New year, new decade, same machinations and treachery from the communist Chinese regime. The Wall Street Journal published a major story over the holidays, exposing extensive Chinese hacking efforts that have penetrated a slew of Western companies. Here's the background, detailed in the story's lede:

In one of the largest-ever corporate espionage efforts, cyberattackers alleged to be working for China’s intelligence services stole volumes of intellectual property, security clearance details and other records from scores of companies over the past several years. They got access to systems with prospecting secrets for mining company Rio Tinto RIO 0.32% PLC, and sensitive medical research for electronics and health-care giant Philips PHG 0.04% NV. They came in through cloud service providers, where companies thought their data was safely stored. Once they got in, they could freely and anonymously hop from client to client, and defied investigators’ attempts to kick them out for years.

And then the new revelation unearthed by the Journal:

A Wall Street Journal investigation has found that the attack was much bigger than previously known. It goes far beyond the 14 unnamed companies listed in the indictment, stretching across at least a dozen cloud providers, including CGI Group Inc., GIB 0.26% one of Canada’s largest cloud companies; Tieto Oyj, a major Finnish IT services company; and International Business Machines Corp. IBM 0.93%. The Journal pieced together the hack and the sweeping counteroffensive by security firms and Western governments through interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the investigation, hundreds of pages of internal company and investigative documents, and technical data related to the intrusions...Inside the clouds, the hackers, known as APT10 to Western officials and researchers, had access to a vast constellation of clients. The Journal’s investigation identified hundreds of firms that had relationships with breached cloud providers, including Rio Tinto, Philips, American Airlines Group Inc., Deutsche Bank AG , Allianz SE and GlaxoSmithKline PLC.

"FBI Director Christopher Wray called it the hackers’ equivalent of stealing the master keys to an entire apartment complex," the story goes on to report. The Chinese cheat and steal. They are dreadfully bad actors on the global trade and commerce scene, with intellectual property theft being a central "business model." This is why there is so much bipartisan support for President Trump's tougher stance against China. And then, in addition to all the human rights horrors, there's this grotesque distortion of the market. It's tough to compete with slave labor:

Beyond detaining one million Uighur and other Turkic Muslims until they renounce Islam, the Chinese government is also forcing many of them to work in new factories, potentially threatening supply chains left and right with abusive labor practices. https://t.co/ptnpAbw2wN pic.twitter.com/HRfUwVw3oX — Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) December 31, 2019

The order from Chinese officials was blunt and urgent. Villagers from Muslim minorities should be pushed into jobs, willing or not. Quotas would be set and families penalized if they refused to go along. “Make people who are hard to employ renounce their selfish ideas,” the labor bureau of Qapqal, a county in the western region of Xinjiang, said in the directive last year. Such orders are part of an aggressive campaign to remold Xinjiang’s Muslim minorities — mostly Uighurs and Kazakhs — into an army of workers for factories and other big employers. Under pressure from the authorities, poor farmers, small traders and idle villagers of working age attend training and indoctrination courses for weeks or months, and are then assigned to stitch clothes, make shoes, sweep streets or fill other jobs. These labor programs represent an expanding front in a major effort by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to entrench control over this region, where these minorities make up about half the population. They are crucial to the government’s strategy of social re-engineering alongside the indoctrination camps, which have held one million or more Uighurs and Kazakhs.

When the appalling situation in Western China was mentioned during a recent Democratic debate, the Chinese government abruptly cut off the television feed:

CNN live feed of Democratic presidential debate goes to black in Beijing. Candidates were asked about China’s human rights record & the mass detention of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. #PresidentialDebate pic.twitter.com/DSQ9QRu5zA — Will Ripley (@willripleyCNN) December 20, 2019



Pure, evil authoritarian censorship, blacking out evidence of rampant abuses. Disgusting. Out of curiosity, have any of the woke heroes of the NBA -- or at Nike -- noticed any of this? They couldn't be bothered to comment a few months ago, with several supposed leading lights repeating the Chinese government line in order to protect their financial interests. Do any of them care to update or revise their comments? Anyone? Will they be asked? On that note, I'll leave you with this nugget, which suggests that many American sports fans may not be enthralled with what they've seen:

NBA ratings are down 15% this year and over 26% in the past two years per @WSJ. 26%! Meanwhile NFL, MLB, NHL, CFB, NASCAR & NCAA Tourney were all up. Interesting. pic.twitter.com/EGGJtyw9j9 — Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) December 31, 2019

UPDATE - Destroying cemeteries: