As of a couple of days ago, the only aircraft carrier strike group operating in the Western Pacific belongs to communist China, reports Breaking Defense:
The Liaoning carrier and its five-ship strike group skirted the territorial waters of Japan and Taiwan over the weekend, passing between the Japanese islands of Okinawa and Miyako on Saturday, before moving east of Taiwan on Sunday, according to reports. The move marks Beijing’s latest show of force in the region as its naval strength continues to grow and many US carriers sit moribund.
While the PLA Navy flexed its muscles, American and French nuclear-powered aircraft carriers struggled to contend with the global pandemic. The stricken USS Theodore Roosevelt continues to offload sailors to hotels on shore in Guam as it treats and about 600 infected sailors are quarantined. The ship has been in port for two weeks, and it’s not clear when it will return to sea.
We lost a sailor to COVID over the weekend. The Liaoning is a former Soviet Union ship China has deployed, first as a “trainer” and later as a blue water warship. When it neared Taiwan, the true Chinese republic scrambled its own navy in response. Communist China also overflew Taiwan with military jets.
On Thursday, an H-6 bomber, J-11 fighter and KJ-500 reconnaissance plane from the PLA Air Force flew over southwestern Taiwan and on to the western Pacific where they followed a US RC-135U electronic reconnaissance aircraft.
And as you’ve probably heard by now, yesterday Iranian fast boats harassed U.S. Navy ships in international waters in the Persian Gulf.
“The IRGCN [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy] vessels repeatedly crossed the bows and sterns of the U.S. vessels at extremely close range and high speeds, including multiple crossings of the Puller with a 50 yard closest point of approach (CPA) and within 10 yards of Maui‘s bow,” according to NACVENT’s statement. “The U.S. crews issued multiple warnings via bridge-to-bridge radio, five short blasts from the ships’ horns and long-range acoustic noise maker devices, but received no response from the IRGCN.”
After about an hour of harassing behavior, the Iranian boats moved away. While none of the individual boats posed much threat to the American ships, they were exhibiting swarm attack behavior.
Against this backdrop, we are going to have to take a deep look at our relationship with China. We’re all aware of the supply line and manufacturing issues by now, but few are aware of the visa issues. Every year we allow tens of thousands of citizens of communist China to come to the United States on various visas — mostly H1B1 and student visas.
Some number of them either enable or become spies, according to BG Robert Spaulding (ret) and A.J. Rice.
Huang came to the United States as a student and stayed, according to her indictment. She pleaded guilty in December to setting up two fake companies, Findream and Sinocontech, that allowed Chinese H1B visa seekers to claim employment. Those visa seekers paid her to verify their employment, and her verification allowed her countrymen to either come to America or to stay here, the indictment says.
One of those countrymen, graduate student Ji Chaoqun, is accused of staying in the United States to spy and paying Huang $900 in 2013 to verify a fake job. According to his 2018 indictment, he was “secretly providing information about American defense contractor employees to a Chinese intelligence officer. … The Chinese government was trying to recruit them as informants,” the New York Times reported. After obtaining his electrical engineering master’s degree, he joined the U.S. Army Reserve, which led to his apprehension.
Read the rest. It looks like an organized scam to use our own visa system to take Americans’ jobs, on one hand, and plant untold numbers of spies in sensitive positions, on the other hand. If it’s organized, Beijing is behind it.
Bigger picture here at home: Unrest is building all over the country in resistance to lockdowns. Michigan and Kentucky have already seen protests. More protests are surely on the way as 5.2 million more Americans filed for unemployment in the past week, raising the total to an eye-watering 22 million since the coronavirus lockdowns began.
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