March 19:
Bo Jiang -- a researcher at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. who worked on developing “source code for high-technology imaging” -- was pulled away from the gate at Dulles International Airport and arrested as a Chinese spy. Representative Frank Wolf (R-Va), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA, said he was contacted about Jiang by a whistleblower who said Jiang had traveled to China with laptops containing classified work. Agents said they discovered Jiang failed to disclose “an additional laptop, an old hard drive and a SIM card.” After Wolf publicly named him as a suspect authorities arrested Jiang as “he was leaving the United States abruptly to return to China on a one-way ticket,” an FBI affidavit said. Federal prosecutors charged Jiang with lying about the electronic devices he was carrying, United Press International reports.
March 20:
North Korea is using China as a staging area for espionage and illicit drug sales. Yonhap reports that a 43-year-old woman has been arrested in Seoul after posing as a defector and engaging in espionage activities under threat from Pyongyang. Between October 2010 and February 2011 the agent was sent to China to monitor Seoul’s spy agents there. Then, posing as a defector, she entered South Korea. North Korean spies enter South Korea about three to four times a year disguised as defectors. Meanwhile, the Chosun Ilbo, citing diplomatic sources, reports that “a large amount of illegal drugs in circulation here [South Korea] is North Korean in origin and smuggled through China.” Drugs are sent from North Korea by ship or trucks and an embassy staffer meets up with smugglers at a secret location to get them. Seoul estimates that North Korea produces 3,000 kg of drugs annually, providing revenues of $100 -$200 million.
March 22:
Earlier this month twelve armed North Korean border soldiers (two groups of six) escaped across the Chinese border into Jilin, but were captured and sent back. Last month, two North Korean soldiers shot their senior officer and fled to Changbai causing Chinese authorities to launch a manhunt to find them. In addition, this month eight North Koreans, including five children, were caught by Chinese officers in Yanji, Jilin, and transferred to a defectors camp in Tumen before all were sent back. China also deported one of two South Korean citizens caught along with the North Korean defectors. Both were former DPRK defectors that had entered China to help their families escape the North. The Choson Ilbo reports that the defections are likely tied to food shortages caused by the drop in international aid to the DPRK after it launched a rocket in last April. Since food rationing is concentrated in Pyongyang and military units along the southern border, troops on the Chinese border with are “subsisting on corn and potatoes they grow on their own.”
During meetings with Indian Defense Secretary Shashikant Sharma, a visiting Chinese military delegation led by Deputy Chief of the People’s Liberation Army General Staff Lt General Qi Jianguo has proposed a bilateral border defense agreement. Under the proposal the two countries’ troops will not tail each other during patrols along the disputed Line of Actual Control and will not fire at each other for any reason. The Press Trust of India reports that New Delhi wants to study the proposal thoroughly before agreeing. This was the second meeting in three months between Sharma and Qi, who is in-charge of PLA Foreign Cooperation and Intelligence. In January they met at the Annual Defense Dialogue where the Chinese side informally mentioned the proposal. Qi and Sharma agreed to hold joint counter-terrorism exercise in China this year after a five-year hiatus, but did not finalize the dates.
March 24:
Sergei Artobolevksy, Head of the Department of Social and Economic Geography at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Svobodnaya Pressa that despite official optimism, he sees “serious problems” with the prospects for increased China-Russia trade. Chinese estimates that bilateral trade will increase 5-6 times are based on its experience with the U.S. and Japan, he said. China’s growth is slowing and this will reduce its energy demand and except for large quantities of raw materials, Russia does not and can not supply anything else. This falling demand will constrain trade growth, he said, noting that Beijing is demanding radical reductions in gas prices. Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provide cheap natural gas to China, but Gazprom does not want to lower prices. When asked about “the Chinese domination that so many Russians fear” Artobolevksy said: All the conversations about the Chinese threat in Siberia are old myths, spread by regional clans, which is the traditional, standard way of gaining support from the federal government. It is advantageous for Russia to open up its Trans-Ural territory to foreign investment. Japan and South Korea are ready to invest in Russia and this could provide an excellent balance to Chinese influence.