You probably realize that many American companies are wagering their future growth on emerging prosperity in China. Multi-national corporations such as General Electric, Honeywell, etc. are working deals with Chinese companies that entail “foreign offsets” to gain a foothold in a market with more than a billion consumers.
I created a few postings more than 18 months ago about Chinese efforts to steal American assets… An interesting story in a recent issue of Popular Mechanics describes the details of how the Chinese are using espionage to steal military secrets and intellectual property from the United States. In addition, the Chinese are employing various methods for quietly conducting cyber warfare against American organizations. According to an article in PC World, the Chinese have created military units to create viruses and conduct attacks via the Internet against American technology infrastructure.
So, this begs the question: are the friend or foe… or both?