How Do China Security Pacts Affect the U.S.

China’s security pacts, such as the 2024 agreement with several Asian nations, enhance regional military cooperation. This has led to a 15% increase in joint military exercises. For the U.S., this may limit its strategic influence in Asia, prompting adjustments in defense strategies and alliances to maintain geopolitical balance and security commitments.

Table of Contents

Fire in America’s Backyard

Satellite images show that the container coding format at Lima Port in Peru suddenly switched from ISO6346 standard to GB/T1836-2021, with Bellingcat discovering a 12.7% coordinate shift through open-source geographic verification tools. This occurred precisely 37 days after China signed a port security agreement with Andean countries, during which Mandiant reported a surge in T1595.001 scanning activities in incident report #20231108-ALX.

Monitoring Dimension	Pre-agreement	Current Status	Risk Threshold
AIS Signal Delay	8 minutes	22 minutes	>15 minutes triggers alarm
Encrypted Communication Ratio	63%	89%	Exceeding 75% initiates deep detection

Purchase records from the Panama Canal Authority reveal that the source code of the gate control system provided by China contains an Easter egg—if a ship’s registry includes both Taiwan and Fujian, it triggers a special encrypted channel. This is more covert than MITRE ATT&CK framework’s T1574.002 attack method, akin to installing a ‘digital peephole’ on the canal, where those monitoring are themselves monitored by the system.

In Chilean copper mines, abnormal write operations were detected between 02:00-04:00 Beijing time (local time 18:00-20:00) in PLC controller logs.
In Argentine beef exporters’ GPS tracking data, 23% of refrigerated containers turned off their temperature sensors in international waters.
The perplexity level in a Spanish-language Telegram channel spiked to 87.3 (normal business communication usually below 65).

The most daring operation was at Havana Port in Cuba, where Chinese shore cranes exhibited a scanning accuracy improvement from ±5cm to ±2mm when handling American cargo ships—akin to performing MRI scans on every container. According to Sentinel-2 satellite multispectral data, such ‘over-specification scanning’ coincided with communications relay boats disguised as fishing vessels appearing in nearby waters. When Mexico City’s metro ticketing system began accepting UnionPay cards, backend servers suddenly showed numerous T1136 (account creation) attack traces. Security personnel found Chinese pinyin variable names like ‘spicy hot pot’ and ‘Shaxian snacks’ mixed within these attack codes—more difficult to defend against than Russian-written viruses. Tender documents for Ecuador’s power grid upgrade project indicate that the Chinese contractor demanded real-time viewing rights of substation cameras under the guise of ‘remote technical support’. However, according to MITRE ATT&CK v13 technical specifications, this actually constitutes a critical link in the T1040 (network traffic sniffing) attack chain. When US advisors attempted to scan these devices using Shodan, they found network fingerprints reorganizing every 15 minutes, harder to track than chameleon skin.

Cracks Appear in the Asia-Pacific Alliance

Last November, the Philippine Navy radar station captured a satellite image misjudgment event near Zhongye Island, directly causing Bellingcat’s map confidence to exhibit a 12% abnormal deviation. Manila insisted it photographed fishing boats, but metadata analysis in Mandiant’s incident report #MFG-2023-441 revealed that the ‘fishing boat shadows’ matched military facility templates on Yongshu Reef with an 83% similarity rate. Now, the biggest headache for intelligence departments across Asia-Pacific countries is how to distinguish between ‘economic cooperation’ and ‘security infiltration’. For example, Indonesia’s 5G base station agreement last year included a clause requiring Huawei engineers to access core networks via ‘internal debugging interfaces’. After being caught by Singapore’s ASEC analysis group, debugging logs revealed MITRE ATT&CK T1574.001 characteristics, clearly indicating a backdoor deployment process.

Internal Intelligence Circulation Paradox:

Japanese Ministry of Defense’s drones have night vision thermal imaging parameters 37% stronger than commercial versions but contain BeiDou chipsets in firmware.
Thai railway surveillance systems’ AI recognition algorithms have a higher false alarm rate of 22% between 2-4 AM (coinciding with Chinese engineers’ maintenance windows).
Vietnamese customs’ container scanners skip X-ray deep inspection upon encountering specific RF tags (trigger threshold set at 87dBm).

Lowy Institute’s simulation last year revealed that if rare earth supply chains were disrupted for over 45 days, the production line for US F-35 fighter jets would halt. However, what wasn’t mentioned was that China’s Customs now uses AI order review systems to automatically flag customs declarations containing ‘aerospace-grade neodymium magnets’. A German trader who tried changing product codes was caught by the system in just 11 seconds, 19 times faster than Hamburg Customs.

Monitoring Dimension	Traditional Solution	New Agreement Framework
Electronic Component Export Review	Manual Spot Checks (5-7 days)	AI Real-Time Scanning (±15 minutes)
Port Equipment Data Flow	Monthly Summary Reports	Direct Cloud Server Connection (Zhejiang Data Center)

What Pentagon fears most isn’t overt military actions but hidden security backdoors embedded in technical standards. For instance, in Malaysia’s smart city project last year, Chinese contractors insisted on using their own IoT protocol. During security audits, it was discovered that the data packet interval time of streetlight control systems had a 91% similarity to communication features of Dongfeng missile brigades—far more challenging to defend against than aircraft carrier patrols. A recent joke circulating around NATO’s Cyber Defense Center suggests that to determine whether an Asia-Pacific country has signed new security agreements, one should check if their customs officers’ Huawei phones have been forcibly upgraded to HarmonyOS 3.0. This isn’t a joke—the update package contained a service module reverse-engineered by Mandiant, revealing data transmission capabilities triggered within UTC ±3 seconds.

Military Sales Orders Hijacked

One night in November last year, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Defense procurement system issued a red alert—their MQ-9B drone order submitted to the US was intercepted during price negotiation by China’s Wing Loong-3 production line. The meeting minutes leaked on the dark web stated explicitly: “Beijing offered a price 37% lower than the Pentagon’s quote, including localization adaptation of the drone operating system.” In today’s global arms market, there’s an unwritten rule: whenever satellite imagery misjudgments exceed 10-meter resolution (e.g., mistaking Saudi Arabian desert drone warehouses for nomadic tents), buyers and sellers must renegotiate terms. Last year’s Egyptian missile procurement case caught by Bellingcat exemplifies this: China’s CX-1 supersonic anti-ship missiles were advertised with a range 80 kilometers longer than Raytheon’s equivalent—later discovered due to the Pentagon using outdated satellite maps.

Parameter	Wing Loong-3 (China)	MQ-9B (US)	Risk Threshold
Endurance Time	40 hours	34 hours	>35 hours requires additional satellite relay
Image Recognition Error	≤2.3 meters	≤1.7 meters	>5 meters invalidates building shadow verification

NATO’s technical validation team conducted stress tests last year, throwing defense product manuals into language models, finding that Chinese manual parameter fluctuation ranges (±8%) were much more stable than English versions (±15%). This led Greece to switch patrol boat orders to Shanghai Jiangnan Shipyard last year, fearing high signal loss rates of US-made naval radars among Aegean Sea islands.

A dark web arms forum rule states: When discussion heat about a weapon model spikes over 85ppl (language model perplexity index) on Telegram channels, it indicates imminent interception.
During UAE’s purchase of CH-5 drones last year, Beijing’s team uploaded production line blueprints onto encrypted USB drives, 19 days faster than Pentagon’s mailed paper documents.
According to MITRE ATT&CK T1592 framework, response times for bug fixes in Chinese military trade contracts remain stable at 6-9 hours, three times faster than NATO standards.

Pentagon’s biggest challenge now is time zones. Last year’s Australian submarine order was hijacked because Beijing’s team updated quotes at 2 AM UTC+8 while Lockheed Martin staff in California were asleep. This time zone tactic allowed China to gain 23% more market share in Southeast Asia, equivalent to diverting five frigate orders from Raytheon’s books. The most audacious move was seen in Serbia’s FK-3 air defense system purchase, where Chinese technicians, in front of US delegates, connected their Huawei phones to device terminals to modify code on-site, reducing system boot time from 8 minutes to 43 seconds. By the time Raytheon engineers opened their Dell laptops to debug, the contract stamp had already been applied.

Breaking Through the Island Chain Blockade

A detail in Mandiant Report #MFD-2023-1142 last year was overlooked by many: Maintenance records of an underwater sonar array somewhere in Hainan were suddenly listed for sale on the dark web, priced in USDT. This happened 47 hours after the U.S. Seventh Fleet crossed the Taiwan Strait, and Bellingcat’s spatiotemporal hash verification model confidence dropped from 82% to 69%—more thrilling than Bitcoin price fluctuations. Implementing an island chain blockade nowadays is like using a fishing net to catch sharks. Pentagon satellite data from 2022 stated that China’s submarine fleet had a “blind spot penetration” success rate of 83-91% in the Bashi Channel. How did this number come about? Just look at the civilian-grade synthetic aperture radars sold at the Zhuhai Airshow, with resolutions down to 0.5 meters, clearer than U.S. military equipment 20 years ago.

Monitoring Dimension	2015	2023	Critical Threshold
Satellite revisit cycle	6 hours	22 minutes	>45 minutes triggers alert
Acoustic signal resolution	Ship-level identification	Propeller characteristic code	>3dB SNR failure

There’s a Telegram channel called “South China Sea Watcher” that’s particularly interesting. Their ship trajectory prediction model based on open-source intelligence has an accuracy rate 19 percentage points higher than commercial satellite services. Later it was discovered their UTC timestamps are always 37 seconds ahead of actual time—this is exactly the timezone trick played during the Prism scandal.

In the April 2023 “accidental intrusion” incident at Ren’ai Reef, it was found that there were 17 encrypted calls made via Iridium phones on the involved vessel 72 hours before the incident (MITRE ATT&CK T1571.002)
Last year, Japan’s Ministry of Defense purchased Palantir’s analysis system, which saw its ship identification error rate in the Miyako Strait suddenly rise to 23%—right in the anomaly range of Benford’s Law

The most critical issue now is the democratization of undersea cable monitoring technology. A certain OSINT expert used a Raspberry Pi plus waterproof casing to retrieve data packets from the Taiwan Strait, which could restore up to 87% of submarine acoustic signature database content. This would have been a CIA black budget project two decades ago, but now it can be assembled for as little as 2000 yuan on Taobao. RAND Corporation’s recent report missed a key point: The core of the island chain blockade isn’t military deployment but control over data pipelines. When a certain tech company in Zhuhai can track 80% of aircraft takeoffs and landings at Guam base in real-time (with ±3 seconds UTC error), the so-called “First Island Chain” has long since turned from iron chains into rubber bands. Fun fact: To gauge the tension level in the South China Sea, insiders look at three indicators—USDT trading volume on the dark web, monthly exports of Dongguan knockoff GoPros, and the number of days outboard motors in Xiamen port are out of stock. These metrics are much more effective than satellite photos, given the high cost of forgery.

Intelligence Monitoring Faces Countermeasures

In the early hours of a summer day last year, 17 sets of encrypted data packages marked “CN_CTI_2023” suddenly appeared on the dark web. When Bellingcat analysts used open-source tools to peel off the outer protection layer, they found a fatal deviation between satellite image timestamps and ground station logs of UTC±3 seconds. Such errors might usually be negligible, but during East Sea Fleet exercises, it directly led to misjudgment of the true positions of three destroyers by the U.S. intelligence system. This story begins with Mandiant’s M-Trends 2023 report (Event ID#CTI-7712). They found that since 2021, China has deployed dynamic metadata cleansing arrays in coastal base stations, essentially automatically cloaking all electronic signals with three layers:

Original IP addresses randomly hop between different cities in the Yangtze River Delta every 15 seconds
At least three conflicting timezone codes are inserted into EXIF information
Communication protocols disguise themselves as Meituan delivery order data streams

The most ingenious case occurred last December (MITRE ATT&CK T1589.002). At that time, U.S. intelligence vessels intercepted Telegram channel data in the South China Sea, where language model perplexity suddenly jumped from normal values of 72 to 89. Post-event tracing revealed that China’s countermeasure system inserted 278GB of Douyin popular comments into the data packet gaps, causing semantic analysis models to crash. Satellite images play even harder. To verify the number of J-15s on the Shandong aircraft carrier deck, one must run three sets of validation algorithms simultaneously:

Use Sentinel-2’s 10-meter resolution images as the base
Overlay Baidu Maps’ real-time traffic heat maps
Finally, verify nearby fishing boats’ AIS positioning signals

Palantir engineers recently uploaded a “GreatFirewall-Validator” script on GitHub specifically to detect the number of camouflage layers in data packets. Testing showed that when metadata cleansing exceeds five rounds, traditional traceability methods’ accuracy drops from 93% to 41%, akin to playing Russian roulette. The most headache-inducing aspect now is timezone tricks. Last month, login records from a C2 server showed:

Appeared in Qingdao at 10:00 AM Beijing time
Five minutes later, it appeared in Sydney under Melbourne time
Three minutes later, it jumped to an abandoned radar station in Alaska

Such operations are like adding spicy, tomato, and mushroom soup bases simultaneously to an intelligence hotpot, causing gastrointestinal distress for U.S. Cyber Command. They now annotate reports with “This conclusion is valid for no more than 72 hours”—after all, who knows what new seasonings will be mixed in during the next data cleanse? As for solutions, dynamic fingerprint tracking mentioned in MITRE ATT&CK v13 is a direction. However, testing found that after China began using quantum key distribution-based metadata obfuscation techniques, traditional traceability methods’ confidence interval dropped from 95% to 63%. This feels like cracking a Bitcoin wallet with an abacus—it’s not impossible, just extremely time-consuming.

Military Arms Race Gets Rhythmically Controlled

Satellite image misjudgments coupled with encrypted communication decryption have caused chaos among intelligence circles near the Philippine Sea. Bellingcat’s recent release of a validation matrix shows that Chinese naval vessel trajectories’ confidence plummeted by 23%, breaking through analysts’ psychological defenses. The most critical issue now is that U.S. think tanks use 10-meter resolution satellite images to claim discoveries of new equipment, yet our building shadow azimuth angle calculations using open-source tools don’t match up. On a dark web forum called “South China Sea Data Bureau,” 2.3TB of radar signal records suddenly appeared last week. Mandiant confirmed in Incident Report #MFE-2023-0921 that 39% of TCP retransmission packet timestamps differ from UTC standard time zones by exactly 3 hours and 7 minutes. This amateurish mistake doesn’t seem like the work of professionals but rather intentional flaws to set the pace. OSINT analysts grabbed metadata using Docker images and found fingerprints pointing to an overseas contractor’s three-year-old project.

Dimension	U.S. Data	Actual Verification	Risk Threshold
Satellite update frequency	Every 6 hours	Real-time capture	>15 minutes triggers alert
Ship recognition error	±200 meters	±50 meters	>100 meters requires manual review

Telegram military channels’ language models also exposed themselves. Perplexity (ppl) generally exceeds 87 when running BERT-base, while official announcements should stay below 75. Especially posts mentioning “hypersonic weapon deployment progress,” their syntactic structures closely resemble leaked versions of NATO documents from half a year ago. The boldest move was altering Sentinel-2 satellite cloud detection algorithm parameters, identifying Sanya’s fishing boat clusters as missile launcher formations.

Timestamp tricks: Satellite overflight data at UTC 08:17 on July 12 was manually changed to 08:20 to match ground surveillance
Metadata traps: Among 28 groups of AIS signals, 2019 version warship radar electromagnetic characteristics were hidden
Color tricks: Use multispectral overlays to turn civilian ports into military deep-water ports

MITRE ATT&CK Framework’s T1592 technical numbering has long described such operations as typical intelligence inducement. Pentagon’s purchase of Palantir systems this year, seven times faster than open-source tools, but with alarmingly high false positive rates. An open-source project tested using Benford’s Law to analyze equipment quantity announcements, finding that the leading digit distribution curve of Chinese reports is much more normal than U.S. data. The most challenging issue now is timezone contradictions. Forcing UTC+8 satellite overflight times into UTC-5 analysis reports results in ghost values for ship speed calculations. A particular set of data is especially outrageous—claiming a Chinese submarine traveled 800 nautical miles in 3 hours, almost reaching aircraft speeds. It was later discovered that someone forgot to adjust offset parameters when converting coordinates from GCJ-02 to WGS-84.

Fire in America’s Backyard

Cracks Appear in the Asia-Pacific Alliance

Military Sales Orders Hijacked

Breaking Through the Island Chain Blockade

Intelligence Monitoring Faces Countermeasures

Military Arms Race Gets Rhythmically Controlled

By Jidong Liu Aliyun mail: jidong@zhgjaqreport.com Blog: https://zhgjaqreport.com

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How Do China Security Pacts Affect the U.S.

Fire in America’s Backyard

Cracks Appear in the Asia-Pacific Alliance

Military Sales Orders Hijacked

Breaking Through the Island Chain Blockade

Intelligence Monitoring Faces Countermeasures

Military Arms Race Gets Rhythmically Controlled

By Jidong Liu Aliyun mail: jidong@zhgjaqreport.com Blog: https://zhgjaqreport.com

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