A Norwegian city discovered that the electric buses it bought from China had software capable of preventing them from operating remotely. This doesn’t just happen in Norway (in Portuguese Braga, a city with a large Brazilian community, the buses are of the same brand) and it’s not just China that does it: the US also has everything from tractors to weapons that could be rendered useless by a higher order.
The potential for remote sabotage is clear: the day European cities are filled with these vehicles, as is the case in EU plans to combat climate change, the push of a remote button will be enough to unleash chaos on the continent’s largest urban areas.
The problem is not limited to Europe; If we think about the number of African government buildings that China has “put on display,” we might wonder whether the same kind of vulnerability does not exist, and what true sovereignty a country might have whose government buildings could be “closed” from one moment to the next.
What is surprising about these signs is the amount of time that governs them. It is hardly appropriate to think whether there was a plan from the beginning or whether an opportunity presents itself from time to time. What is certain is that the strategy of remote sabotage will only succeed on the day when the majority of such buses are located in the most important cities. This reveals planning decades and generations into the future. It is often said that China thinks long-term, and these examples confirm this hypothesis.
Compare what China is doing with what Russia is doing. The government in Moscow is also involved in acts of sabotage on EU territory, but they are more aggressive and less sophisticated, including, for example, flying drones against infrastructure in Poland or Denmark, among other cases that are treated with some caution by European authorities.
The difference in nature between the Chinese plans and the Russian attacks makes sense. Russia is a declining empire in a hurry, while China is a rising empire able to wait.
Hence the large-scale war against Ukraine, which seemed meaningless until the day it happened. Moscow seems to believe that “with Ukraine, Russia automatically becomes an empire,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish American who was national security adviser in the Jimmy Carter administration.
But there is still a dimension of urgency to this thought, as Putin’s 2022 pseudo-historical article “On Unity between Russians and Ukrainians” shows: Without Ukraine, Russia is not even Russia. The existence of an independent Ukraine poses an existential threat to Russia in the eyes of the Kremlin.
If Moscow is the only actor in this endeavor, it will be enough to exhaust its forces and create a Ukrainian quagmire. But the unique feature of our age is the alliance between the empire of haste and the empire of patience. While Russia is distracting the Europeans, China is putting its pieces on the board.
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