 Hello, my name is Matthew Bruzezi. I'm a senior Chinese language analyst with Flupath Labs. We're a government contractor servicing a variety of contracts across the USG, including providing linguistic and analytical support to the China Aerospace Studies Institute at National Defense University here in DC. And we've also partnered with Peter Singer and Defense One to write an ongoing series of articles on the topic of China, including on Chinese tech advances and military issues. And I've been asked to speak briefly today about some of the insights we've gained from this partnership, as well as more generally as open source researchers of China's defense space. And one of the biggest takeaways for me in recent years has been that there is still a major disconnect, whether you're speaking about the US government, the military, the research community, etc. between interest in China, which is rapidly spiking and the resources available to meet that growing demand. There just aren't enough people or organizations with the requisite skill to read what the PRC government or military or scientific research community is actually saying in their own words and translate that to a wider audience. And this problem is only set to grow in the coming years as interest in China as an adversary grows. And this is the issue which we at BluePath Labs in our workbook with Peter Singer and Defense One and elsewhere are trying to contribute to solving to try to shine some light on what the PRC security apparatus is actually saying in their own words. And interestingly, you know, the Chinese government, the military, etc. are well aware of the fact that the US and its allies have this problem. In a way, they have oftentimes considered their language to be the first level of encryption, largely shielding what they say, even in the public forum that is the internet from foreign eyes. And the truth is, they're not entirely wrong in this assumption. The majority, I would even say the vast majority of content out there goes on red. And it's amazing what you can actually find once you start looking, you know, they will sometimes say something entirely different or at least leave out relevant information in the English translation of the same document. And I'll just give one small example from some of my past research. Here's how one company which makes microwave components describes itself in Chinese versus in English. In Chinese, they clearly state more than once that they make components for the military market. And you can see here the Chinese character for military highlighted. But in their English language description for a foreign audience, any mention of military use of its products is conspicuously absent. And this company probably uses American components. I know that their parent company, which also makes military components, certainly does. And has so far managed to avoid being added to any US government export control list. So you can see why they would leave that little detail out. And to give a second example, in recent years, researchers of China's nuclear weapons have expressed concern that the PLA is intermingling its nuclear and conventional ballistic missile forces. In particular, one of its ballistic missiles, the DF-26, which you see here, it's capable of firing both nuclear and conventional warheads with obvious implications for deterrence. If you can't tell which missiles are conventional or nuclear, it could easily lead to inadvertent escalation in the heat of a conflict. But the great unknown here was to what extent the PLA was actually commingling these two missions. Perhaps, for example, they at least had geographically distinct nuclear and conventional DF-26 units. However, we were able to prove that they were, in fact, intermingling these two missions and that, in at least one case, the conventional nuclear missions were not geographically distinct or at all easy to discern, which is deeply concerning. And we did this by uncovering an article from 2017 on China's official state news site, which plainly stated that they are, in fact, commingling nuclear and conventional missions, and even described how DF-26 personnel trained for both nuclear and conventional missions. And this article, with important information about China's nuclear strategy, it was just sitting there online since 2017, but no one had yet read and translated it. And just as a postscript, CCTV ended up deleting this article after our piece came out. And here's another more recent example from our work with Defense One. In 2021, a Chinese national named Chin Xu Ren was sentenced to prison time by the US Justice Department for purchasing underwater warfare research equipment and illegally exporting it to China. In our article for Defense One titled How China Steals US Tech to Catch Up in Underwater Warfare, we were able to dig further into Chin's case uncovering the lab he was likely working for in China and even identifying his likely co-conspirator at the lab. We found that this lab, dedicated to submarine and torpedo technology, actually listed out its major equipment on its website, including equipment from the US that had clearly been illegally acquired. They even boasted on their website about their use of a US-made advanced autonomous underwater vehicle that Chin had allegedly tried and failed to illegally export, indicating that they had somehow gotten their hands on it by other means. The ease with which this information was available just openly listed on the lab's website really demonstrates the kind of information you can find, what's out there in the open, waiting to be discovered when you are both reasonably curious and able to crack that first level of encryption. Beyond uncovering actual wrongdoing, or at least things they don't want us to know, we frequently come across stories that are interesting and relevant, but just for whatever reason are not widely covered in English language media. So for example, in June of this year, my colleague wrote a story about how researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently made a breakthrough toward creating a particle beam cannon as part of a new advanced type of nuclear power, which would allow for the recycling of spent nuclear fuel, and showing that China is determined to be at the forefront of nuclear power research, just as nuclear power is stagnating in much of the West. Despite the importance of this breakthrough, the story was not widely covered in English language sources. In fact, I'm not sure if it was covered at all. So those are the kinds of things we come across and try to uncover for our readers. And I'll just leave you with that. There is a veritable ocean of fascinating open source material out there just waiting to be read. And now we just need people who are able to read it.