In Norse mythology, the one-eyed god Odin saw all of the daily events of mankind when he sat on his throne each night, listening to the reports from his two ravens—Thought and Memory—with one raven whispering the activities it saw, while the other explained their meaning.
In 2019, China believes it’s a dozen years away from achieving the technological equivalent of Odin’s all-world vision in gaining knowledge of human activities, no matter how mundane or scattered, in near real-time.
Today, 5G is the focal point of the superpowers vying for global supremacy. 5G underpins the new cold war, replacing the Soviet nuclear arms race with information warfare on an electromagnetic spectrum.
‘Unrestricted Digital Warfare’
China’s scorched-earth approach to global hegemony has roots in its doctrine of unrestricted warfare, set out in a book of the same name. Written by a pair of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) colonels in 1999, it maps 26 warfare domains that cover the spectrum from military and trans-military, such as network and smuggling warfare, to non-military warfare in trade, media, and finance, among other areas of destabilization.By observing the U.S. military’s tactics and smart weapons used in the First Gulf War, the PLA colonels discovered that information is the linchpin to achieving total and swift victory.
Uyghur 5G Warfare Lab
Since 2017, China has erected concentration camps, where it has imprisoned more than one million of the ethnic minority, stripping them of their human rights and religious identity. Thousands of dissidents have disappeared. But the real tool for total domination comes with the pervasive spying built on 5G-wireless networks that have digitally enslaved Uyghurs who aren’t in the camps.Every minute of every day, the Uyghurs are tracked by their smartphones and followed around the towns and cities by thousands of facial-recognition cameras. They are scanned, searched, and questioned at checkpoints. The police take their DNA samples and biometric prints, while inspecting mobile apps and photos on their smartphones for illegal content. The stream of information is then transmitted to databases for actionable intelligence.
Why is arid, dusty Xinjiang so important to the CCP’s plans?
Can China Be Trusted With 5G?
With download speeds that will be 200 times faster than 4G technology, 5G will deploy artificial intelligence (AI) on data gathered from hundreds of billions of sensors embedded in people, devices, kiosks, cameras, robots, machines, transactions, and blockchain ledgers and contracts. 5G-AI will empower machine-to-machine communication for autonomous drones, vehicles, and weapons, transforming the analog world to all digital on the massive internet of things.In this hyperconnected future, oceans of data will flow into databases to be analyzed and acted upon in real time.
Standing at the center of the 5G donnybrook is Huawei. Founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, a PLA veteran who came up through the ranks as a military IT researcher, Huawei has been losing the media warfare battle of late.
In Huawei’s equipment, there have been accusations of backdoor data dumps to the CCP, while spying on Americans in their homes and workplaces. The potential security gaps need to be examined more deeply.
Take the scenario in which Huawei’s equipment is embedded in everything that is “smart,” from meters and appliances, homes and buildings, to autonomous vehicles and the grids of smart cities. China would be able to shut down any part of the system at any time, including the loss of power to nuclear power plants and hospitals, or allow hackers to penetrate the lives of people or steal the trade secrets of businesses.
Since 5G will be both ground-based and on satellites orbiting the Earth, the PLA would be able to spy on users beyond Huawei’s networks, such as poor countries without telecom infrastructure. The real threat, however, comes in near-future military use of 5G. There, China could disrupt sea, air, and land navigation, unleash machine-command drone warfare, or take out 5G antennae networks or 5G satellites in space.
Gordon Chang, the author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” sat on the panel “21st Century Terminator: How China is Using 5G and AI to Take Over the World” at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 1, and stated:
Can China be trusted after casting aside the international law of the sea by building military bases on atolls in the South China Sea? Can China be trusted after subjugating the Uyghurs and other ethnic people for the crime of being themselves? Can Chinese tech companies, such as ZTE and Huawei, be trusted to secure and not abuse your data?
The answers are no, no, and no.