It’s worth noting that China’s National Intelligence Law requires that all organizations and citizens support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts. In other words, every Chinese tourist is expected to act as a spy.
“Fifth column” refers to citizens or residents of the targeted country who betray it to an invader. Your concern would be well-placed if this were about Americans of Chinese ethnicity. But it isn’t; it’s about citizens of China “visiting” the US and probing security of US military facilities.
Again: This is about citizens of China, not Americans of Chinese ethnicity. And it is not just about any citizens of China visiting the US, but specifically those who attempt to get into US military installations.
Citizens of China are expected to obey the Chinese law requiring them to assist the China regime’s spy agencies. If they don’t, they and their families can be imprisoned, tortured, or murdered. None of that is true of Americans of Chinese ethnicity, nor do these articles suggest that it would be.
So I think your concern is misplaced here.
The US has made that mistake in the past; most famously in WWII with regards to Americans of Japanese ethnicity. That was bad; that was racist; that was unjust.
First you treat all foreigners of a specific nationality as a spy, then you treat everyone of a specific nationality as a spy, and then you round them up. The progression is quite simple, so let’s not start with step one. Military bases should just fix their security and end it at that.
Part of what “fixing military bases’ security” looks like in practice is catching people who try to go into restricted areas, and then figuring out why they tried to do that.
Sometimes, the reason they tried to do that could be: “Their country’s government openly passed a law that allows them to order random citizens to do spy stuff. Non-compliance with that law is punished as a crime. Then they ordered those people to do spy stuff. So, those people’s motivation was to comply with their country’s law, to avoid being punished as criminals.”
“Fixing security” includes investigating that possibility.
If one cares about actually protecting the country from spies from China, one has to avoid both those errors. And, if one cares about justice, one does have to be vigilant to not slide into racist bullshit as happened in WWII. That’s a valid concern. But it’s not what seems to be going on in this case.
“Fifth column” refers to citizens or residents of the targeted country who betray it to an invader. Your concern would be well-placed if this were about Americans of Chinese ethnicity. But it isn’t; it’s about citizens of China “visiting” the US and probing security of US military facilities.
Again: This is about citizens of China, not Americans of Chinese ethnicity. And it is not just about any citizens of China visiting the US, but specifically those who attempt to get into US military installations.
Citizens of China are expected to obey the Chinese law requiring them to assist the China regime’s spy agencies. If they don’t, they and their families can be imprisoned, tortured, or murdered. None of that is true of Americans of Chinese ethnicity, nor do these articles suggest that it would be.
So I think your concern is misplaced here.
The US has made that mistake in the past; most famously in WWII with regards to Americans of Japanese ethnicity. That was bad; that was racist; that was unjust.
However, that is not going on here.
First you treat all foreigners of a specific nationality as a spy, then you treat everyone of a specific nationality as a spy, and then you round them up. The progression is quite simple, so let’s not start with step one. Military bases should just fix their security and end it at that.
Part of what “fixing military bases’ security” looks like in practice is catching people who try to go into restricted areas, and then figuring out why they tried to do that.
Sometimes, the reason they tried to do that could be: “Their country’s government openly passed a law that allows them to order random citizens to do spy stuff. Non-compliance with that law is punished as a crime. Then they ordered those people to do spy stuff. So, those people’s motivation was to comply with their country’s law, to avoid being punished as criminals.”
“Fixing security” includes investigating that possibility.
If you confuse that with racism, you get really shitty security. That goes in both directions: ignoring spies from China out of fear of “being racist” is bad security, and so is accusing an American of being a spy for China just because he’s ethnically Chinese.
If one cares about actually protecting the country from spies from China, one has to avoid both those errors. And, if one cares about justice, one does have to be vigilant to not slide into racist bullshit as happened in WWII. That’s a valid concern. But it’s not what seems to be going on in this case.
LOL, can you imagine believing that a country would order random schmucks who were visiting a foreign country to act as their intelligence agents?