For #China’s oceanographic research #ship order of battle, see: 1) @rdmartinson88/@ChinaMaritime/@NavalWarCollege’s Appendix in “CMSI Note 19: China’s Blue-Water Research Fleet: Science in Service of Strategy”: digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cm… 2) “Modern Chinese Maritime Forces”—Most comprehensive #OpenSource Order of Battle for China’s Sea Services: andrewerickson.com/2026/10/h…

Stanford University student Elsa Johnson became a target of the Chinese Communist Party in 2024. Elsa attended a private school as a child with a heavy focus on foreign languages and became fluent in Mandarin Chinese while still in elementary school. Years later after she was accepted to Stanford, she studied international relations and researched Chinese industry and military tactics while working at the Hoover Institution on campus. She soon came to the attention of members of the Chinese Communist Party, which has a heavy presence at Stanford and throughout Southern California. There are currently more than 1,000 Chinese students attending Stanford each year, and the university has received more than $64,000,000 in private donations from Chinese individuals and organizations since 2010. In June 2024, a man claiming to be a fellow Stanford student named Charles Chen contacted her online. She was not initially suspicious as they had many mutual associates, and his photos and posts appeared to be centered on campus. But his questions and requests quickly put her on edge as he invited her on a paid trip to China. And he seemingly knew details about her that she had never shared with him. When she tried to disengage with him, she began receiving threatening phone calls by Chinese speakers. Elsa contacted Stanford administrators and the FBI, who told her Charles was likely affiliated with the Ministry of State Security, had been posing as a Stanford student for years, and had targeted at least ten other female students since 2020 in a similar manner. They also told her she was under physical surveillance on campus by the Chinese Communist Party. Elsa wrote articles in the Stanford Review and The Free Press about Chinese influence on campus, and in March 2026 testified about espionage threats on college campuses before the House Committee on Education and Workforce. For episode 270 of the Spycraft 101 podcast I spoke with Elsa about being targeted by a foreign government right in the middle of a US college campus. The episode is available now. #stanford #college #student #china #hooverinstitute   open.spotify.com/episode/6KO…

🇨🇳 Chinese hydrographic mapping for submarine warfare

thank you, professor.

A @WSJ analysis of ship-tracking data shows Chinese research vessels sailing back and forth in a lawnmower pattern over swaths of ocean to Taiwan’s south and east, helping Beijing to complete its portrait of waters surrounding the island: wsj.com/world/china/china-sc… w/ @austinramzy

The investigation completed by @GordianKnotRay illustrates how China would employ various methods, such as using aligned media mouthpieces to promote its narratives and inauthentic documents, as part of the influence or disinformation campaigns it conducts in the Philippines.

Important coverage of world’s largest fleet of oceanographic research vessels by @austinramzy & @joyuwang/@WSJ! wsj.com/world/china/china-sc… #China operates more than 120 research vessels, according to #Taiwan’s coast guard. “They are launching research ships as fast as dropping dumplings into a pot,” said Su Chih-chieh, an associate professor at National Taiwan University’s Institute of Oceanography, which operates one of Taiwan’s research ships. “Taiwan is having a really hard time catching up right now,” said Su.  Taiwan has only five ships actively carrying out its own maritime research: three managed by universities, one by the government-backed Taiwan Ocean Research Institute and one by Taiwan’s navy.

Oct 30: two 🇨🇳 nationals — Liren “Ryan” Lai and Yuance Chen — were sentenced for conspiring to act as agents of the 🇨🇳 government and acting as agents of a foreign government without prior notification to the Attorney General. Lai and Chen were each sentenced to 30 months in prison and three years of supervised release. The defendants agreed to operate under the direction and control of 🇨🇳 Ministry of State Security (MSS), carrying out clandestine intelligence activities in the US that included facilitating secret “dead drop” cash payments in exchange for information related to the national security of the US, gathering information about US military personnel and installations, and assisting efforts to recruit potential intelligence assets from within the US military. Lai and Chen began acting as agents of 🇨🇳 MSS no later than May 2021. Lai recruited Chen into the scheme and initially served as an intermediary between Chen and 🇨🇳 MSS intelligence officers. Chen subsequently received assignments directly from 🇨🇳 MSS officers. As detailed in the government’s sentencing memorandum, Lai and Chen facilitated a clandestine cash payment of approximately $10,000 in Jan 2022. While the defendants were in China, they coordinated with individuals in the US to leave a backpack containing the cash in a locker at a recreational facility in Livermore, California. Such arrangements, known as “dead drops,” allow intelligence operatives to transfer money or information without directly meeting the intended recipient. The defendants’ illegal activities extended beyond facilitating covert payments on behalf of 🇨🇳 MSS. Beginning in 2022, Chen gathered information about US military installations and personnel at the direction of Lai and 🇨🇳 MSS intelligence officers. These activities included obtaining photographs of Navy Base Kitsap in Bremerton, Wash., and photographs and videos of military recruits and active-duty sailors inside a Navy recruiting station in Southern California. Chen also collected personal identifying information about a US Navy employee and maintained detailed biographical information about military personnel who were potential intelligence targets. In Mar 2023, Lai traveled to the US and delivered a cell phone to Chen for covert communications with the MSS referred to by Chen as a “state secret.”  Chen later traveled to China in 2024 and 2025, where he met with 🇨🇳 MSS officers and received additional assignments concerning US service members. In Apr 2025, Lai again traveled from China to the US to carry out assignments for the MSS. The following month, the MSS directed him to travel to Phoenix to facilitate another clandestine cash payment of approximately $20,000 in furtherance of its intelligence operations. Lai and Chen were arrested on June 27, 2025, during a coordinated FBI counterintelligence and law enforcement operation. A federal grand jury in the Northern District of California returned an indictment on July 1, 2025, charging both defendants with conspiracy to act as agents of a foreign government without prior notification to the Attorney General and acting as agents of a foreign government without prior notification. Lai pleaded guilty to both offenses on Dec 12, 2025. Chen pleaded guilty to both offenses on Feb 20. justice.gov/opa/pr/two-men-s…

#Russia #Novokuybyshevsk oil refinery struck by #Ukrainian drone. As seen through NCC, Wildfire & SWIR images of #Sentinel2 🛰️30 Oct 26:08:00:49 UTC. @Moochikal @MontyKhanna2308 @AndrewSErickson @MT_Anderson @GordianKnotRay @NavyNews1109 @anshu217 @supbrow @azistaspace @tom_bike

This is well worth a read.

Andrew Erickson (@AndrewSErickson @NavalWarCollege) will teach the session "PRC Military #Maritime Efforts vs. #Taiwan: Exercises, Operations, Scenarios" in NBR's Dec 1-3 exec ed course on China’s PLA in Washington, D.C. Register by 11/20 bit.ly/4ix99hT #ChineseMilitary

My quote: “We’ve seen this movie before. Djibouti was ostensibly a ‘humanitarian support facility’ that is now a full-fledged military base. The U.S. has lost Laos and Cambodia to China."

Pleased to offer some thoughts on China's new military base in Laos in this @politico piece. Thanks, as always, to @PhelimKine for the opportunity to engage! politico.com/newsletters/nat…

💥 the CCP is telling a high-ranking US state official how to do his job… On Oct 12, 2026, Indiana’s state treasurer Daniel Elliott received a letter from the 🇨🇳 Consulate General in Chicago objecting to his attendance at a Taipei Economic and Cultural Office event and urging him to avoid future interactions with Taiwanese authorities. facebook.com/share/p/1PiJG7a…

Hot off the @NavalWarCollege/@ChinaMaritime Studies Institute press! #CMSI Translation #38: “Furious Seas, Raging Waves: The PLA’s Development of Sea-to-Shore Strike Capabilities” digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cm… From CMSI Director CAPT @ChrisHSharman, @USNavy (Ret.): #China #Military Maritime Watchers: How do PRC authors envision the PLA bridging the gap between its opening bombardment of Taiwan & an amphibious landing? The China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) translation, “Furious Seas, Raging Waves: The PLA’s Development of Sea-to-Shore Strike Capabilities,” examines how 1 PRC author believes the PLA could sustain fires against Taiwan’s surviving defenses to support an amphibious assault. Authored by 天鹰 [Tian Ying], this article appeared in the November 2024 issue of the PRC navalist publication Shipborne Weapons. While the journal is not an official PLA publication, the author uses a pseudonym & appears informed of PLA requirements, capabilities, &—most importantly for this article—limitations. The article identifies a specific operational problem: China’s ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, & long-range rocket artillery may devastate exposed Taiwanese targets in an opening joint firepower strike campaign, but cannot be expected to eliminate concealed, mobile, or rapidly reconstituted defenses. Surviving mobile air-defense systems, anti-ship missiles, artillery, & other counter-landing weapons could continue to threaten PLA amphibious forces & must be engaged as they emerge, move, or resume operations. The author explores how the PLA might address this challenge through a combination of platforms & weapons, including unmanned systems to locate & strike emerging targets & modular rocket launchers that could be installed aboard civilian vessels to provide additional firepower support. The author also suggests PLAN surface combatants have a key limitation. Destroyers & frigates escorting amphibious forces must prioritize air defense against long-range missile threats, limiting their capacity to carry land-attack missiles. The author therefore argues for longer-range, more responsive fire-support systems that can engage targets ashore without exposing PLAN combatants to Taiwan’s coastal defenses. This translation will be of interest to readers who seek to better understand how PRC authors conceptualize the challenges of sustaining fires, suppressing Taiwan’s defenses, & supporting an amphibious landing.

This is such a non-serious statement by Nvidia. First of all, it is false that the allegation that Megaspeed was providing China access to controlled chips were debunked--if anything, they were proven by multiple investigations. Second of all, Nvidia's statement also said, "We’re confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know." This statement, in conjunction with all the public evidence about Megaspeed, implies that Nvidia will follow the law and will not do business with anyone the US government expressly prohibits it from working with, but everyone else is fair game absent any explicit prohibition from the US government. If that is reflective of what Nvidia's due diligence process represents, then the US government has no choice but to impose much stronger regulations on who can purchase its products. At this point, we all should be able to agree that Megaspeed is a Chinese front company, whose CEO is a Chinese spy. So this means one of two things must be true: (1) Nvidia's customer due diligence process failed miserably and did not uncover Megaspeed's ties to China, or (2) Nvidia was aware of these ties but chose to do nothing. We should all hope that the answer is (1). But even if that is the case, and this is a matter of incompetence and not malice, it still goes to show why companies like Nvidia simply can't be trusted to regulate themselves.

Megaspeed’s sister company in Malaysia bought at least $4.8 billion worth of advanced AI equipment containing Nvidia chips and technology between June 2024 and Feb 2026. It was an exceptional amount of money for a small, obscure company. Nvidia and Megaspeed have continued to do business this year. The limited data available for most of this year shows that Megaspeed and its affiliates kept buying Nvidia products, often through intermediaries. Nvidia continues to list Megaspeed on its website as a cloud partner. Megaspeed advertised the relationship as recently as this month. In a job ad, Megaspeed’s Indonesian branch called itself “a premier business partner of Nvidia.” Megaspeed has continued serving its primary client, Alibaba. In June 2024, just weeks before Megaspeed began its purchases, photos posted to LinkedIn showed Jensen Huang alongside Alice Huang at a bar in Taipei following a local technology trade show. They drank whiskey with other AI executives. One year later, in May 2025, they were seen together again, leaving a restaurant in Taipei after a business dinner with other AI suppliers. She waited behind Jensen Huang as he spoke to Taiwanese journalists outside the restaurant. Those details were described in a news article last Oct. But the deeper intelligence involving Alice Huang remained closely held inside the administration. US agencies had been conducting electronic surveillance of Alice Huang. That surveillance showed that she was in contact with an American citizen. US intelligence agencies generally cannot legally surveil American citizens without a court order. But when communications involving Americans turn up in surveillance, citizens can be identified to government agencies who can show a need for the information through a process known as unmasking. In this case, the unmasking process identified Jensen Huang as the US citizen. It is not clear when Jensen Huang and Alice Huang first met. Alice Huang had posted photos of herself with Jensen Huang on her social media feed. Alice Huang has a slim profile on the Chinese internet. She has described herself as Megaspeed’s chief executive, and the company listed her as its managing director for its first eight months before removing her from that role in its corporate paperwork. Megaspeed’s current director is from Singapore but has recently lived in Shanghai, according to business records and his social media accounts. According to information posted online by a Chinese investment fund where Alice Huang worked, she was formerly employed in China as a TV reporter. She later worked at several major Chinese banks, then joined a Shanghai-based fund, Hexi Capital, which has invested in a variety of semiconductor- and AI-related firms. Alice Huang and her associates bragged about her connections to Jensen Huang and used it to raise funds and promote their fast-expanding network of businesses, which has invested alongside the Chinese government in data centers around China. In Southeast Asia, Megaspeed has continued to pitch new data centers, hire employees and trumpet its close connections to Nvidia. Megaspeed is pushing ahead with construction of a large data center in Johor, the Malaysian state across the border from Singapore. In a stock filing last month, a Malaysian property developer said it had received the final payment for the 53-acre plot where a Megaspeed subsidiary has promised to build the data center. The company had already secured the chips necessary for the build out. 2/n

Mao Zedong was certainly a dictator, French footballer Kylian Mbappé was right about that, but the label still feels inadequate for a man who was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese. He was a mass murderer, one of the worst tyrants of the twentieth century, in a super-league alongside the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. When he died in 1976, after endless and barbaric campaigns and purges, his legacy was a traumatised and impoverished land of fear and paranoia. Mbappé's jokey comments were not about this brutal history, but the result of an internet meme, a video circulating online that placed his face on images of Mao. '[The meme] that makes me laugh the most, it's the one where there's a video of a guy, I think it's a Chinese dictator,' he said on a podcast interview. ✍️ Ian Williams Article | spectator.com/article/why-th…

Thanks for report. To contextualize what you experience, this is a summary of vessels operating around Bajo de Masinloc (Scarborough) during the month of October. The PRC has maintains a force of 15-20 comprised of Coast Guard and PAF-MM vessel. PRC is spending a lot of $$ just loitering. What makes it more interesting is that during this period a PRC submarine cable ship sailed into the Philippines. This is perhaps more concerning than the Liaoning.

Wait, you mean there's NOT going to be a #SouthChinaSea Code of Conduct? But golly, I thought everyone totally wanted one this time ... If only someone could have predicted this.