With stuff like the Jamestown article, I’m not saying its impossible for the PRC to have a massive espionage program, but that 1) most of the articles provide no evidence at all that there’s actually a central program, and 2) tend to make incredibly bogus arguments. For example, The Times of London just had a piece about a British official getting his blackberry stolen in a Chinese “honeytrap” operation. How this is a honeytrap and not an opportunistic lady who simply wanted to sell his phone is never demonstrated, and the real problem is not Chinese espionage in particular, but rather a failure on the British side to be adequately secure regardless of where the threat comes from. There’s precisely the same problem with hackers: whether there’s a Chinese government master plan to hack foreign governments is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that government officials should be opening email attachments without taking proper precautions (this was what the Merkel administration failed to do).

Of course there are some spies and hackers who are part of PRC govt programs. But there’s plenty that aren’t, and the same is true in the U.S. (think Hewlett Packard or credit card data thieves). Determining the relationship between the two in China is definitely a good thing to do, but making huge leaps by quoting random phrases that sound scary (Assassin’s Mace is another good example) is not the way to do it.