realizing that they did not have permission to enter, told them to go through the gate, turn around and exit the base, which is common procedure in such situations.
But the Chinese officials instead continued on to the base, according to those familiar with the incident. 

After the fire trucks blocked them, the Chinese officials indicated that they had not understood the guard’s English instructions, and had simply gotten lost, according to people briefed on the matter.
American officials said they were skeptical that the intruders made an innocent error and dismissed the idea that their English was insufficient to understand the initial order to leave.
It is not clear what they were trying to do on the base, but some American officials said they believed it was to test the security at the installation, according to a person briefed on the matter. 

Had the Chinese officials made it onto the base without being stopped, the embassy could have dispatched a more senior intelligence officer to enter the base.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry and Chinese Embassy in Washington did not reply to requests for comment about the episode. 

Two associates of Chinese Embassy officials said they were told that the expelled officials were on a sightseeing tour when they accidentally drove onto the base.
The State Department, which is responsible for relations with the Chinese Embassy and its diplomats, and the F.B.I., which oversees counterintelligence in the United States, declined to comment.
Chinese Embassy officials complained to State Department officials about the expulsions and asked in a meeting whether the agency was retaliating for an official Chinese propaganda campaign in August against an American diplomat, Julie Eadeh. 

At the time, state-run news organizations accused Ms. Eadeh, a political counselor in Hong Kong, of being a “black hand” behind the territory’s pro-democracy protests, and personal details about her were posted online. 

A State Department spokeswoman called China a “thuggish regime.”
So far, China has not retaliated by expelling American diplomats or intelligence officers from the embassy in Beijing, perhaps a sign that Chinese officials understand their colleagues overstepped by trying to enter the base. 

One person who was briefed on reactions in the Chinese Embassy in Washington said he was told employees there were surprised that their colleagues had tried something so brazen.

The American Consulate in Hong Kong in September.

In 2016, Chinese officers in Chengdu abducted an American Consulate official they believed to be a C.I.A. officer, interrogated him and forced him to make a confession. 

Colleagues retrieved him the next day and evacuated him from the country. 

American officials threatened to expel suspected Chinese agents in the United States, but apparently did not do so.
China is detaining a Canadian diplomat on leave, Michael Kovrig, on espionage charges, though American officials say he is being held hostage because Canada arrested a prominent Chinese technology company executive at the request of American officials seeking her prosecution in a sanctions evasion case.
For decades, counterintelligence officials have tried to pinpoint embassy or consulate employees with diplomatic cover who are spies and assign officers to follow some of them. 

Now there is growing urgency to do that by both Washington and Beijing.
Evan S. Medeiros, a senior Asia director at the National Security Council under Barack Obama, said he was unaware of any expulsions of Chinese diplomats or spies with diplomatic cover during Obama’s time in office.
If it is rare for the Americans to expel Chinese spies or other embassy employees who have diplomatic cover, Medeiros said, “it’s probably because for much of the first 40 years, Chinese intelligence was not very aggressive.”
“But that changed about 10 years ago,” he added. 

“Chinese intelligence became more sophisticated and more aggressive, both in human and electronic forms.”
For instance, Chinese intelligence officers use LinkedIn to recruit current or former employees of foreign governments.
This year, a Chinese student was sentenced to a year in prison for photographing an American defense intelligence installation near Key West, Fla., in September 2018. 

The student, Zhao Qianli, walked to where the fence circling the base ended at the ocean, then stepped around the fence and onto the beach. 

From there, he walked onto the base and took photographs, including of an area with satellite dishes and antennae.
When he was arrested, Zhao spoke in broken English and, like the officials stopped on the Virginia base, claimed he was lost.
Chinese have been caught not just wandering on to government installations but also improperly entering university laboratories and even crossing farmland to pilfer specially bred seeds.
In 2016, a Chines, Mo Hailong, pleaded guilty to trying to steal corn seeds from American agribusiness firms and give them to a Chinese company. 

Before he was caught, Mo successfully stole seeds developed by the American companies and sent them back to China, according to court records. 

He was sentenced to three years in prison.
The F.B.I. and the National Institutes of Health are trying to root out Chinese scientists in the United States who are stealing biomedical research for China. 

The F.B.I. has also warned research institutions about risks posed by Chinese students and scholars.

Last month, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a former C.I.A. officer, was sentenced to 19 years in prison, one of several former American intelligence officials sentenced this year for spying for Beijing.
His work with Chinese intelligence coincided with the demolition of the C.I.A.’s network of informants in China — one of the biggest counterintelligence coups against the United States in decades. 

From 2010 to 2012, Chinese officers killed at least a dozen informants and imprisoned others. 

One man and his pregnant wife were shot in 2011 in a ministry’s courtyard, and the execution was shown on closed-circuit television, according to a new book on Chinese espionage.
Many in the C.I.A. feared China had a mole in the agency, and some officers suspected Lee, though prosecutors did not tie him to the network’s collapse.
For three decades, China did have a mole in the C.I.A., Larry Wu-Tai Chin, considered among the most successful enemy agents to have penetrated the United States. 

He was arrested in 1985 and convicted the next year, then suffocated himself with a trash bag in his jail cell.

China Is Leasing an Entire Pacific Island. Its Residents Are Shocked.

What could Beijing want with Tulagi, where Allied forces fought a bloody battle with Japan in World War II? Some fear military ambitions.
By Damien Cave

Residents of Tulagi, an island of a little over 1,000 people in the Solomon Islands.

SYDNEY, Australia — The island of Tulagi served as a strategic headquarters for Britain and then Japan when each dominated the Pacific.

Before World War II, it was the capital of the Solomon Islands. 

During the war, its natural deepwater harbor across from Guadalcanal made it a military gem fought and died for.
Now Tulagi is about to fall into Chinese hands.
Under a secretive deal signed last month with a provincial government in the South Pacific nation, a Beijing-based company with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party has secured exclusive development rights for the entire island and its surroundings.
The lease agreement has shocked Tulagi residents and alarmed American officials who see the island chains of the South Pacific as crucial to keeping China in check and protecting important sea routes. It is the latest example of China using promises of prosperity to pursue its global aspirations — often by funneling money to governments and investing in local infrastructure projects that critics call debt traps for developing nations.
“The geography tells you that this is a good location,” said Anne-Marie Brady, a China scholar at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. 

“China is expanding its military assets into the South Pacific and is looking for friendly ports and friendly airfields just like other rising powers before them.”
Beijing’s ambitions in the South Pacific have economic, political and military ramifications.
The region is rich in natural resources, and China’s investments have provoked worries in the United States and Australia that the projects could give Beijing an opening to establish a military foothold for everything from ships and planes to its own version of the Global Positioning System.
China is also pushing to end the region’s status as a diplomatic stronghold for Taiwan.
The Solomons cut ties to Taipei and allied with Beijing just a few days before the Tulagi deal.
A second Pacific nation, Kiribati, followed suit the same week.

A boat in the waters off Tulagi.

Even compared to previous Chinese development deals in nearby countries — including a wharf in Vanuatu, whose terms were not publicly released for years — the Tulagi agreement is remarkable for both its scope and lack of public input.
The renewable 75-year lease was granted to the China Sam Enterprise Group, a conglomerate founded in 1985 as a state-owned enterprise, according to corporate records.
A copy of the “strategic cooperation agreement,” obtained by The New York Times and verified by two people with knowledge of the deal, reveals both the immediate ambitions of China Sam and the potential — just as in Vanuatu — for infrastructure that could share civilian and military uses.

CHINA’S SURGE
Signed on Sept. 22, the agreement includes provisions for a fishery base, an operations center, and “the building or enhancement of the airport.”
Though there are no oil or gas reserves in the Solomons, the agreement also notes that China Sam is interested in building an oil and gas terminal.
These are just the explicit possibilities.
The document also states that the government will lease all of Tulagi and the surrounding islands in the province for the development of “a special economic zone or any other industry that is suitable for any development.”
The provincial governor who signed the deal, Stanley Maniteva, could not be reached for comment. Noting that laws and landowner rights would be respected, he told local reporters this week that the agreement had not been completed.
“I want to make clear that the agreement does not bear the official stamp of the province so it is not official and formalized yet,” he said.
But many residents of Tulagi, an island of a little over 1,000 people, are taking the signing of the document to mean it is a real agreement, and outrage has quickly set in.
“They cannot come in and lease the whole island like that,” said Michael Salini, 46, a business owner on Tulagi who is helping organize a petition to oppose the China Sam agreement.
“Everyone is really scared about the possibility of China turning the island into a military base,” he added.
“That is what really scares people — because why else do they want to lease the whole island?”
A military installation would carry strategic and symbolic significance.
China’s efforts in the region echo the period before and during World War II, when Japan wrested control of island assets, which were won back in turn by American and Australian troops in bloody battles.
But it is also a matter of feasibility: China goes where there’s value and interest.
With the United States pulling back in much of the world under Trump’s America First policy, Beijing is often knocking on doors left open.
American and Solomon Islands officials note that Chinese businesses and officials have cultivated local politicians for years with bribes and gifts like luxury trips to China and Singapore. 
In a poor country of 600,000 people with a national Parliament of 50 members, it doesn’t take much to tilt debate.
“What worries me much more about the new Chinese engagement, be it political or economic, in the Pacific is the way in which this engagement is taking place, being lubricated by elite capture and corruption,” said Jonathan Pryke, a Pacific islands expert with the Lowy Institute in Sydney.
Though patronage and corruption have long been a challenge, he added, “this engagement has certainly taken it to a whole new level.”

Li Keqiang and Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare of the Solomon Islands at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing last week.

The prime minister of the Solomon Islands, Manasseh Sogavare, visited China earlier this month. Photographs from the trip showed him smiling with China Sam executives.
The visit carried a whiff of victory for Beijing.
It followed a failed lobbying effort by Australia and the United States to keep the Solomons loyal to Taiwan and the alignment that began when American Marines dislodged Japanese troops from Tulagi and Guadalcanal in 1942.
Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, visited the Solomons in June — the first official visit by an Australian leader in a decade.
He announced an infrastructure program worth up to 250 million Australian dollars, or about $168 million, in grant financing over 10 years.
Vice President Mike Pence also pressed Sogavare to hold off on deciding about Taiwan, promising infrastructure investments and making plans for an in-person discussion in September around the time of the United Nations General Assembly.
But Sogavare then announced the severing of ties with Taiwan, and Mr. Pence canceled the meeting.
Still, some argue that the United States could revive support.
“It’s not too late in the game,” said Phillip Tagini, a mining executive who served in the Solomons as a prime minister’s adviser from 2012 to 2015.
“At this stage we don’t have the history with China to say we can trust them.”
After an election in 2006, rioting and violence broke out amid allegations that money from Chinese businessmen had rigged the results.
Protests also greeted Sogavare’s election win in April, with demonstrators marching toward the capital’s Chinatown to register discontent.
“Separate from China’s agenda is the risk of destabilizing a vulnerable society,” Professor Brady said.
But the tangible effects of the deals being struck now, some say, could win over even the skeptics.
“The fact is, people in the Solomons are going to see infrastructure from China, and when they see these things happening they are going to say, ‘Wow, this is what we were waiting for,’” Mr. Tagini said.
“If the Americans are going to come, they need to choose where their impacts are going to be seen. They need to be seen.”

Trojan Horse: From a Space Station in Argentina, China Expands Its Reach in Latin America

By Ernesto Londoño

The Chinese space station, including a 16-story-tall parabolic antenna, in a remote area of Argentina’s Patagonia region.

QUINTUCO, Argentina — The giant antenna rises from the desert floor like an apparition, a gleaming metal tower jutting 16 stories above an endless wind-whipped stretch of Patagonia.
The 450-ton device, with its hulking dish embracing the open skies, is the centerpiece of a $50 million satellite and space mission control station built by the Chinese military.
The isolated base is one of the most striking symbols of Beijing’s long push to transform Latin America and shape its future for generations to come — often in ways that directly undermine the United States’ political, economic and strategic power in the region.
The station began operating in March, playing a pivotal role in China’s expedition to the far side of the moon — an endeavor that Argentine officials say they are elated to support.
But the way the base was negotiated — in secret, at a time when Argentina desperately needed investment — and concerns that it enhances China’s intelligence gathering capabilities in the hemisphere have set off a debate in Argentina about the risks of being pulled into China’s orbit.
“Beijing has transformed the dynamics of the region, from the agendas of its leaders and businessmen to the structure of its economies, the content of its politics and even its security dynamics,” said R. Evan Ellis, a professor of Latin American studies at the United States Army War College.

China, with Argentina’s help, is engaged in a bold effort to explore the far side of the moon. A satellite was launched from China in May to aid the effort.

For much of the past decade, the United States has paid little attention to its backyard in the Americas. 

Instead, it declared a pivot toward Asia, hoping to strengthen economic, military and diplomatic ties as part of the Obama administration’s strategy to constrain China.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has retreated from that approach in some fundamental ways, walking away from a free trade pact with Pacific nations, launching a global trade war and complaining about the burden of Washington’s security commitments to its closest allies in Asia and other parts of the world.
All the while, China has been discreetly carrying out a far-reaching plan of its own across Latin America.

It has vastly expanded trade, bailed out governments, built enormous infrastructure projects, strengthened military ties and locked up tremendous amounts of resources, hitching the fate of several countries in the region to its own.
China made its intentions clear enough back in 2008. 

In a first-of-its-kind policy paper that drew relatively little notice at the time, Beijing argued that nations in Latin America were “at a similar stage of development” as China, with much to gain on both sides.
Leaders in the region were more than receptive. 

The primacy over Latin America that Washington had largely taken for granted since the end of the Cold War was being challenged by a cadre of leftist presidents who governed much of the region — including Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador, Uruguay and Bolivia — and wanted a more autonomous region.
Beijing’s invitation came at a fortuitous time: during the height of the financial crisis. 

Latching onto China’s voracious appetite for the region’s oil, iron, soybeans and copper ended up shielding Latin America from the worst of the global economic damage.
Then, as the price of oil and other commodities tanked in 2011, several countries in the region suddenly found themselves on shaky ground. 

Once again, China came to their aid, striking deals that further cemented its role as a central player in Latin America for decades.
Even with parts of Latin America shifting to the right politically in recent years, its leaders have tailored their policies to fulfill China’s demand. 

Now Beijing’s dominance in much of the region — and what it means for America’s waning stature — is starting to come into sharp focus.
“It’s a fait accompli,” said Diego Guelar, Argentina’s ambassador to China.
Back in 2013, he published a book with an alarming-sounding title: “The Silent Invasion: The Chinese Landing in South America.”
“It’s no longer silent,” Mr. Guelar said of China’s incursion in the region.
Trade between China and countries in Latin America and the Caribbean reached $244 billion last year, more than twice what it was a decade earlier, according to Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center. 

Since 2015, China has been South America’s top trading partner, eclipsing the United States.
Perhaps more significantly, China has issued tens of billions of dollars in commodities-backed loans across the Americas, giving it claim over a large share of the region’s oil — including nearly 90 percent of Ecuador’s reserves — for years.
China has also made itself indispensable by rescuing embattled governments and vital state-controlled companies in countries like Venezuela and Brazil, willing to make big bets to secure its place in the region.
Here in Argentina, a nation that had been shut out of international credit markets for defaulting on about $100 billion in bonds, China became a godsend for then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
And while it was extending a helping hand, China began the secret negotiations that led to the satellite and space control station here in Patagonia.

Satellite imagery of China’s space station in Argentina.
Argentine officials say the Chinese have agreed not to use the base for military purposes. 

But experts contend that the technology on it has many strategic uses.
Frank A. Rose, an assistant secretary of state for arms control during the Obama administration, said he spent much of his time worrying about China’s budding space program. 

American intelligence and defense officials watched with alarm as China developed sophisticated technology to jam, disrupt and destroy satellites in recent years, he said.
“They are deploying these capabilities to blunt American military advantages, which are in many ways derived from space,” Mr. Rose said.
China is not alone in regarding space as a critical battlespace for future wars.

Last month, the Trump administration announced it would create a sixth military branch devoted to space.
Antennas and other equipment that support space missions, like the kind China now has here in Patagonia, can increase China’s intelligence-gathering capabilities.
“A giant antenna is like a giant vacuum cleaner,” said Dean Cheng, a former congressional investigator who studies China’s national security policy. 

“What you are sucking up is signals, data, all sorts of things.”
Lt. Col. Christopher Logan, a Pentagon spokesman, said American military officials were assessing the implications of the Chinese monitoring station.
Chinese officials declined requests for interviews about the base and their space program.
Beyond any strategic contest with the United States, some leaders in Latin America are now having doubts and regrets about their ties to China, worried that past governments have saddled their nations with enormous debt and effectively sold out their futures.
But Mr. Guelar argued that hitting the brakes on engagement with China would be shortsighted, particularly at a time when Washington has given up its longstanding role as the region’s political and economic anchor.
“There has been an abdication” of leadership by the United States, he said.
“It surrendered that role not because it lost it, but because it doesn’t wish to take it on.”

The entrance to a Chinese area in Buenos Aires.

‘A Window to the World’
The Argentine government was in crisis mode in 2009.
Inflation was high.
Billions of dollars in debt payments were coming due.
Anger was swelling over the government, including its decision to nationalize $30 billion in private pension funds.
And the worst drought in five decades was making the economic situation even more bleak.
Enter China, which stepped forward to brighten the outlook.
First, it struck a $10.2 billion currency swap deal that helped stabilize the Argentine peso, and then promised to invest $10 billion to fix the nation’s dilapidated rail system.
In the middle of all this, China also dispatched a team to Argentina to discuss something that had nothing to do with currency fluctuations: Beijing’s ambitions in space.
The Chinese wanted a satellite-tracking hub on the other side of the globe before the launch of an expedition to the far side of the moon, which never faces the Earth.
If successful, the mission, scheduled to launch this year, will be a milestone in space exploration, potentially paving the way for the extraction of helium 3, which some scientists believe could provide a revolutionary clean source of energy.
China Satellite Launch and Tracking Control General, a division of the country’s armed forces, settled on this windswept 494-acre patch in Argentina’s Neuquén Province.
Flanked by mountains and far from population centers, the site offered an ideal vantage point for Beijing to monitor satellites and space missions around the clock.
Félix Clementino Menicocci, the secretary general of Argentina’s National Space Activities Commission, a government agency, said the Chinese had pitched officials with promises of economic development and the prospect of enabling a history-making endeavor.
“They’ve become major players in space in the span of a few years,” Mr. Menicocci said of China’s space program.
After months of secret negotiations, Neuquén Province and the Chinese government signed a deal in November 2012, giving China the right to the land — rent free — for 50 years.
When provincial lawmakers caught wind of the project after construction was already underway, some were aghast.
Betty Kreitman, a lawmaker in Neuquén at the time, said she was outraged that the Chinese military was being allowed to set up a base on Argentine soil.
“Surrendering sovereignty in your own country is shameful,” Ms. Kreitman said.
When she visited the construction site, she said, she pressed Chinese officials for answers but walked away feeling even more concerned.
“This is a window to the world,” she recalled the Chinese supervisor at the site saying.
“It gave me chills. What do you do with a window to the world? Spy on reality.”

Workers at a housing site in Bajada del Agrio, the closest town to the space station. “People see it as a military base,” one local said.

Rapid Growth, and Then Peril
The pitch was certainly not subtle, but then, it was never meant to be.
China’s policy document on Latin America in 2008 promised governments in the region to “treat each other as equals,” a clear reference to the asymmetric relationship between the United States and its neighbors in the hemisphere.
As “our relationship with the United States diminished, our relationship with China grew,” said Brazil’s former president, Dilma Rousseff, whose ties with the Obama administration suffered after revelations that American officials had spied on her, her inner circle and Brazil’s state-controlled oil company.
“We never felt that China had imperial designs on us.”
The new alliance paid off, helping propel Latin America to the kind of growth rates that Europe and the United States envied.
“Latin America won the China lottery,” said Kevin P. Gallagher, an economist at Boston University. “It helped the region have its largest growth spurt since the 1970s.”
Yet, Mr. Gallagher said, the bounty came with significant peril.
Industries like agriculture and mining are subject to the boom-and-bust cycles of commodity prices, which made relying on them too heavily a big gamble over the long term.
Sure enough, global commodity prices eventually tumbled.
In July 2014, as several leftist leaders were presiding over distressed economies, China signaled even more ambitious plans for the region.
At a summit meeting in Brazil, Xi Jinping announced that Beijing aspired to raise annual trade with the region to $500 billion within a decade.
In an interview with journalists, Xi hailed the trust his government had built in Latin America by quoting a Chinese proverb: “A bosom buddy afar brings distant lands near.”
For emphasis, he quoted the Cuban national hero José Martí and the Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, and recited a line from the epic Argentine poem “Martín Fierro” by José Hernández: “Brothers be united because that is the first law.”
Soon, China took a step that startled the Pentagon.
In October 2015, China’s Defense Ministry hosted officials from 11 countries in Latin America for a 10-day forum on military logistics titled “Strengthening Mutual Understanding for Win-Win Cooperation.”
The meeting built on the ties China had been making with militaries in Latin America, including donating equipment to the Colombian military, Washington’s closest partner in the region.
Borrowing from the playbook the United States had used across the world, China organized joint training exercises, including unprecedented naval missions off the Brazilian coast in 2013 and the Chilean coast in 2014. 
Beijing has also invited a growing number of midcareer military officers from Latin America for career development in China.
The contacts have paved the way for China to start selling military equipment in Latin America, which had long regarded the United States defense industry as the gold standard, said Mr. Ellis, the War College scholar.
Venezuela has spent hundreds of millions on Chinese arms and matériel in recent years. 
Bolivia has bought tens of millions of dollars’ worth of Chinese aircraft. 
Argentina and Peru have signed smaller deals.
Mr. Ellis said the Chinese had also probably pursued cooperation relationships with Latin American nations, with an eye toward any possible confrontation with the United States.
“China is positioning itself in a world that is safe for the rise of China,” he said.
“If you’re talking about the 2049 world, from the perspective of Latin America, China will have unquestionably surpassed the United States on absolute power and size. Frankly, if it was a matter of sustained conflict, you reach a point where you can’t deny the possibility of Chinese forces operating from bases in the region.”
Just weeks after the space station began operating in Patagonia, the United States made an announcement that raised eyebrows here in Argentina.
The Pentagon is funding a $1.3 million emergency response center in Neuquén — the same province where the Chinese base is, and the first such American project in all of Argentina.
Local officials and residents wondered whether the move was a tit-for-tat response to China’s new presence in this remote part of the country.
American officials said that the project was unrelated to the space station, and that the center would be staffed only by Argentines.

Chinese espionage: Lily Huang, 28, right, from China, works at the Argen-Chino supermarket in the town of Las Lajas, about 37 miles south of the Chinese space station.

No Need for New ‘Imperial Powers’
Latin America experts in the Obama White House watched China’s rise in the region warily.
But the administration raised little fuss publicly, sharing its concerns with leaders mostly in private.
Besides, former officials say, Washington did not have much of a counteroffer.
“I wished the whole time I was working in Latin America that any administration had as well thought-out, resourced and planned a policy as the pivot to Asia for Latin America,” said John Feeley, who recently resigned as the American ambassador to Panama after a nearly three-decade career.
“Since the end of the 1980s, there really has never been a comprehensive hemispheric long-term strategy.”
While Barack Obama was widely hailed in the region for restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba in late 2014, Washington’s agenda never ceased being dominated by two issues that have long generated resentment in Latin America: the war on drugs and illegal immigration.
While the Trump administration has yet to articulate a clear policy for the hemisphere, it has warned its neighbors not to get too cozy with China.
Former Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson publicly cautioned that Latin America did not need new “imperial powers,” adding that China “is using its economic statecraft to pull the region into its orbit; the question, is at what price?”
That question is being vigorously debated in some corners.
Former President Rafael Correa of Ecuador was interrogated by prosecutors in February as part of an investigation into whether the decision to promise the country’s crude reserves to China through 2024 harmed national interests.
In Bolivia, which has also seen a surge of Chinese investment, several industries have withered as Chinese products have become cheaper and easier to buy, said Samuel Doria Medina, a Bolivian businessman and politician who has run unsuccessfully against President Evo Morales three times.
“Our financial, commercial and, ultimately, political dependency keeps growing,” Mr. Doria said. Bolivia and several other leftist leaders who have tied their lot to China, he warned, have “mortgaged the future” of their nations.
Yet China’s influence has not diminished, even as Latin America shifts to the right politically.
In recent months, Beijing persuaded Panama and the Dominican Republic to sever ties with Taiwan, notable victories in one of China’s foreign policy priorities.
China’s clout, analyst say, is also a sign of how much the Trump administration has alienated governments in the region by adopting harsh immigration policies and pursuing hardball tactics on trade in a part of the world where Washington already has an ample surplus.
Jorge Arbache, the secretary for international affairs at Brazil’s Planning Ministry, said Washington’s “lack of predictability” had prevented a more ambitious partnership from taking root, while China had been far clearer about its vision.
“Everyone expects China to become even more influential,” Mr. Arbache said.
Residents enjoying a street violinist at dusk in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Belgrano, where Chinese residents are concentrated.

‘People Are Afraid’
Soon after being nominated as Argentina’s ambassador to China in late 2015, Mr. Guelar said, he steeled himself for an arduous task: pushing to renegotiate the space station agreement.
The former government, he said, had given away too much, recklessly failing to specify that the base could be used only for peaceful purposes.
“It was very serious,” he said.
“At any moment it could become a military base.”To his surprise, he said, the Chinese agreed to the use base solely for civilian purposes.
But that did not assuage concerns in Bajada del Agrio, the closest town to the station, where residents speak of the Chinese presence with a mix of bewilderment and fear.
“People see it as a military base,” said Jara María Albertina, the manager at the local radio station. “People are afraid.”
The mayor, Ricardo Fabián Esparza, said the Chinese had been friendly and even invited him to look at the images the antenna produces.
But he is more apprehensive than hopeful.
“From that telescope, they probably can even see what underwear you’re wearing,” he said.
The United States is the one that should be most concerned, he said. 
The base, he said, is an “eye looking toward that country.”

The antenna is the centerpiece of a $50 million station built by the Chinese military.

China Threat

Australia Shudders Amid Talk of a Chinese Military Base in Its Backyard
By JACQUELINE WILLIAMS

Prime Minister Charlot Salwai Tabimasmas of Vanuatu addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 2016. A report this week suggested that China was building a military base in Vanuatu, just miles from Australia. 

SYDNEY, Australia — The Australian government has warned China against building a military base in the South Pacific following a report that the Chinese had approached the tiny island nation of Vanuatu about establishing an outpost there.
The report on Monday that the Chinese and Vanuatu governments had held preliminary discussions about a permanent Chinese military presence in the former French colony, which is 1,500 miles off the coast of Australia, has raised alarm bells in the region.
But China hit back quickly on Tuesday, with a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman dismissing the report that it was seeking to put a base on Vanuatu as “fake news.” 

Vanuatu’s government also said that there was no such proposal. 

And Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said Vanuatu had assured his government that no such request had been made.
“We would view with great concern the establishment of any foreign military bases in those Pacific Island countries and neighbors of ours,” Mr. Turnbull said on Tuesday.
Massive infrastructure projects and investment activity around the world form the backbone of China’s ambitious economic and geopolitical agenda, but to date China has built only one full-fledged overseas military base, in the Indian Ocean port of Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. 

It has also been building military outposts on man-made islands in the South China Sea despite U.S. concerns.
The prospect of a Chinese military base close to Australia in the South Pacific could provide a significant boost in Beijing’s ability to project its power, and could also undermine the strategic dominance of Western powers in an area they have long effectively controlled.
An official with the United States State Department confirmed the department was aware of the report and was seeking to determine its credibility. 

The United States has an enduring interest in the security and stability of the Pacific, the official added.
The report comes as many Australians have become increasingly alarmed about Chinese influence in the country, with Australian politics recently thrown into turmoil over allegations that China is trying to buy its politicians and sway its elections.
Experts say officials in Australia, the United States, and New Zealand are closely watching Beijing as it deepens its influence in the South Pacific through infrastructure projects and loans to smaller nations, and any effort to build military bases in the region would be particularly worrisome.
“If it were to happen, and it’s a huge if, it would be an aggressive move in the eyes of Australia, the U.S. and New Zealand,” said Graeme Smith, a Pacific Affairs expert at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Vanuatu, an impoverished nation, is considered to be within Australia’s sphere of influence, with Canberra providing it with aid and investment. 

Australian politicians said that a Chinese base on Vanuatu would be a potential game changer strategically for the region.
“It would have not only security but economic consequences for the region, and we should regard it as a wake-up call for Australia,” Senator Penny Wong told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
“It is not in the interest of the region — or in the interests of stability — for there to be increased competition, great power competition, in our region,” she said.
Jonathan Pryke, a Pacific islands expert with the Lowy Institute, noted that Vanuatu is home to a wharf built and financed by China that could conceivably be used for military purposes, particularly if Vanuatu has problems repaying the loan.
“They can provide a nice bit of economic leverage over that country,” Mr. Pryke added.
Fairfax Media reported that Beijing had recently committed to building a new residence for Vanuatu’s prime minister, Charlot Salwai, as well as other government buildings. 

Vanuatu has also reportedly been given hundreds of millions in development money by the Chinese.

Chinese aggressions: Japan to bolster military base on island idyll

Island of Ishigaki is set to be the site for a substantial deployment of hardware and troops
By Kim Sengupta Ishigaki

A Japanese Self-Defence Forces' vehicle carrying units of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missiles leaves a port on Japan's southern island of Ishigaki, Okinawa prefecture.

If war is to break out, then Ishigaki would be the frontline. 

This is the island where Japan feels the most under threat from China and the place it will be installing missiles and troops amid clashes at sea, accusations and recriminations.
While international attention is on whether Games diplomacy in South Korea, with the presence of Kim Jong-un’s sister and henchmen present for the Winter Olympics, will lead to peace breaking out, tension between China and its neighbours have continued to grow.
Throughout last year, while Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un traded public insults, Beijing has been quietly bolstering its presence on the extraordinary chain of artificial isles it has been building in waters near and far taking advantage of what it calls "the strategic window of opportunity.”

Three airfields have been put into its seven bases in the disputed Spratly chain. 

There, and elsewhere, aerial photographs from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington reveal facilities awash with fortified shelters for warships, hangers for aircraft and radar, underground bunkers and missile emplacement positions.
The Chinese calls a series of archipelagos the "first island chain of defence” stretching in an arc from the South China Seas to Russia’s Kurils. 

For Japan the most vulnerable point is the Senkaku, to which Beijing has laid claims with surrounding isles, in particular Ishikagi 90 nautical miles away seen as the obvious targets.
Hundreds of fishing boats from China, escorted by coastguard ships, or, at times, warships have been in the seas leading, at times, driving back Japanese fishermen leading to clashes with Japanese coast guards. 

There has been a recent spate of incursions into airspace by Chinese warplanes and the appearance for the first time, a few weeks ago, of a nuclear attack submarine in these waters.
The Japanese government are now finalising the deployment of missiles batteries, anti-aircraft and anti-ship, radar installations and around 600 troops to Ishigaki.
Final details are likely to emerge next month. 

The Independent understands the surface to air missiles are likely include American made MIM-104 Patriots capable of taking down Chinese ballistic missiles with enemy vessels being targeted by SSM-1s which carry up to 500lbs of high-explosives and have range of over a hundred miles. 

There are future plans for a joint missile system involving Japan and Western Europe to be installed in a project involving the British, French and Italian MBDA and Mitsubishi Electrics.
China’s attempt at ocean hegemony has led to international reaction.
The US Defence Secretary General James Mattis stressed during a visit to Tokyo that the Washington is fully committed to backing Japan over the Senkakus. 

On a broader basis, the US has been sending warships through the China Seas to underline the right to freedom of navigation. 

The British Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, has announced that HMS Sutherland, an anti-submarine ship, will be sailing through the South China Seas. 

The navies of America, India, Japan and Australia, will be holding naval manoeuvres.

HMS Sutherland

The tiny Senkakus were used in the past by a small Japanese community scratching a living out of bonito fishing and collecting albatross feathers. 

But they were then abandoned had been lying unpopulated for 78 years with basically scientific and geographical exploration groups the only visitors.
That these five islets and three barren rocks, with a total area of just seven kilometres, has become a potential flashpoint for a conflict between two modern industrialised states may be reminiscent of the Jorge Luis Borges’s view that Britain and Argentina going to war over the Falklands was “like two bald men fighting over a comb”.
In fact, there was little interest in the islands, apart from its fishing grounds, until an international survey in 1969 concluded large undersea deposits of oil and natural gas. 

The following year China began its claims of ownership.
The steady growth of Chinese presence in the seas, say the Japanese, has damaged the country’s fishing industry. 

Many of Beijing’s coast guard vessels are rebranded warships and the crews of Chinese 'fishing' boats are not fishermen at all, but peoples’ militia in disguise out to provoke. 

The confrontation means that Ishigaki fishermen like Yukihidi Higa can no longer catch the red snappers and groupers they used to off the Senkakus.
“Of course it has affected my earnings, I can no longer go there because of the Chinese and their big ships” he stated. 

“ But they are not just taking the fish, most of the coral from the sea has been stripped over the years, this is not good for marine life.”
The missile deployment comes at a time of great controversy in Japan as premier Shinzo Abe seeks to revise Japan’s post-Second World War pacifist constitution mandated, he holds, by a strong election victory. 

Last month, his cabinet approved an increase of 1.3 per cent in the annual military budget raising it to a record $ 45.8 billion for the year.
The military deployment is also going to be a key factor in Ishigaki’s municipal election next month. “This is certainly going to be part of my campaign. It is of course a very important topic and it needs to be discussed fully and the city will have to agree on providing the land ” said Yoshitaka Nakayama, the mayor.
“I am in favour of the deployment by our Self Defence Forces (SDF). We have seen the Chinese behave very aggressively, they are coming into our territorial waters, our fishermen have been prevented from fishing, our coastguards are having lots of problems, we have seen their planes fly into our airspace. Putting the missile systems here will act as a warning, it may stop Chinese aggression and a conflict in the future.”
The military was a key issue in the election in Nago, the capital of the Okinawa prefecture, last week in the defeat of the incumbent Mayor Susumu Inamine, by Taketoyo Toguchi, a candidate backed by Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
The Mayor had been an opponent of a US Marines base remaining in Okinawa. 

Mr Toguchi wanted them to stay and backed a plan by Washington and Tokyo to relocate it from a central urban area to one less populated.
For Yoshiyuki Toita, the secretary general of the Yaeyama Defence Association, the result showed “that attitudes are changing: people are beginning to see the dangers posed by China, which is following an expansionist policy. If the Japanese government and the SDF do nothing it will send the wrong message and the Chinese will feel even bolder.”
The defence associations across Japan are private groups which claim to be independent of government. 

Mr Toita, however, is a member of Mayor Nakayama’s campaign and will be spreading his message in support of the military deployment.

"This is about security. We have achieved good things here in Ishigaki and we must protect this community and Japan.”
Many are apprehensive, however, that the achievements may be put at risk by militarisation. Subtropical Ishigaki, with its mountains and mangrove forests, beaches and birdlife, has, somewhat surprisingly for a place not widely known, topped TripAdvisor’s “Destinations on the Rise” in the Travellers’ Choice awards.
“We have definitely seen a steady rise in tourism and this growth has taken place despite this place being so remote. The new airport has been a great plus factor” said Hiro Uehara, the owner of a bar and restaurant.-
Around a dozen coast guard ships are the current line of defence. 

Captain Kenichi Kikuchi, in command of the Taketomi, wanted to stress that they do their utmost to avoid confrontations. 

“We are careful , we are careful because we do not want to escalate matters and also have to mind that the Chinese Navy ships as well their coastguard vessels tend to be large” he said. 

“ But we also do our duty and deal with problems when they arise and make sure we are not outnumbered by the Chinese.”-
What will happen when the missiles and troops are deployed? 

 “That is a decision for the Japanese government and the Self Defence Forces. They will decide what is right. But it could become very interesting.”-