by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
April 20, 2019
Have you seen the PLA Navy's latest whizzbang terror toy? Described as a "tactical laser system," it was recently featured in a PR puff piece on China's state-owned mouthpiece channel, CCTV. According to reports, it will be deployed on the PLA Navy's Type 055 destroyers as a replacement for the fleet's old HHQ-10 surface-to-air missiles.
Which is all well and good, but let me ask you again: Have you seen it? I mean, have you actually looked at it? Because when you do, you might notice something interesting. Namely, it bears a striking resemblance to the U.S. Navy's Laser Weapon System (LaWS).
The LaWS is on the left and the Chinese laser system is on the right. Or is it the other way around? It's hard to tell the difference.
But it's not just this laser weapon. From drones to stealth jets to railgun prototypes, it seems all of the latest and greatest weaponry in the Chinese arsenal is suspiciously similar to (or is an exact duplicate of) an item in Uncle Sam's arsenal.
For instance, here's the Shenyang J-31, China's fifth generation stealth fighter:
And here's the good ol' Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II:
Or compare the Chinese Lijian Sharp Sword Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle:
To the Northrop Grumman X-47B Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle:
Or take the Sunward SVU-200 Flying Tiger unmanned helo:
And play a game of "spot the similarities" with Northrop Grumman's very own MQ-8 Fire Scout unmanned helo:
No, your eyes aren't deceiving you; from fighter jets to drones, from Hummers to rifles, it's a well-known fact that much of China's military technology is copied from American designs. In fact, there are entire galleries online devoted to showcasing the phenomenon (yes, that's galleries plural).
The only question is: Where are the Chinese getting the designs from, and why isn't this at the top of the "national security" newsfeeds instead of that made up nonsense about Russian bogeymen? Or, as the yellow journalists at Hearst's Popular Mechanics puts it, if the video of China's CH-4B drone—which shows information being provided to the drone operator in English—is legitimate, "it begs the question whether or not software and other technology originally from the United States and other western countries is flying on Chinese military aircraft."
So what's happening here? One answer to this question is that China is simply reverse engineering American technologies . . . somehow. But that "somehow" is important. Are the Chinese engineers merely looking at photos of American vehicles and copying the outer design? Downloading press kits from US contractors' public websites and trying to match the specs? Stealing planes and guns and drones from the US and smuggling them back to China for reverse engineering? Hacking the blueprints for these technologies from top secret databases?
Indeed, all sorts of explanations have been offered for the remarkable similarities between American and Chinese weaponry. The official story of the Chinese J-20 stealth fighter jet, for example, is that it was copied from an F-117 Nighthawk that was downed during NATO's bombing campaign in the Kosovo war. And the Z-20 medium lift security helicopter—China's answer to America's iconic Black Hawk chopper—was allegedly copied from a combination of civilian Black Hawks that China purchased in the 1980s and some military versions that they were given access to by Pakistani intelligence.
By far the funniest explanation comes from Popular Mechanics:
"The United States and China both have nearly identical requirements for many kinds of weapon systems. And nearly identical requirements can lead to nearly identical outcomes. The eye, for example, is estimated to have evolved separately between 40 and 65 times in the entire history of life on Earth. Often there's just so many ways to do something."
That's right, folks, part-for-part identical designs (right down to identical contours on cockpit windows and English language software on tracking systems) just spontaneously occur because "nearly identical requirements can lead to nearly identical outcomes." That has to be the stupidest coincidence theory I've read in a long time.
The more popular allegation is that it's all down to that omnipresent threat of the digital era: cyberhackers.
It has long been alleged, for instance, that China's J-31 stealth fighter was constructed from stolen F-35 blueprints. Why anyone would want to copy the plans for the world's most expensive jalopy is anyone's guess, but the story goes that Chinese hackers infiltrated US military systems in 2007 and 2008, pilfering several terabytes of data on the jet in the process. A tranche of Snowden documents later corroborated the story, so you know it must be extra super-duper true.
These stories are the bread and butter of those seeking to kick off WWI part three between the modern-day British Empire (the US) and the modern-day Huns (the Chinese). (If you're confused by this analogy, please consult my presentation on Echoes of WWI.) "The dastardly Chinese hackers are stealing our military! We need to strike while we still can!"
But there's a much more ominous possibility that remains unexplored in the mainstream scare stories about the Chinese bogeyman: China is being given these technologies deliberately.
As outlandish as this idea might seem to the average normie, it has a clear historical precedent. Antony Sutton spent his time at the Hoover Institute researching technology transfers from the US to the Soviets. After publishing the third volume of his study on the subject, National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union, he was shown the door and never permitted back into the ivory tower of "respectable" academia. The truth that he had uncovered about the US role in helping to arm and equip the very Red Menace that it pretended to oppose was simply too explosive. He had to be shut up, and the best way to do it was to kick Sutton out of the academy and pretend that neither he nor his meticulously-documented research existed.
Sutton lays his grisly thesis bare in the preface to his study: "The 100,000 Americans killed in Korea and Vietnam were killed by our own technology." He then goes on to elaborate exactly how this is so. For instance, he details exactly how American technology supplied to the Soviets was then used against American forces in the Korean War:
"The 130,000-man North South Korean Army, which crossed the South Korean border in June 1950, was trained, supported, and equipped by the Soviet Union. This army included a brigade of Soviet T-34 medium tanks (with U.S. Christie suspensions). The artillery tractors that pulled the guns were direct metric copies of Caterpillar tractors. The trucks were either from the Henry Ford-Gorki plant or the ZIL plant. The North Korean Air Force had 180 Yak planes built in plants with U.S. Lend-Lease equipment; these Yaks were later replaced by MiG-15s powered by Russian copies of Rolls-Royce jet engines sold to the Soviet Union in 1947."
This seems incomprehensible from a surface-level analysis. After all, the United States and the Soviets were mortal enemies locked in a struggle for control of the planet. Why on earth would the US have willingly aided and abetted its greatest foe? The question answers itself: They created a foe precisely so they would have a great power to "struggle" against. The Cold War was the pretext for the building up of the military-industrial complex abroad and the security state at home.
And now the same financial interests and powers-behind-the-throne are trying to ignite a Cold War 2.0 using the same template. We can see it happening before our very eyes with the revelation of each new piece of "Chinese" (American) weaponry. And yet no one is reporting it.
Take the case of the Dongfeng EQ2050, better known as the "Chinese Humvee." AM General "gifted" Beijing a Humvee back in the 1980s in the hopes that the Chinese would be persuaded to buy more. Instead, the Chinese took it apart and built their own part-for-part copy. When the PLA wanted to start mass producing the vehicles in the 2000s, they faced a problem: they didn't have the parts. So what did they do? They just bought them from AM General, who were perfectly happy to supply them. The one part that the Chinese couldn't source was the engine, a diesel engine made by Cummins. Unfortunately for Beijing, they couldn't buy these engines directly because they were embargoed along with other "military goods" after the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident (which is a whole other story). So they simply said they needed them to produce a civilian version of the Humvee, which was good enough for Uncle Sam. The Chinese company that's producing the EQ2050 displayed a civilian version of the vehicle at some exhibitions, but they have never actually been on sale in China. Military versions of the vehicle have been produced, however, complete with Cummins diesel engines. Funny that.
For those familiar with my podcast on China and the New World Order, this will be a familiar story. As I documented in that podcast, military technology transfers from America to China have been ongoing for decades now, with everything from American satellite technology to American missile technology (via Clinton) to American semiconductor technology (via Bush) ending up in Beijing's hands.
And now the Chinese are building a carbon copy of the American military, jet by jet, drone by drone, rifle by rifle.
Where is the Antony Sutton of today who will take up the mantle and blow the lid off this story?