 Bloomberg's CIA Apologia accidentally vindicates China's strict domestic policies. In a new article promoting the CIA's new mission center focused on China, and the need to pour more resources into countering Beijing, Bloomberg also accidentally makes the case that many of the Chinese government's controversial domestic policies are entirely justified and completely necessary. Citing anonymous government officials alongside bloodthirsty psychopath John Bolton, the article, China is evading US spies and the White House is worried, argues that a stronger pivot to China can't come soon enough, and reminds readers of last year's House Intelligence Committee report which claimed that, quote, absent a significant realignment of resources, the US government and intelligence community will fail to achieve the outcomes required to enable continued US competition with China on the global stage. End quote. But in their efforts to justify the need for greater focus on espionage campaigns in China, the article's multiple authors explain that the US intelligence cartel has been floundering on that front precisely because of the authoritarian policies which Western institutions have been aggressively criticizing China for implementing. Xi's sweeping efforts to change China's domestic politics and consolidate his control have also taken a toll on American intelligence, the article says. The shift from a system of collective leadership under former presidents toward one dominated by Xi means that the CIA has to go from focusing on the inner circles of seven or even nine top leaders to effectively just one. Chinese academia, the media and civil society organizations are all closely controlled by the government, further compounding the challenge of reporting on the country, the article adds. CIA officers in China faced daunting challenges posed by China's burgeoning surveillance state, which has blanketed Chinese cities with surveillance cameras and employs sophisticated facial recognition software on track threats, claim the article's authors. Bloomberg explains that China's anti-corruption measures have made it much harder to recruit CIA assets. Writing, Xi's broad anti-corruption campaign, which has punished more than 1.5 million officials, has also led to greater scrutiny of Chinese officials' income making payments to potential sources far more problematic, two former officials said. Those efforts were detailed extensively in 2017 by the New York Times, who said as many as a dozen US sources were executed by China, while others jailed, and what represented one of the worst breaches ever of American spying networks, the article also notes. So Beijing's anti-corruption crackdowns, widespread surveillance, and strict control over Chinese society is making it harder for the CIA to undermine that nation, and now the CIA is expressing its frustration through the billionaire media, which shows that China is acting entirely in self-defense when it implements those policies. When people complain about Chinese authoritarianism and lack of transparency, what they're really complaining about is that China is defending itself against a nonstop assault from the US centralized empire which seeks to bring Beijing to its knees. The heavy-handed domestic policies of US targeted nations like China are not morally comparable to the censorship, propaganda, secrecy, surveillance, and other authoritarian measures you see in the US in its lackey states, because US targeted nations are actively defending themselves against a hostile foreign aggressor who won't be content until all nations on Earth bow to its dictates. These are not the same thing. One is a weaker government acting defensively, the other is a globe-spanning power structure that, if given the opportunity, will topple your government using mass-scale scyops, espionage, special operations, color revolutions, and proxy conflicts to force your nation and its people to subordinate its interests to those of the US empire. Sure it would be great if all the world's populations were free to say and read and do whatever they want without government interference, but to pretend we live in a world where populations aren't deprived of those freedoms in response to a nonstop assault by a global juggernaut is to live in a fantasy land. There is a slow-motion Third World War underway between the US centralized empire and the few remaining nations which have successfully resisted its aggressive attempts to absorb them into its folds. Nations like the US use propaganda, censorship, secrecy, and surveillance to advance imperialist aggressions, while nations like China use them defensively. This is a fundamental difference, and to pretend it isn't is to ignore the reality of the power dynamics at play. It's so silly how the US war machine uses the word defense to describe the machine by which it inflicts nonstop aggression upon the world. Department of Defense, the defense industry. The US war machine doesn't defend anything, it attacks relentlessly and maliciously. Defense is what the nations who resist those aggressions are doing.