It’s worth noting that China’s National Intelligence Law requires that all organizations and citizens support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts. In other words, every Chinese tourist is expected to act as a spy.
First you treat all foreigners of a specific nationality as a spy, then you treat everyone of a specific nationality as a spy, and then you round them up. The progression is quite simple, so let’s not start with step one. Military bases should just fix their security and end it at that.
Part of what “fixing military bases’ security” looks like in practice is catching people who try to go into restricted areas, and then figuring out why they tried to do that.
Sometimes, the reason they tried to do that could be: “Their country’s government openly passed a law that allows them to order random citizens to do spy stuff. Non-compliance with that law is punished as a crime. Then they ordered those people to do spy stuff. So, those people’s motivation was to comply with their country’s law, to avoid being punished as criminals.”
“Fixing security” includes investigating that possibility.
If one cares about actually protecting the country from spies from China, one has to avoid both those errors. And, if one cares about justice, one does have to be vigilant to not slide into racist bullshit as happened in WWII. That’s a valid concern. But it’s not what seems to be going on in this case.
First you treat all foreigners of a specific nationality as a spy, then you treat everyone of a specific nationality as a spy, and then you round them up. The progression is quite simple, so let’s not start with step one. Military bases should just fix their security and end it at that.
Part of what “fixing military bases’ security” looks like in practice is catching people who try to go into restricted areas, and then figuring out why they tried to do that.
Sometimes, the reason they tried to do that could be: “Their country’s government openly passed a law that allows them to order random citizens to do spy stuff. Non-compliance with that law is punished as a crime. Then they ordered those people to do spy stuff. So, those people’s motivation was to comply with their country’s law, to avoid being punished as criminals.”
“Fixing security” includes investigating that possibility.
If you confuse that with racism, you get really shitty security. That goes in both directions: ignoring spies from China out of fear of “being racist” is bad security, and so is accusing an American of being a spy for China just because he’s ethnically Chinese.
If one cares about actually protecting the country from spies from China, one has to avoid both those errors. And, if one cares about justice, one does have to be vigilant to not slide into racist bullshit as happened in WWII. That’s a valid concern. But it’s not what seems to be going on in this case.
LOL, can you imagine believing that a country would order random schmucks who were visiting a foreign country to act as their intelligence agents?