President Xi Jinping of China attends a working session on food and energy security during the G20 Summit on November 15, 2022 in Nusa Dua, Indonesia. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images.)
SEA AIR SPACE 2023 — The United States has “strong indications” that Chinese leader Xi Jinping could be losing control over the gray zone “harassment” tactics that his military and paramilitary forces have been using against neighboring countries and the US, a senior intelligence officer warned today.
“We have strong indications that Xi Jinping — and I’m an intelligence guy — Xi Jinping is not aware of everything his security forces are doing,” Rear Adm. Mike Studeman, commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence, told an audience here at the Sea Air Space exposition. “We think it’s a function of the unwieldiness of China’s governance model. There are dangers of dictatorships.”
Studeman highlighted a variety of China’s harassment tactics used against fishermen from Vietnam and the Philippines, such as ramming other vessels or spraying them with high-power water cannons. The Chinese military also frequently tries to harass US Navy warships as they transit the South China Sea. The Pentagon refers to these transgressions as “gray zone” actions because they are below the standards of what would constitute acts of war. Studeman also referenced incidents where Chinese pilots flew dangerously close to US and Australian military aircraft.
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In one incident, Studeman said, a Chinese pilot ejected chaff in the form of metal scraps from his aircraft — normally used to distract guided air-to-air missiles — while flying in front of an Australian P-8, leading the plane’s engines to ingest the material. The admiral today said the Australian crew was lucky they landed safely.
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The severity and frequency of incidents like these may not always be making their way to Xi Jinping or other Chinese Communist Party elites, Studeman said.
“There are dangers in how totalitarian states operate,” he said. “The truth doesn’t always flow very quickly in the dictatorships, and if it’s bad news, sometimes that gets adulterated on the way up to [the top]. We see some of that happening.”
As the head of one of the US government’s intelligence agencies, Studeman, a career intel officer and longtime China watcher, has previously been vocal about the threat he sees from the country the United States has marked as its “pacing threat.”
In February, he told attendees at the West 2023 exposition that the American public was “naïve” about China’s capabilities.
“I’ll be very honest with you. It’s very unsettling to see how much the US is not connecting the dots on our number one challenge,” he said at the time. “It’s disturbing how ill-informed and naïve the average American is on China. I chalk this up, if I could summarize, into a China blindness. We face a knowledge crisis and a China blindness problem.”
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Those comments came just days after the country’s attention had been transfixed on what the Pentagon dubbed a “Chinese spy balloon” that had flown over a large swath of US territory before it was shot down once it reached the Atlantic ocean.
The Chinese government claimed the balloon was purely for research purposes and its intrusion into US airspace was an accident. The Pentagon vehemently disputed that narrative and said the balloon, which was later recovered by US Navy and Coast Guard units, was an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance asset.
