Tag: china

REPORT: China Helped Iran Target U.S. Base Before Attack That Killed Three American Troops

Chinese entities allegedly provided Iran with high-quality satellite imagery of a U.S. air base shortly before Tehran launched a ballistic missile attack that killed three American service members, according to a new report.

U.S. officials have linked the Chinese-supplied imagery to Iran’s July 17 attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The imagery was reportedly provided both before and after the attack, giving Tehran detailed views of the American facility.

The strike killed three U.S. troops and wounded four others, marking the first American military deaths of the Iran war since the April ceasefire.

The three Americans killed were First Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, and Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, 28.

U.S. officials reportedly view the satellite imagery as the clearest evidence yet that Chinese assistance to Iran during the war has contributed directly to American military casualties.

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US Customs supervisor busted for stealing Core i7 CPUs, RAM, and hard drives from Homeland Security PCs, damage estimated at $105,800 — stolen tech swapped with inferior hardware and cashed out on Newegg

According to a report from The Maine Wire, the FBI has arrested and charged Terry “Jiajia” Liu, a Customs and Border Protection supervisor based in Calais, Maine, for theft and damage to government property. Liu allegedly stole computer hardware, including Intel 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh processors, memory modules, and hard drives, from at least 46 Department of Homeland Security computers across three Maine border facilities. They replaced the stolen parts with inferior hardware and exchanged the stolen equipment through Newegg’s trade-in program for store credit.

Liu’s official responsibilities were limited to information-technology support, so they did not have access to modify any government computer. Port Director Theodore Cummings made the restriction abundantly clear to Liu in a written order: “Please do not move any computers or computer parts.” However, criminals rarely listen.

Hidden surveillance cameras captured Liu opening government computers and swapping hardware during the midnight shift. The perpetrator would take the systems to a training room to commit the crime. One camera recording showed Liu using a screwdriver to scrape thermal paste off a processor and installing a replacement chip in one system. Meanwhile, another recording caught Liu removing a memory module from a system and storing it in their desk drawer.

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Trump’s Grid Battery Ban Leaves Developers Guessing

The United States is trying to build up its energy storage capacities at a rapid scale. At the same time, it is trying to wean itself off of Chinese battery tech. In many ways, these two goals are in direct opposition to each other.

China dominates global supply chains for clean energy tech in general, but especially when it comes to lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from your phone to your car. Approximately 80 percent of all battery cells in the world are made in China according to figures from the International Energy Agency. What is more, Beijing controls the production of EV battery cathode active material (85 percent of global production) and anode active material (more than 90 percent), and refines the vast majority of the critical minerals involved in their manufacturing.

The Trump administration is eager to challenge Beijing’s outsized presence in the global energy sector as part of its stated goal to establish “energy dominance.” Toward the end of August, the Trump administration declared a national emergency that effectively bars the use of Chinese-made batteries in grid-scale energy storage systems, pointing to cybersecurity concerns as the rationale. In the same month, the federal government awarded $500 million in funding to seven companies working on battery minerals, manufacturing, and recycling with the express purpose of building up the domestic sector in order to reduce reliance on Chinese supply chains.

However, these measures are falling short. Way short. “It takes decades and tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars” to build the kind of supply chains that would be capable of competing with China according to Tu Le, founder and managing director of Sino Auto Insights. “We don’t have decades. We have five, six, seven years to try to become competitive,” he was recently quoted by Quartz.

“We have a ton of innovation coming out of the United States,” Le went on to say. “These small fledgling companies are super innovative, but getting and building prototypes of what they’re trying to sell is one thing. Being able to mass produce them at a high quality level, repeatably in the millions of units is another thing entirely.”

Moreover, critics have pointed out that the August 26 executive order is vaguely worded, calling for the ban of “any foreign-produced bulk-power system electric equipment”, and may only serve to slow down the growth of the domestic energy storage sector. Analysis from BloombergNEF notes that, as a result of the state of emergency and the uncertainty around its terms, battery projects “face near-term delays or cancellations as developers await guidance, reconsider existing contracts, or shift suppliers.”

The effort may also be too little, too late to make up for the damage that the Trump administration has already done to the domestic battery manufacturing sector by rolling back critical Biden-era supportive legislation. Repealing laws supporting domestic manufacturers and the EV sector as a whole (which is far and away the largest market for these batteries on a global scale) has cost U.S. battery manufacturers time and money when both are in short supply.

And then there is another critical dilemma: is the real problem that the Trump administration’s efforts are insufficient, or that they are misguided entirely? “All this tension raises a broader question for me,” Casey Crownhart wrote in an article for the MIT Technology Review this week: “How much should countries take advantage of cheap, available tech, versus cutting off major sources to force development of their own factories even if that comes at a higher cost?”

Of course, allowing for the near-total monopolization of global critical infrastructure in the hands of just one country, and an authoritarian one at that, is also a bad option. It’s a sticky situation that no executive order can solve overnight.

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China Stops And Interrogates Crews Of 200 Commercial Ships In Philippine Sea — Analysts Warn Of ‘Status Quo Change’ Near Taiwan

China’s Coast Guard is conducting an unprecedented campaign of maritime coercion in the Philippine Sea. Analysts have confirmed that the Chinese Coast Guard has been stopping and interrogating the crews of nearly 200 commercial vessels in the area.

Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) of Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) wrote about this unprecedented maritime coercion by China in its August 2026 issue. The issue was written just in time as the operations started to take place in mid-June this year, shortly after Japan and the Philippines jointly announced that they were going to discuss ways to delimit their overlapping exclusive economic zones (EEZs) in the Philippine Sea, east of Taiwan.

Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and the Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in May 2026 upgraded ties between Japan and the Philippines including possible sale of Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s destroyers to the Philippines as well as sharing of classified military information between both sides. Beijing swiftly responded to the two countries’ joint move by deploying large numbers of Coast Guard vessels and survey ships to the Philippine Sea in a series of “unprecedented” operations, according to AMTI.

AMTI notes that even within China’s own EEZ, the Coast Guard has no authority to stop and question vessels in this manner. The Philippine Sea is far beyond the limits of any plausible jurisdictional claim by China.

The region in which China is conducting these surveys is strategically located near Taiwan, and outside the boundary line being discussed by the Japan-Philippines negotiations. Moreover, the type of data that China is collecting can have dual-use values — while appearing to be related to safety of navigation it can also be used for military targeting and even for the routing of attack submarines.

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Trump Declares National Emergency Over Chinese Equipment Inside America’s AI Data Centers

President Donald Trump declared a national emergency Wednesday over Chinese-made equipment in the core of America’s AI data centers. The numbers behind his declaration are stunning.

In a move that threatens to rip apart the global supply chain for data center hardware, President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency in order to block the importation of Chinese equipment buried deep inside America’s AI infrastructure. The new executive order signed by Trump last week gives the Department of Energy the authority to block or to impose conditions on transactions involving foreign-made equipment in the bulk-power system as well as in data center construction.

China’s share of other subcategories of transformers and switchgear, used to power the facility, ranges around 30 percent, according to Yury Dvorkin, associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. For batteries specifically imported for data centers, the Chinese share is over 40 percent. And then there are the raw materials that Chinese suppliers control at the upstream stages of production — copper, electrical steel, and battery cathode materials, to name a few.

But it’s not just the substation transformers that the AI infrastructure buildout is increasingly dependent on Chinese imports for, according to Ben Boucher, senior supply chain analyst at Wood Mackenzie. He highlights a few key areas of supply chain exposure that the AI buildout of data centers is dependent on. “And if you can’t bring those in, you can’t build out the AI infrastructure of the data centers,” he said.

China has a near two-thirds share of global optical transceiver units in revenue terms, led by the market of two major domestic firms, Zhongji Innolight and Eoptolink, which together account for over 50 percent of data center optical transceiver markets — other Chinese companies taking up the remainder.

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China’s Communist Party Buying Access to US High Schools

The Chinese Communist Party has pursued a decades-long, multilayered strategy to embed its influence in American education, adapting each time federal investigations closed one channel.

At the university level, Confucius Institutes, Chinese government-funded language and culture centers, peaked at 118 in 2017. In August 2020, the Trump administration designated their US coordinating office a Chinese “foreign mission,” and Congress cut off Pentagon funding to host universities. By 2023, fewer than five remained.

However, the K-12 version of the program, Confucius Classrooms, was never subjected to the same pressure. The State Department reported in 2020 that there were about 500, more than the number of university-level institutes at their peak. No equivalent disclosure law or funding threat targeted school districts. A 2023 investigation by Parents Defending Education found that 143 school districts, including 20 near military bases, were still running Confucius Classroom-style programs.

The same pattern has resurfaced in a new form: the Young Envoys Scholarship (YES) program, administered by the China Education Association for International Exchange (CEAIE). The organization states on its Chinese-language website that it is guided by Marxism-Leninism and Xi Jinping Thought and that it “integrates the Party’s work into the entire process of the association’s operations.”

YES has already reached 83 universities and 27 K-12 schools across 30 states, including Taft High School and at least three other Chicago Public Schools campuses. It operates with essentially none of the federal oversight that eventually reined in Confucius Institutes.

Beijing’s objective through YES is blatant. Chinese officials describe it themselves: bring as many young Americans as possible into direct, positive contact with China. Xi Jinping set a target of bringing 50,000 American students to China over five years so that they return as “messengers” of friendship, in the Chicago consulate’s words. According to one participating school official, they will become “multipliers” whose influence will “triple and quadruple” as they carry favorable views of China back into their communities.

The mechanism is emotional and experiential rather than curricular. It includes fully or heavily subsidized trips, personal outreach from Xi Jinping to individual students and schools, staged cultural immersion, and extensive coverage in Chinese state media. As a Parents Defending Education investigation documents, these programs are designed to shape “how youth in the United States view China” before those students are old enough to become policymakers, business leaders, or voters.

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Chinese National Working as CBP Supervisor at Maine-Canada Border Caught on Camera Swapping Hardware Inside Homeland Security Computers — Then Putting Them Back on the Government Network

A Customs and Border Protection supervisor assigned to the Maine-Canada border has been arrested and charged after FBI agents say he was caught on hidden camera tearing apart government computers, ripping out processors and memory, stuffing in cheaper parts, and plugging the machines back into CBP’s network.

Terry “Jiajia” Liu, 39, of Calais, Maine, described himself as a native of Guangzhou, China. He worked as a CBP supervisor at the Calais Port of Entry, with duties stretching to the Ferry Point and Milltown crossings.

CBP officers are required to be U.S. citizens. According to The Maine Wire, Liu has posted images suggesting he voted in 2020. That does not answer the question every American should be asking: how did a man from Guangzhou end up with after-hours access to Homeland Security computers on the northern border?

According to an FBI affidavit obtained by Steve Robinson at The Maine Wire, CBP IT staff discovered in late 2025 that computers at three Maine border facilities had been modified without authorization. The count grew to 46 machines: 38 in Calais, six at Ferry Point, two at Milltown.

Thirty-nine had their CPUs swapped. Six had RAM changed. Eight had hard drives replaced.

The original hardware included 14th-generation Intel Core i7 processors. What went back in were older, weaker chips, including Pentium-class parts that did not meet CBP specs. Many of those computers were then reconnected to the agency network.

Port Director Theodore Cummings had already told Liu in writing in March 2025: “Please do not move any computers or computer parts.” Stay in your lane. File a ticket. Liu allegedly kept going.

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Telecom Company in Africa Gets $100 Million U.S. Loan to Compete with China’s Huawei

The Trump administration announced on Friday that Africell, the only American-owned telecommunications company in Africa, will receive a $99.6 million loan from the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) to help it compete with Chinese telecom giant Huawei.

The loan from EXIM was intended to “boost the telecommunications sector in Angola and strengthen American technology leadership abroad” by helping Africell acquire the latest American and European mobile phone technology.

“Africell’s fast growth in Angola and DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo), and our long-term market leadership in Sierra Leone and The Gambia demonstrate the unique benefits that high-class American technology, skills and investment can bring to Africa,” said Africell CEO Ziad Dalloul.

“We are pleased to be working with EXIM to introduce more trusted communications infrastructure to our operating markets,” he said. “In doing so, we are flying the flag for American technology leadership and creating secure pathways for future American and allied digital technologies to be deployed in sub-Saharan Africa, including in the Lobito Corridor region.”

“The quality and results achieved through partnerships with the United States and American companies speak for themselves. This is a win for both our countries: American technology and a more prosperous, more connected Angola,” said Shannon Nagy Cazeau, charge d’affaires of the U.S. Embassy to Angola and Sao Tome and Principe.

While these statements did not directly mention China, Reuters noted on Friday that the Trump administration has been working on a “clean network” initiative to get security-threatening Chinese telecom and network equipment out of the U.S. and allied nations, particularly equipment from Huawei. 

The U.S. government has slapped Huawei with heavy sanctions for allegedly spying on users, a charge the company denies, even though Chinese law explicitly requires all companies to hand over information about their customers upon demand from Chinese Communist intelligence services. Huawei has also been implicated in Communist China’s human rights abuses, such as the surveillance and oppression of the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang province.

Huawei currently has about 52% of the 5G mobile data market in Africa, a grip the Trump administration seeks to loosen. Africell, a company that started up in 2001 with a data center in Angola, received a $100 million loan in 2018 from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which has since been renamed to the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). Africell used the funds to expand into the DRC, Gambia, and Sierra Leone. Africell repaid the loan three years ahead of schedule.

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Why are people driving around this city in fake foreign police cars?

When Stella* saw a car parked outside a café in the Auckland CBD on Thursday with Chinese police insignia, she was shocked.

“I lived in China for a number of years and seeing a Chinese police car there wouldn’t raise alarm,” she said. “But seeing it here is quite intimidating.”

Across the side of the white Toyota RAV4 were the characters 公安, meaning “public security” and commonly used by police in China. There was a police-style emblem on the door and blue and yellow markings running along the body.

“It made me immediately think, what are the Chinese police doing here?”

I sent one to Freeman Yu, an outspoken critic of the Chinese government’s influence in New Zealand, to see what he made of it.

“I am aware of this matter. I have already reported it to the 105 police online.”

Yu said he reported it because he believed it could be an offence and a potential public safety risk.

In his report to police in July, which Stuff has seen, he said: “The fact that this car is painted to look like a Chinese police vehicle is disturbing and highly inappropriate.”

But the car Yu reported had a different number plate than the one seen by Stella, and was a different make – a white Tesla Model 3.

Images of the Tesla have circulated on Chinese-language social media.

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Repeat After Media: Data Centers Are Wonderful and Good

If you follow conservative media and Republican politicians, you could be convinced that any opposition to AI data centers is not due to their sprawling footprint, greed for electricity or insatiable need for cooling water. Rather, it’s the result of a Chinese Communist plot.

These data centers are dreadfully unpopular. “Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed,” according to Gallup (5/13/26). From YouGov (9/1/26): “About half (51%) of Americans say that the construction of new data centers is a bad thing for the country. Only 20% say it is a good thing.”

The reasons for this opposition is that these centers put enormous strain on the electrical grid, need loads of water for cooling, can be extremely noisy and take up lots of space in communities. “The environmental footprint of data centers already rivals some of the world’s largest countries,” AP (6/3/26) reported.

Much like how some liberals have convinced themselves that MAGA and American nationalism are fueled by Kremlin disinformation, the right-wing line is that communities opposing these giant data centers are motivated not by their own interests or common sense, but some unseen Beijing-manufactured psychosis.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) demanded that the Justice Department “investigate foreign influence efforts targeting the buildout of American AI infrastructure,” as he suspected that a “network of foreign actors, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is attempting to manipulate US policy and public opinion on data centers.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), in the words of Newsmax (9/2/26), believes “China is helping fuel opposition to artificial intelligence data centers in the United States.” “Beijing has a strategic interest in convincing Americans to slow construction of the infrastructure needed to compete in the global AI race,” the far-right outlet paraphrased.

The Washington Examiner‘s Facebook page (8/30/26) featured a cartoon from A.F. Branco depicting a Chinese data center running a psy-op on Americans who oppose data centers.

The National Interest (9/1/26) said:

Chinese entities have a long history of collaborating with far-left causes, and they have again found common ground in opposing the construction of data centers. They are pushing mutually reinforcing messages that criticize a host of alleged environmental and ethical concerns as reasons to disempower American growth in a critical economic and competitive sector. Officials at the federal, state and local levels should recognize this noxious alliance as they field criticism of data centers.

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