China's Accidental Spies
How Chinese internet users reveal Beijing's military secrets ... with Beijing's help
This story originally appeared in Miller-McCune in 2011. With reporting by Robert Beckhusen.
The jet fighter appears suddenly directly overhead, twin engines roaring, landing gear dangling like claws, diamond-shaped wings tracing an impressive black silhouette against the grayish sky. The airplane, wearing the red star insignia of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, whips past and disappears on the opposite horizon.
In its wake, there is only the image of the gray sky—and the excited chatter of the cameraman and the other airplane aficionados huddled around him. “The wind was strong!” someone says in the local Sichuan dialect, referring to the blast from the fighter’s engines.
They laugh nervously, clearly appreciating that they've just witnessed, and recorded, something remarkable: the second-ever test flight of the Chinese military’s very first stealth fighter prototype—the Chengdu J-20, an advanced “fifth-generation” warplane that some experts say could rival America’s latest F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters—on the outskirts of Chengdu, an industrial city of 14 million in central China.
But the most remarkable thing is what happened in the hours following the April 17, 2011 flight: a cameraman with the handle “Star Not” uploaded his video to Youku, a Chinese YouTube clone that is closely monitored by the Chinese government.
The upload itself was nothing special. But the fact that it didn’t immediately disappear, yanked from the server by a vigilant censor, was special.
The video and several others taken from the same spot at the same time, quickly went viral. The same day, web users all over the world snatched the Youku videos and uploaded them to other video-sharing sites, including YouTube. Thousands of people on almost every continent shared a detailed glimpse, however brief, of what until recently had been the Chinese air force’s greatest secret.
The first grainy photos and fragmentary videos of the J-20 had appeared three months earlier. But many of these images were the military-industrial equivalent of the 1967 amateur film that purported to show Bigfoot strolling through a Californian forest. In other words, implausible.
Western analysts and reporters had all heard rumors of a warplane called the J-20. But almost all of China’s warplane designs to date were poor copies of older Russian planes—and most observers believed the J-20 would be the same middling stuff.
Absent firmer proof, it was easiest to dismiss the jet in those early snapshots as the product of Photoshop image-manipulation software and someone’s imagination.
But Star Not’s video was undeniably authentic. That made it ideal fodder for an online audience hungry for news regarding the impressive new warplane from the world’s fastest-growing military power. The same audience devours rumors about and photos of Chinese drones, ballistic missiles, helicopters, armored vehicles, submarines and, most famously, the PLA's first aircraft carrier, which sailed on its debut voyage in July 2011.
The majority of the audience is Chinese, and in it for the “coolness” value. “Huitong,” a 40-something Chinese man living in America, is typical. Since 1995, Huitong has been an active member of Chinese internet forums specializing in military news and gossip.
The forums are, in essence, updated versions of the chat rooms that were so popular in the U.S. a decade ago. “I played with many toys like tanks, warships and aircraft,” Huitong tells Miller-McCune by email. “Now I visit military forums just for fun.”
But there’s a more serious side to the online audience. Besides millions of everyday Chinese, visitors to China's military forums include Beltway think-tank analysts, U.S. Congressional staffers, Western journalists and other members of the American policymaking machine.
U.S. intelligence agents also use information they find on the forums to supplement the more specialized data provided by satellites, spy planes and foreign turncoats. “It always is preferable to obtain information this way than clandestinely, given that it is cheaper and less hazardous,” says Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the CIA who now teaches at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C.
The policy and intelligence communities even have a name for the practice: “open-source intelligence.” It’s a practice with roots in the Cold War, when journalist Andrew Cockburn interviewed Soviet Jewish emigres about Moscow’s weaponry and strategy to produce the influential 1983 book The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Regime.
Until recently, open-source intel was the work of government outsiders like Cockburn trying to make educated assessments of foreign powers. That's changing, says Michael D’Alessandro, a physician who since 2000 has been aggregating information about the world's navies at his website Naval Open Soure Intelligence. “With the advent of the internet and the new generation of intelligence analysts who are ‘digital natives,’ [open-source intel] is now gaining greater traction in the intelligence community,” D’Alessandro says.
Star Not’s video marked a signature moment for a largely anonymous group of Chinese internet users, living in China and abroad, who are exerting growing yet apparently unintentional influence on what is shaping up to be the defining strategic rivalry of the early 21st century. Web-savvy amateur weapons enthusiasts have become China's accidental spies, passing valuable open-source intelligence to foreign audiences through internet gossip.
But these spies might be double agents, whether they know it or not. “Drip-by-drip revelations are apparently condoned or even encouraged by the PLA,” said Rick Fisher, a fellow at the Virginia-based International Assessment and Strategy Center.
If so, why? The answer could lie in Beijing's deep tradition of state secrecy and its ongoing effort to control the supposedly uncontrollable internet, and the world’s growing demands for more information on the rapidly expanding Chinese military and assumption that all information will somehow appear on the internet. The forumers could be the best people to bridge the gap between these positions.
China has no fewer than 500 million internet users, according to Google—the most of any nation. The numbers for social media, including blogs, video-sharing sites and message forums, are even more impressive. The forums claim more than a billion members, though many “forumers” use more than one account. “China’s digital footprint is massive,” writes Brian Solis, an analyst with the Altimeter Group in California.
But Chinese web content is heavily censored, or “harmonized,” to use the popular Chinese term. All of the country’s internet traffic routes through a central server farm, where “Golden Shield,” a $700-million program designed by U.S. firm Cisco, checks URLs against a list of banned webpages tens of thousands of entries long. On that list: Facebook, YouTube, Voice of America, BBC News.
To supplement the Golden Shield, an army of censors working for the Public Security Bureau scours blogs and other social media, yanking any material considered politically sensitive. The censors pay close attention to any web content describing Chinese military capabilities.
Many countries have active internet-based communities of military hardware aficionados. They include: “plane spotters” and their non-aerospace kin, who photograph and videotape warplanes and other weaponry from outside bases’ security fences; so-called “milbloggers”—online diarists who might be active-duty military personnel, veterans, or simply war-obsessed civilians; armchair analysts who process the visual and anecdotal data from the photographers and bloggers into on-the-fly commentary on all things military; plus online journalists who skim the best of all these for their stories.
In the U.S., with its dizzying media diversity, the online war-nerd community is anchored by a wide range of professional news websites. In China, with its state-controlled media, there are few professional military sites. Instead, Chinese war nerds anonymously post photos, news and rumors to their own password-protected forums, which are widely seen as safer from harmonization.
Inside the perceived safety of their virtual salons, Chinese military forumers add their voices to a vast, noisy, chaotic conversation about the latest weapons, tactics, and grand strategy of the People’s Liberation Army. It’s a conversation with many eavesdroppers.
The average Chinese military forumer is a college-educated man in his 20s or early 30s with no formal ties to the Chinese government. “Their biggest role in this community appears to be supplying first-hand photos and rumors related to the latest developments in the PLA,” says “John,” a 29-year-old Chinese-American contributor to the popular China Defense Forum. Like all the forumers interviewed for this story, he asked that his real name not be used.
Photos, videos and gossip posted to the forums can feed directly into the complex U.S. intelligence machinery, via Chinese-speaking U.S. government analysts who are forum members and can sift through the terabytes of data for useful nuggets.
This direct access to the forums requires not only fluency in written Chinese. A reader must also understand Chinese internet slang, which is so pervasive—and unintelligible to outsiders—that the Chinese government has banned its use in official documents and college applications. “You really have to follow it a while to understand it,” says “Feng,” a U.S.-based Chinese forumer whose native language is Mandarin.
To be truly useful to a global audience, much of the raw material on the forums needs translating by Chinese forumers who also speak English. Many of these translators are Chinese men working or studying abroad. John includes himself in this group. cultural
It’s the translators’ work, often filtered a second time through Western websites, that most obviously feeds the U.S. defense establishment. The Pentagon sometimes ignores initial postings by non-English-speaking forumers, instead waiting for the translators or their U.S. or British counterparts to vet data on a new weapon.
Eric Wertheim, a naval analyst and author of Combat Fleets of the World, an authoritative guide to the world's warships, defends the U.S. military establishment’s cautious approach to Chinese forumers. “We would be remiss if we neglected or ignored them,” Wertheim says. “We’d be equally irresponsible if we considered their information and postings as above suspicion.”
The J-20's internet debut perfectly illustrates the complex relationship between the different breeds of Chinese forumers and between the forumers and Western observers.
On Dec. 22, 2010, Huitong, the forumer living in America, plucked the very first public image of the J-20 prototype from an obscure Chinese forum and posted it on Top81, one of the biggest and most respected Chinese military forums. But it would be days before that photo filtered through to a wide Western audience—and weeks before the Pentagon accepted it as authentic.
The photo was blurry, snapped through trees and at a distracting angle—probably the product of the photographer’s using a cell phone camera while driving outside the airfield’s security fence, trying not to be noticed. The J-20 was depicted apparently slowly taxiing rather than flying.
The British forum Secret Projects republished the photo the same day Huitong posted it. But many Secret Projects users doubted the picture’s authenticity. “What makes him [Huitong] reliable?” one user demanded in a forum post. Another came to the Chinese forumer’s defense: “Huitong has been right on other matters.”
The debate continued for three days. Then on Christmas Day, Bill Sweetman, the senior military aviation reporter for Ares, the blog of the respected Aviation Week, a trade publication based in Washington, D.C., reposted Huitong’s J-20 photo.
Two days later, Sweetman relayed another photo of the still-nonflying J-20—this one published by John’s China Defense Forum after first appearing on another forum. Sweetman’s endorsements meant a big boost in Western credibility for the images.
In short order, scores of U.S. and other English-language websites posted the photos. With every page view, the J-20 became more “real”—and the implications of its existence more profound. “Now that the last few skeptics have been converted to the idea that the J-20 is a real airplane, and not the product of a network of Chinese teenage boys armed with Photoshop,” Sweetman wrote on Dec. 30, the internetz [sic] are rife with speculation about the project’s schedule, technology and capabilities.”
The Western internet community was still days ahead of the traditional media and the U.S. government. The first major news outlet to run the J-20 story was The Wall Street Journal, on Jan. 5. The Defense Department analysts also waited to concede the J-20’s existence. The Pentagon’s annual report on the PLA, published in May, refers to “initial images of China’s ... J-20 stealth fighter ... posted on the internet” in “January 2011.”
John, the Chinese-American forumer, says in an email that it is “inconceivable” that Chinese forumers would “add to the collective knowledge of the U.S. government and security apparatus in a way that American intelligence and espionage operations cannot.”
But that’s apparently exactly what happened. In January, Vice Adm. David Dorsett, the Navy's top intelligence officer, told Aviation Week the Pentagon knew the Chinese were working on the J-20, but had no idea it was ready for testing until photos worked their way through the forumers, translators and Western bloggers." “We have been pretty consistent in underestimating the delivery and initial operational capability of Chinese technology weapons systems,” Dorsett admitted.
Even with hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of satellites and other spy gear, Washington still can't peer inside buildings in another country or read the minds of foreign officials, scientists and engineers to predict the emergence of new technologies. A young man with a cell phone camera and an internet connection can take the U.S. intelligence establishment to school.
It’s a bigger problem than many people realize. “The Pentagon was not just behind the curve on the J-20,” Feng, the U.S.-based forumer, says in an email. “Their reports on the PLA Navy basically have not changed that much, even though the kind of build-up we are seeing in the PLAN requires a lot of adjustment.”
In other words, the Chinese military is developing fast—too fast for the Pentagon to keep up. With their many eyes and ears and their 24-7 schedule, the forumers are in a better position to tap the constant stream of new information.
“Chinese forumers and bloggers do not seem to be aware of how influential they are,” “Bob,” a Chinese-born forumer in his 40s who now lives in the U.S., tells Miller-McCune in an email.
Beijing, on the other hand, does seem to appreciate the forumers’ influence. In a possibly shrewd and exploitative way. It’s possible that the Chinese Communist Party uses the forumers to selectively “announce” China's military developments, with the aim of stoking Chinese nationalism, projecting an image of strength to the world, and, at the same time, satisfying Western demands for more and better information on the PLA without having to provide it themselves—for reasons, as with most everything having to do with the PLA’s decisions, that are unique to China and the subject of informed speculation
That seems especially true considering the timing of the J-20’s first flight. After more than two weeks of ground testing that was thoroughly albeit inexpertly documented by forumers, the J-20 took off for the first time on Jan. 11—an event also recorded by the forums' amateur photographers and videographers.
The flight coincided with a visit to Beijing by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who just two years earlier had assured an audience at the Economic Club of Chicago that China would have “no fifth-generation aircraft by 2020.” The forumers proved that Gates was off by a full decade.
It could be that the J-20’s first flight was meant as a message to Gates while he was in China and, by extension, the U.S. military—with the forumers as the primary messengers. “What would this message have been?” Andrew Scobell, an analyst for RAND, a think tank working for the U.S. Air Force, said in a March Congressional hearing. “It would appear to be along the lines of: ‘America, take heed—the capabilities of our weaponry are ever-improving and we are not intimidated by your technologically superior military might.’”
According to Gates, Chinese president Hu Jintao vehemently denied that any message was meant. “I take President Hu at his word that ... the test had nothing to do with my visit,” Gates told reporters in China.
But there are good reasons to believe it did, and moreover to believe that much of what happens on Top81, China Defense Forum and their ilk serves the subtle purposes of the world’s last great oligarchy. In other words, it’s possible that Beijing is using the forumers to help boost the Chinese government's image at home and abroad.
After all, governments walk a fine line between military secrecy and feats of strength. For most nations, rival states are the intended audience of military displays. But for China, the showcasing of new weaponry also serves to remind the Chinese people of the government's power, according to Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of China in the 21st Century.
For the Chinese, military demonstrations can be both unifying and pacifying. “Military modernization is one of the very few issues in which the central government has near-universal support from the Chinese people and even the overseas Chinese community,” John says. At the same time, the rolling out of a new weapon serves to remind a sometimes restless population of the consequences of democratic movements such as the one dashed in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
So why not simply announce new weapons developments through official channels, like the U.S. military and most of the rest of the world’s armies do? Here is where the other shoe starts to drop.
Like most authoritative regimes, Beijing is obsessed with official secrecy. At the same time, China’s enormous size, wealth, and regional aspirations makes it a particular concern for other governments. The world craves information about the Chinese military that the military isn’t comfortable providing on its own. “Allowing the blogger community to expose PLA weapons developments at an early stage could be an indirect way of alleviating Western concerns without official transparency,” John explains.
That means relaxing the state's grasp on the military forums—though not totally. China’s censors monitor the military forums but rarely intervene. Forumers get in trouble “only if they delve too deep into sensitive political matters,” Bob said.
And, in fact, Chinese censors are known to delete forum posts that don’t sync up with the PLA’s schedule for rolling out new weapons. The J-20 might have made its debut earlier if not for the efforts of the Public Security Bureau. There were rumors that photos of the new warplane had surfaced, briefly, before Dec. 20—but had been yanked by the censors. It appears that the PLA plotted the J-20’s unveiling so that rising anticipation culminated in the J-20’s first flight on Jan. 11 ... right in the middle of Gates’ visit.
Provided their timing is right, then, many forumers apparently do Beijing’s dirty work without the Chinese Communist Party’s needing to lift a finger. They either don’t realize or don’t care that their hobby could serve Beijing’s ends.
A few forumers do, however, reportedly collude with Party operatives, echoing government statements in their own, supposedly spontaneous forum posts. Some are even allegedly on Beijing’s payroll. “The people that carry out this effort are commonly referred to as the ‘50-Cents Party,’” John says, named after the amount of money they receive for each internet message.
Some degree of government involvement is apparent in the months-long trickle of photos and videos that brought the J-20 out into the open. One prominent China-based forumer, who goes by the pseudonym “Snowhole,” believes the PLA was directly responsible for planting the first images of the new jet fighter.
“Some of the early photos of J-20 came from within the CAC’s Chengdu compound,” Snowhole tells Miller-McCune in an email, using the acronym for a government-owned China Aerospace Conglomerate.
While Snowhole suspicion is well-founded, it’s equally possible the first photos and videos taken of the non-flying J-20 in December of 2010 were the product of enterprising forumers acting on their own. But by the time of the J-20’s first flight on Jan. 11, PLA officials were likely coordinating the internet chatter.
“They apparently alerted a group of bloggers around the Chengdu military airport about the impending flight and encouraged them to cover the flight,” Bahukutumbi Raman, a former Indian intelligence agent now working as an analyst with the Chennai Center for China Studies in Chennai, India, wrote on his blog “Chinese authorities ... used the same procedure” for the J-20’s second flight on April 17, Raman added.
That much is obvious from stories appearing in Chinese state media. In January and April, China Central Television broadcast amateur videos of what it called the “mystery jet.”
Global Times, a PLA mouthpiece, even quoted forumers describing the “alleged” second test of the new plane.
That could explain why Star Not’s dramatic video, uploaded to Youku in April, wasn’t promptly yanked by the censors—and could also account for most if not all of the depictions of the J-20 published after Dec. 22. It’s possible that censors rarely meddle with China’s thriving military forums not because the forums aren’t revealing military secrets but because they are. And that’s exactly what Beijing wants.
While there’s a hint of Big Brother in Beijing’s apparent manipulation of the forumers, there’s an equally positive way to interpret the relationship. The forumers open a window—the only window, really—into the Chinese military. This assuages Western governments that have long clamored for more and better information on Beijing’s strategic intentions, buying time for the Chinese Communist Party and the PLA to gradually adopt more open practices.
That’s good news for the forumers. In the short term, they’ll probably continue being the major source of public information on the Chinese military. In the medium term, they’ll enjoy less of an information monopoly—but greater access to an increasingly open People’s Liberation Army. “As the PLA embarks on a road towards gradual transparency, bloggers will have more leeway to take photos and assess new developments,” John claims. “Enthusiasm and satisfaction will only grow.”
The forumers’ work is equally valuable to the U.S., whether it’s unofficial P.R. sponsored by Beijing or open-source intelligence that slips past the censors. The information matters more than the circumstances of its origins, website editor D’Alessandro argues. “The more we know and understand about each other, the less the chance of misunderstanding between us and the less the chance of accidental and avoidable conflict between us.”
China's accidental spies might also be its accidental diplomats.
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