The goal of China’s influence operations around the world is to replace the United States as the world’s leading superpower, the CIA’s Michael Collins said Friday.
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«At the end of the day they want every country around the world, when it’s deciding its interests on policy issues, to first and foremost side with China and not the United States, because the Chinese are increasingly defining a conflict with the United States and what we stand behind as a systems conflict.»
By looking at the writings of Xi, whose «thought» or world view was recently enshrined in China’s constitution, it’s clear, Collins says, that the threat China presents is the greatest global challenge the US currently faces.
«It sets up a competition with us and what we stand behind far more significantly by any extreme than what the Russians could put forward,» Collins said.
Collins’ comments on the third day of the forum echoed those of other senior US officials there, including FBI Director Christopher Wray and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, who both pointed to China as the most significant danger for the US today.
«I think China, from a counterintelligence perspective, in many ways represents the broadest, most challenging, most significant threat we face as a country,» Wray had told his audience on Wednesday.
«And I say that because for them it is a whole of state effort. It is economic espionage as well as traditional espionage; it is nontraditional collectors as well as traditional intelligence operatives; it’s human sources as well as cyber means.»
Coats said Thursday that the US needed to decide if China was a «true adversary or a legitimate competitor.» He criticized Chinese state efforts to steal business secrets and academic research. «I think that’s where we begin to draw the line,» he said.
China’s growing defense posture
Marcel Lettre, a former undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said that influence operations — in which the ruling Communist Party uses political, financial and military strategies to establish and solidify its presence in countries in its region and beyond — were only one tool China deploys as part of a larger effort to expand and grow.
«It’s a country that has the second largest global defense budget, the largest standing army of ground forces, the third largest air force in the world, a navy of 300 ships — including more than 60 subs — all of this is in the process of being modernized and upgraded,» he said, adding that those upgrades were «oriented around the innovations we’ve been taking on the US side for the last decade or two.
