Facing a global pushback against it, China naturally has no intention of sitting back and waiting for its fate. Instead, like a cornered beast still fighting, it is seeking every manner of strategy conducted away from the light of day, in order to break the encirclement and strike back. These strategies center on covert sabotage, technology plunder, neuro-warfare, and supply-chain disruption, in an attempt to wage a final showdown against the Western world. 1. The Undersea Cable-Cutting War On November 17 and 18, 2024, two important undersea cables in the Baltic Sea were severed. One was the C-Lion1 cable connecting Finland and Germany; the other was the BCS East-West Interlink connecting Lithuania and Sweden. Generally speaking, cutting an undersea cable requires intent, capability, and equipment, something an ordinary commercial vessel would neither be "willing" nor "able" to do. At the time of the incident, a large Chinese-flagged cargo ship, the Yi Peng 3, was moving slowly through the area, making it a major suspect. The Chinese-flagged vessel is currently anchored near the Kattegat Strait off Denmark, undergoing a joint multinational investigation. Although Chinese officials have stated their willingness to allow several Nordic countries to investigate this cargo ship, given that the vessel is Chinese-flagged, China cannot escape suspicion of "indirect responsibility" or "tacit complicity", and this is precisely why China is happy to cooperate with the investigation, because the primary culprit is likely Russia. In my assessment, it can be established with certainty, no further investigation even required, that this was an undersea cable-cutting operation directed by Russia and carried out with the cooperation of a Chinese-flagged cargo ship, and that it forms part of China's broader "undersea cable-cutting" strategy. Specifically, with the Russia-Ukraine war continuing to escalate and NATO countries increasing their aid to Ukraine, it is highly likely that before leaving a Russian port, this cargo ship was directed or bought off by Russia to sever the two Baltic Sea cables using the technique of "dragging an anchor along the seabed." The ship may not have notified Chinese authorities at all, which is why China is happy to cooperate with the investigation while distancing itself from primary responsibility, but even if the ship did notify Chinese authorities, China would certainly have tacitly permitted or condoned the act, since it serves the goals of Sino-Russian cooperation and the advancement of the "undersea cable-cutting" strategy, reflecting a linkage of strategic interests between China and Russia. In fact, Russia's use of a Chinese vessel to carry out this cable-cutting sabotage is a classic case of "killing with a borrowed knife": if the sabotage operation were to fail and be exposed, blame could then be shifted onto China. Given the continued hostility between China and Lithuania, and given that Sweden's parliament, on November 7 of this year, proposed strongly supporting Taiwan's participation in international organizations, China has every motive and every willingness to retaliate by sabotaging these two pieces of critical infrastructure. In fact, according to statistics from Chunghwa Telecom, in the five years prior to 2023, China had already carried out as many as 27 "undersea cable-cutting" operations against Taiwan. In March 2023, two undersea cables connecting Taiwan and Matsu were both severed by Chinese vessels; such a repeated pattern of sabotage cannot be dismissed as carelessness or accident, it is one of China's methods of waging covert warfare against Taiwan. On this point, America's CNN has even issued a warning: Should war break out across the Taiwan Strait, the 15 undersea cables surrounding Taiwan could be deliberately destroyed by China, cutting off internet access across the entire island and affecting Taiwan's ability to operate and use its advanced weapons in a counterstrike. 2. The Talent Headhunting War Huawei, founded by Ren Zhengfei, who came out of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, has never simply been an ordinary private enterprise; it doubles as one of China's telecommunications intelligence apparatuses. Over the past several years, Huawei has consistently used the provision of overseas 5G equipment as a tool to infiltrate other countries' national telecommunications networks, whether to control power grids or steal secrets. In recent years, as many countries have canceled contracts with Huawei and tightened sanctions and blockades against it, Huawei has found it increasingly difficult to obtain advanced Western technology through normal channels, and so it has turned instead to a strategy of "talent headhunting." Moreover, Huawei's "recruitment" is not simple employee hiring, but "headhunting" with a strategic purpose, using lavish pay packages and other inducements to poach talent from important Western technology companies, especially those tied to semiconductors and AI. This is a "legal shortcut to technological catch-up": in other words, rather than innovate on its own, it is easier to import elite talent; rather than buy equipment, it is easier to buy brains. This is a low-cost strategy of harvesting ready-made technology, without having to bear R&D costs or pay for intellectual property. The reason Western countries suffer this kind of "brain drain" is mainly that democratic countries treat an individual's career choices as a matter of personal autonomy, and treat corporate recruitment as ordinary business activity that the government cannot interfere with. It is precisely this democratic loophole that gives the CCP its opportunity to poach technology talent. This means that technology talent is not merely made up of "employees" or "engineers", they are "strategic assets" tied to national security and strategic competition. How to protect this talent asset, or prevent it from falling into the CCP's hands, is now a major task facing democratic nations. Huawei's "talent headhunting" did not begin today; there have already been three notable precedents: (1) The earliest example is Liang Mong-Song, a Taiwanese former senior engineer at TSMC and Samsung, who, lured by a lucrative offer, joined China's largest chip foundry, SMIC, and helped it rise and expand rapidly. Liang has been described by outside observers as a "TSMC defector"; under today's national security legal framework, his conduct could well be described as "aiding the enemy through technology." (2) According to information from the Dutch company ASML, a Chinese engineer who left ASML roughly a decade ago later founded a competing company in China. He had taken with him certain key ASML software and confidential materials, causing great harm to the company. (3) In 2023, the CEO of the California semiconductor company Femto Metrix testified before the U.S. Congress that the company's trade secrets had been stolen: three of its employees left to found a semiconductor company in China, taking with them thousands of the company's documents. The "talent headhunting" strategies of Huawei and other Chinese companies have already put countries including the United States, South Korea, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and Germany on alert, prompting them one after another to adopt legal and technical measures to contain the threat. This is not only an imperative, it is now an urgent priority in democratic nations' "battle to defend technology."
3. Brain-Control Neuro-Warfare "Brain-control neuro-warfare" is a form of "hyper-limited warfare" aimed at controlling the cognitive and neural functions of the human brain. This invisible form of warfare is also known as "Brain War," "Neurostrike," or the "microwave killer." It represents the ultimate frontier and goal of the "weaponization of AI." This is not "physical warfare aimed at the destruction of the body," but rather "a war for the soul aimed at the human brain": a destructive project that uses AI computation and microwave projection to rewrite, guide, and reshape the medium of human cognition, in order to achieve "cognitive united-front work" and "ideological domination." Last July, The Epoch Times revealed a report titled "Enumerating, Targeting and Collapsing the Chinese Communist Party's Neurostrike Program." The report was co-authored by Ryan Clarke, a senior research fellow at the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore; Lin Xiaoxu, a former U.S. Army microbiologist; and L.J. Eads, a current artificial-intelligence expert within the U.S. intelligence community. This report puts forward a specialized term, "Neurostrike": the use of "non-kinetic technology" to conduct "engineered targeting" of the brains of military personnel or civilians. Its goal is to impair thought, reduce situational awareness, cause long-term neurological damage, and disrupt normal cognitive function. The most alarming aspect is the "brain-computer interface", a cutting-edge technology that uses "neural microwaves" to block or alter human neurons, changing a person's cognitive system and manufacturing artificial cognitive states. For example, microwave projection could be used to alter a soldier's perception of the battlefield, or to block the neural pathways of fear so that soldiers lose their instinctive fear of death, or to activate neural pathways of anger to induce "extreme hatred" toward the enemy to the point of losing rational control, or to stimulate neural pathways of excitement to make a subject more receptive to a given ideology. In fact, the CCP had already begun researching and developing this kind of dark tactic as early as the 2010s. Xiao Tianliang, president of China's National Defense University, wrote in his 2015 work The Science of Military Strategy: "Attacks are not limited to microwave weapons; they also include the use of 'brain-computer interface systems' to control the thoughts and mental states of large populations." This report amounts to a "final warning" to the West: if Western countries fail to adopt feasible countermeasures such as containment, supply cutoffs, and sanctions, the result will be a world "ruled by devils."
4. The Supply Chain Disruption War In fact, as far back as the 2019 Trump Trade War 1.0, China had already established restrictive export controls on key strategic materials, focused primarily on rare earths, chemical raw materials, and lithium batteries. Now that Trump has returned to the White House, vowing to wage a "nuclear-level tariff war" against China, China, in order to respond and retaliate, will launch a "Supply Chain Warfare" campaign of its own: exploiting America's heavy dependence on scarce Chinese resources to wage a "counter-chokehold" war, moving from export restrictions to outright supply cutoffs. According to reporting by The New York Times, just days before the U.S. presidential election, Chinese authorities imposed sanctions on Skydio, America's largest drone manufacturer, cutting off a battery supply critical to the company and forcing Skydio to scramble for alternative suppliers, thereby slowing its deliveries to customers, including the U.S. military. This is China's "strategic-materials supply-chain disruption war," a "counter-cutoff" against America's technology cutoffs. In fact, according to The New York Times, China has maintained an "unreliable entity list" since 2019 to punish companies that harm China's national interests, and has established retaliatory punitive rules against foreign entities that comply with U.S. sanctions on China. At the same time, China has expanded its export-control laws to restrict Western access to the sources and channels of critical materials such as rare earths and lithium, in order to help China resist the onslaught of the "global pushback against China." Chinese Hegemony, By Any Means Necessary Amid the constantly shifting nature of modern warfare and the trend toward "all weaponization," China has developed, and continues to develop, an array of silent "dark strategies," aimed at using any means necessary, in disregard of law, ethics, and basic humanity, to subvert the international order with all its strength, fundamentally reshape human cognition, and achieve its goal of becoming a dominant global hegemon.