China sees its relationship with us very differently than we do

At Red State, strieff has an eye-opening piece about a recent arrest of a former CIA agent:

 The Department of Justice has announced the arrest of a former CIA case officer on charges of “retaining classified information.”

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, aka Zhen Cheng Li, 53, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, was arrested last night on charges of unlawful retention of national defense information.

Dana J. Boente, Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security and U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and Andrew W. Vale, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, made the announcement.

Lee was arrested after arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York.  Lee is a naturalized U.S. citizen, currently residing in Hong Kong, China.  According to court documents, Lee began working for the CIA as a case officer in 1994, maintained a Top Secret clearance and signed numerous non-disclosure agreements during his tenure at CIA.

According to court documents, in August 2012, Lee and his family left Hong Kong to return to the United States to live in northern Virginia. While traveling back to the United States, Lee and his family had hotel stays in Hawaii and Virginia.  During each of the hotel stays, FBI agents conducted court-authorized searches of Lee’s room and luggage, and found that Lee was in unauthorized possession of materials relating to the national defense.  Specifically, agents found two small books containing handwritten notes that contained classified information, including but not limited to, true names and phone numbers of assets and covert CIA employees, operational notes from asset meetings, operational meeting locations and locations of covert facilities.

He's been looked at as a possible mole in the context of the Chinese government rolling up informant networks in recent years.

Strieff quotes his own earlier post about this:

As I said in an earlier post on another CIA operative arrested for spying for the Chinese:

The Chinese are actively targeting US industry, military, academia, and government officials. In March, a State Department official was charged with working for the Chinese. While they are recruiting here, they are actively engaged in rolling up networks it took us decades to establish in China.

We also have national blinders about China, perhaps because we have a major trade relationship with them and because they aren’t as blatantly aggressive as Putin’s Russia. While people are turning white trousers brown over the DNC losing some emails, no one really gives a rat’s ass about the fact that the Chinese government hacked the US Office of Personnel Management and downloaded more that 20 MILLION personnel records of current and former government employees.

This story caught my eye because I'm currently working on a story for a business magazine in a midwestern city in which there are a number of companies with global reach. Yesterday I interviewed  a person whose day job is with an international investment firm. She also serves on the city's economic development board. The story is actually about communication technology, and she revealed the frustrations she and colleagues feel when they encounter the ways the Chinese government blocks their ability to communicate. In the course of our conversation, I asked her if there were truly private companies in China. She said that there were, and the advantages of working with them was their flexibility, but that state-owned enterprises had the real money, so that they had to be dealt with as well.

As I say, my article is going to be about the bells and whistles of modern communication in global business, but a few years ago, for the same magazine, I did a piece - it was an idea I'd pitched to the editor, rather than an assignment from him, which is usually the case - on the pros and cons - not just economic, but those of a national-security nature - of fostering trade with China. I was disappointed in the way the piece turned out. I couldn't get anybody to talk to me about the obvious agenda of the Chinese government. It's clear that the government - that is, the Party - intends to overtake the United States economically, in military strength and geostrategically.

The tone of the responses I got to my attempts to broach the subject was along the lines of, "You know how big that market is, how many people and how much capital is there. Someone is going to act on that opportunity. Why shouldn't it be us?"

Well, as long as it doesn't abet the Chinese government's aims, I guess they should go for it. But how sure are they that their activities are immune to that?