Report finds China gave Iran western drone technology, No. of countries imposing China travel restrictions rising & Chinese tracking device found in UK government car -- China Boss News 1.09.2023
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Hope your 2023 is off to a great start. If you haven’t seen it yet, I posted a 4-part year-end review of the most monumental China news stories of 2022 on the China Boss YouTube channel. Part 2, “Greetings from Balochistan,” seems to be the favorite, but a number of history-shaping news trends are highlighted in parts 1, 3 and 4, also. Watch or listen during your morning commute/daily run!
The Big Story in China Business
Report finds China gave Iranian drone makers western technology
“Parts made by more than a dozen US and Western companies were found inside a single Iranian drone downed in Ukraine last fall,” CNN reported last week. The discovery “illustrates the extent of the problem facing the Biden administration” in enforcing tough export control restrictions aimed at keeping US military technology out of Russian, Iranian, and Chinese hands, news staff said.
The US government is now considering “enhanced enforcement” for restrictions as it tries to encourage companies to do a better job of securing their own supply chains to prevent “third-party distributors” from “taking these products and re-selling them to bad actors."
CNN:
“This is a game of Whack-a-Mole. And the United States government needs to get incredibly good at Whack-a-Mole, period,” said former Pentagon official Gregory Allen, who now serves as Director of the Artificial Intelligence Governance Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This is a core competency of the US national security establishment – or it had better become one.”
Allen, who recently co-authored an investigation into the efficacy of US export controls, said ultimately, “there is no substitute for robust, in-house capabilities in the US government.”
“China plays a larger role than previously assessed”
A study released in October by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security found that “Iran may also be acquiring near-exact replicas of western components from China” and that “China plays a larger role than previously assessed in enabling Iran to manufacture and supply drones to Russian forces. “It appears that Chinese companies are supplying Iran with copies of Western commodities to produce UAV combat drones,” the report said.
Although CNN analysts said that there is no evidence to suggest that western companies know their products are being used by Russia in the war in Ukraine, experts interviewed recommended the US toughen enforcement of export controls and said that companies could do better due diligence.
CNN:
“American companies should be doing a lot more to track their supply chains,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, the former chief technology officer at the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
Keeping better track of resellers is a first step, he said, but the task is admittedly difficult because so many of these companies’ products are so commoditized and available off-the-shelf and online for civil purposes. Ultimately, neutering some Iranian front companies with sanctions and cutting off their supply from some western companies will be akin to “a game of whack a mole,” Alperovitch said, noting that they “can easily find another supplier.”
He added that the real “weak underbelly” of US policy when it comes to export controls is enforcement—and prosecuting the specific individuals involved in the illicit transactions.
“We have to beef up the resources for enforcement of our sanctions to achieve the desired effect,” Alperovitch said.
For the rest of CNN’s report, CNN Exclusive: A single Iranian attack drone found to contain parts from more than a dozen US companies, click here. For the CNN story which cited the Institute for Science and International Security, Exclusive: Biden task force investigating how US tech ends up in Iranian attack drones used against Ukraine, click here. For the original study (available in pdf), Iranian Drones in Ukraine Contain Western Brand Components, click here.
Law and International Xi
Number of countries imposing new China travel restrictions continues to rise
European states are joining a growing list of countries around the world - including Australia, Canada, India, Israel, Malaysia, Morocco, Qatar, South Korea, Taiwan and the USA - that have introduced new COVID travel measures for flights from China nearly three years after the original coronavirus outbreak.
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