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Cyber Attacks on US Linked to Chinese Military?
wiredog writes "Security expert Bruce Schneier is reporting on a continuing effort to penetrate US government and industry computer systems that most likely stems from the Chinese military." From the Terranet article: "The attacks have been traced to the Chinese province of Guangdong, and the techniques used make it appear unlikely to come from any other source than the military, said Alan Paller, the director of the SANS Institute, an education and research organization focusing on cybersecurity."
Take, for example this story which includes the quote:
Let's not forget how important our information infrastructures are and how dependent we have been on computers for quite sometime. Let's also not forget common rules of war one of which is cutting off an enemy's supply line ASAP to reduce their cone of influence. A pre-emptive move to "test the waters" of U.S. security by China would not surprise me.
My work here is dung.
Does this sound like another blame game when something bad happens in USA? If they have already traced the source and still couldn't fend it off, I don't know what they would do next, calling President Hu?
These attacks come from someone with intense discipline. No other organization could do this if they were not a military organization
Does this rhyme with "Space exploration is both demanding and dangerous. No other nations could do this if they did not have a space shuttle".
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
This was brought up on my local SAGE mailing list earlier. Someone brought up the good point: Aren't there an awful lot of news stories recently (heck, there've been three on /. in the past few days) villianizing China? Almost as if some large government- or media-induced program is going on to remind us how Evil they are and influence the collective consciousness to be in favor of breaking off relations with the most populous nation on Earth? (Or, to some extreme, treating them like our last Axis of Evil?)
so does this mean in the coming information war they are going to use that commie OS, what is it...
Linux, I think it's called?
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
Nice try, China! Your silly attempts to raise yourself to the level of the U.S. will never succeed. The U.S. is the dominant super power and always will be!
Just ask Britain and France! If anyone understands that national standing on the international scene, once established, is permanent... it's them!
I'm a big tall mofo.
1. How do they know that it's the Chinese Military? It could be a criminal organization.
2. Do you really think that anything really sensitive would be able to be accessed from the Internet?
I heard a story about these Chinese hackers on the radio, apparently all of the data for the Mars Polar Lander was stolen as well.
Now China is planning on landing men on the moon within 15-20 years......coincidence?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
it is possible they stole "extremely sensitive" information. I bet they raided the government's pr0n library
Does this, combined with the Air Force's new mission statement, constitute an Act of War?
Only if we were planning on paying much less.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
And the Americans are not doing the same to the Chinese?
I would have been shocked if this was not going on in both directions - in dozens of directions for that matter.
If this can be proven, this is an act of war. Tell me again why China has Most Favored Nation status? WWIII seems close at hand.
For those who think that China is a big teddy bear full of love for the world, freedom, and independence of the people we have two words to remember: Tiananmen Square.
I will never forget the images of those young people being shot at, arrested, stampeded out of the square by the Chinese military.
Their government is not warm and fuzzy and has nothing to do with basic human rights. They are fellow humans, the people of China. They deserve better than that gang of thugs in power. I wish them luck in outlasting their predecessors' mistake in choosing to empower those creeps.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Just ask anyone involved in the free Tibet movement or any of the ISP's that host websites with the words free Tibet, they used to get massive attacks from DOS right through to serious and well planned attempts to hack these sites. Spent an entire week assisting the fending off of one of these and having to rebuild a server after the attack got through with it.
Given that the way we won WWII was by throwing vast numbers of inferior equipment and troops at a nation who was more technologically advanced and had a population that was a small fraction of our own, then yes, I think we will wait this one out. You should actually look at how we won WWII before you spout.
Say bad words about my book, in cold oatmeal, or I shall sue!
And, in the aftermath you get to see how hypocritical our government (U.S.) is when it comes to authoritarian regimes. We're more than happy to open up the gates for business with China, yet we crack down on democracies (Venezuela, Haiti) who don't fit in with our Project for the New American Century.
Forget all that "Freedom is on the march" propaganda and start looking at our REAL foreign policy.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I wish they'd hack my mortgage company and reduce my principal!
Crying "Peace" - what purpose can it possibly serve to alert the media that attempts are being made? Who are the terrorists: Those attempting entry, or those publicizing the attempts? Or is some group setting up an attempt at justifying some potential action?
Peace, please.
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
I was really surprised by the whole energy of the place. When I went to McDonalds and they didn't have my food immediately, they said no problem we will find you and bring it to you when its ready. 2 min latter I had my fries. This particular McDonald's had around 30 registers all open. They said that they served 6000 lunches everyday -- just nuts. You won't find any fast food resturant in the US that can manage that volume and provide good service too.
The only downside was all the street vendors, which annoyed our tour guide. She said that they all had day jobs, but would often call in sick to go run side businesses to make extra money.
In closing, the US needs to sell $3,000,000,000 in bonds everyday to China just to keep running. If they really wished us harm they could just stop buying our debt. Once China no longer relies on exports we will be at their mercy. That will happen in around 10 - 20 years just when the US needs money to fund SS payments to baby-boomers.
It's not so much "Freedom is on the March" as "Corporate Capitalism-based Command Economy is on the March".
Once you realize that this is becoming a country by, for, and of The Management most of the rest of government policy becomes extraordinarily clear.
It isn't the Chinese!
Everyone knows that the Chinese could shut down the U.S. military by mailing a baker's dozen fingercuffs to the Commander in Chief and the War Cabinet.
Can't push the nuke button without use of your fingers, can you?
Tons of scans and pen attempts have been coming out of the Guangdong Province for years. Funny thing is if you trace the scan back to the IP admin and etc... you can often Google the names listed as contacts and find they are linked to Chinese IW...
This is not big news IMO just a resurfacing of info that has been seen before... (FUD for new book sales maybe?)
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Let's see, out of 1.3 billion people, there would be 130,000,000 people in the 90 percentile of intelligence. The US population is about 250 million. In other words, China could fill almost half of the US with very smart people. My point? I agree with you.
"I've been saying all along that China is a threat- and this is really the third front of WWIII."
"World war..." I do not think it means what you think it means.
See, when cities start getting wiped off of the face of the planet and an entire generation of young men gets decimated and then decimated again, then you get to call it a "World War III." Ask Europeans or even Chinese of the proper age group to tell you what a real world war looks like.
Very, very few people in North America have seen what a war actually looks like since the freakin' 1860's (and they had to travel to see it), which is probably why people like tossing around the word "war" without having any fucking clue what it entails ("War on Poverty," "War on Drugs," "War on Terrorism," "War on Christmas," and the silliness of calling the whole Red State vs. Blue State thing the "Second American Civil War).
Sherman said "War is Hell" and went on to aptly demonstrate that fact. This, this isn't even a hissy fit. If you have the liesure time to piss away posting on a website, it ain't war.
I have been following this for some time.
This is not the first time this story has appeared on Slashdot. The last time it did (last year, I think), it covered a person who had traced the attacks back as far as China and gave some basic information about the methods and types of attacks. Also there is some reason to think that some military systems have indeed been penetrated and such items as flight control software stolen.
My own suspicion is that you have some sort of DMZ from which these attacks are occurring. You have a number of people stationed in shifts around the clock logging into these systems (possibly remotely) and using them for the attacks. There is plenty of reason to suspect the Chinese military here. These are not defacement attempts but are pretty surgical attempts at military data theft. This means organized crime (terrorist or not) and military are your only major suspects. The military is more likely the purpetrators given not only the specific type of data being targetted but also the Chinese Gov't's general unwillingness to cooperate with an investigation.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I have always thought that our growing debt would make a good reason for our leaders to consider war. Has to be better than he made fun of my daddy.
LIVE, Love, die
While I agree with the gist of what you're saying, my firewall logs are constantly filled with hack attempts originating from our Chinese cyber-neighbors. What I'd be interested to know is whether these are concentrated attacks (most do not seem to be) or whether China's tenancy towards software piracy has become a problem for them. Would it surprise anyone if many widely-circulated, Chinese-pirated copies of Windows XP were pre-infected with trojan rootkits? In that case the botnets would be deployed from the moment the OS was installed. That being said, the responsibility ultimately lies with them either way.
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, thousands of American soldiers died in an effort to stop the threat of Chinese communism. Today, China is one of our top trading "partners". What has changed? China is still one of the worst human rights violators, and routinely abuses its neighbors (Taiwan and Tibet). In trading terms, China is probably our most abusive partner. Any project done in China must also have any related side projects completed there. China also devalues their currency, further imbalancing trade.
The China situation probably pisses me off more than any single other issue. Its an issue where both parties are on the same side; the side of profit-whoring multinationals that have no problem selling out American workers and small business and buddying up to the rights-abusing monster that is the Chinese govt.
We have a record trade deficit right now: money.cnn.com so China doesn't want to fight us, we consume way too much of their produced goods.
And we don't want to fight China, American buisnesses rely way too much on Chinese goods. On top of that, China and South Asia are among the largest emerging markets in the world... The only war both sides want is a price war.
I certainly don't think there is any Nazi/Alexander the Great/Ghengis Khan expansionist ambition on any side that could lead to a world wide conflict. After Iraq, no one in the US wants to rule anything but the good ol' USA. And while there are huge issues with basic human rights, China is gradually making a shift towards a free society, which is probably the right way to go (see the former USSR, Easter Europe, and the Balkans, for the variety of problems: economic depression, civil war, etc. that emerge with even the best intentioned political upheaval).
Taiwan could end up being a sticky issue, but neither side really wants it to result in violence.
If I remember the details on the prior Slashdot article on this topic (from back, last year, before this was becoming publically acknowledged), I think the packets were nat'd in intermediary countries, so doing a blanket block on China wasn't going to be very effective.
Back then there were many people on Slashdot suggesting that they block all foreign traffic, but that becomes problematic given the size and scope of the US Armed Forces.
So the short answer is "no" there is no easy way to block these on the firewall.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"Chinese outnumbers all other languages in the world."
So? If you read the whole article, you'll notice that they point out that, funny thing is, the vast, vast majority of all Chinese speakers live in one place. China has always believed it is the center of the world and waited for everybody to come to them instead of, say, exporting themselves and their language. Unless you're actually going to China, you will get far more mileage with English, French or Spanish (i. e. the ones who did go out and export people and langauge).
In my own layman's opinion, the obsession with whatever flavor of Chinese dialect you're looking at is little more than a fad. Twenty years ago, "the" langauge for us to all go out and learn would have been Russian or Japanese, two other examples of isolated languages.
IMO, it makes more sense to run out and learn Portuguese. Brazil is closer to the US than China.
I have been worried for a long time about the apparent naivete of the U.S. government and military regarding the Chinese.
The Chinese government and military are extremely savvy so long as they are not blinded by their communist dogma. When it comes to trade, information, spying, and weapons technology, they understand the reality that those who play fair lose.
If you are a businessman, have no illusions that your papers and files are safe in your hotel room in China. There have been documented cases of government-sponsored spies following businessmen and bugging or entering their hotel rooms to scour their belongings for useful trade secrets and intellectual property.
We can see clearly that they are pursuing a strategy of mercantilism in trade, to our great disadvantage, thanks to the cluelessness of free-traders in Congress and the White House.
Who can doubt that the same issues exist with regard to sensitive military information? The Chinese sponsor students to come to the U.S. with the express goal sometimes of infiltrating research staffs and supplying tech info back to China. The same surely occurs with U.S. government and military employees, although the screening is more thorough.
In my opinion, the CHinese government would see hacking U.S. government or military sites as a requirement for successful international competition. Hopefully, the NSA and others like them are on top of the problem. I don't doubt, though, that they have gained access to lots of systems on the lower end of the confidentiality spectrum.
It needs to be impressed on people in government, military, and intelligence work, that the Chinese are playing one mean game of chess in everything they do vis-a-vis the U.S. Their sense of time spans centuries and millennia rather than decades. Any suspicious activity on their part needs to be treated with the greatest skepticism by our guys, rather than with apathy or giving them the benefit of the doubt...
Although the number of victims aren't really comparable, I'd be more willing to compare Tiananmen Square to the Kent State massacre.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_Massacre
'nuff said.
You could wish their current (and continuing) administration to have learned (well, something) from the previous administrations mistakes. To say communism is outright bad is ignorant. Its like blaming God (and I know some people do) or religions for all the bad interpretations people make of them.
And as far as human rights go I don't think the US has a leg to stand on right now. Tiananmen Square like a big FUCK YOU to the world, to divergent ideologies, etc. Guantanamo Bay or the unintentional results due to the use of white phosphorus in Falluja aren't signs of a government suddently gone wild. We've been violating basic human rights for ages, we've just done it more diplomatically.
Sorry for the ramble. I just feel like for all our best intentions in time men will find means to erode high-standing ideals for a little bit of personal gain. We want so much.
Quack, quack.
I bet they're all running RED Hat! Ha!
Sorry, that was terrible.
First, the argument that an attack is disciplined thus it must be the national military is just plain stupid -- and I frequently agree with Bruce S.
Even then, how is this not anticipated? Governments spy on each other (and their own citizens) prolificly, even their allies. We do it, they do it. European countries and the US are constantly one-upping each other in government sponsored corporate espionage. The Internet's done nothing but created a new medium. We steal corporate and military secrets from them, and they from us. Big deal.
The fact is that this means nothing. We know how to prevent this from being a problem, we do it, and we even disseminate disinformation this way.
The Iraq boondoggle aside, countries are actually very good about researching each other. There's a level of transparency between nations that is completely hidden to the average citizen. I think that everyone understands that at some level. The problem is, of course, that the public understanding of geopolitics is quite different than that of world leaders and the intelligence community. China could be an invasion threat, or on the verge of a dramatic shift to democracy and becoming our (USA) 51st state -- but, honestly, how many people are privileged enough to have access to sufficient information to make that call? Almost certainly not you.
By avoiding transparency, governments can avoid accountability to their citizens and other nations. That lack of accountability makes people easy to assuage, makes governments appear artificially effective, etc. In the US we demand little transparency because making information available puts us at risk (so the logic goes). Thus, by simply augmenting the perception of risk (nwes about terrorists, spies, etc.), people will lower their accountability demands, enabling more flexibility for things probably not in the public interest.
Of the top 100 economic powers in the word, 52 are corporations, and 48 are countries. About 1/3rd of goods transferred over a national border are goods that don't transfer ownership because they stay within a multinational corporation that is internally transferring those goods). It seems that some good geopolitical FUD can make you richer than Croesus if you're an inside player in the game.
It's never hack from home. Now, even if the Chinese are actively trying to .gov or .mil. I'm pretty sure so called
hack us, (why not, I am sure it's not just them and I'll bet money we are doing
it too), why would they source an attack from their primary location? Even if
the "attacks" are coming from there, that doesn't mean it's the Chinese. It
could be an American or British kid who took over a box there. And I gotta
tell you, if it were me, I would bounce my traffic around the world twice
before I even took a look at a
"military trained" hackers backed by the Chinese government could and would
have far more resources and could cover their tracks better than that. If it
were me, I would have all the attacks sourced from Britian or Iserail, or some
other friendly US ally. Color me suspicious.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
STEEE-RIKE!!!
sarcasm -------->
O
-|-
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/ \
you
From your second paragraph (the first one quoted above), it appears we've already figured out what to do to cause harm to them.
American corporations will not stand for being refused entry to a market encompassing a sixth of the world's population. This pressure began to build in the seventies and has only increased. This is the determining factor in all US/China dialogue.
illegitimii non ingravare
Second china is not an iraq or vietnam. It would kick americas butt in both a ground war and a nuclear exchange. Massive losses for the chinese sure, but so what? Not like they are going to run out.
Third russia would have a fit.
Fourth India would have a fit.
Fifth non-commercial blokkade would suit the chinese just fine. Less capatalist propaganda to filter out. It is not like South Africa were the majority of the population were against the boycotted goverment.
No it is just bash the chinese time in the media, next month it will be the EU's turn.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"Did it ever occur to you that war may have changed,"
Ten thousand years of civilization and warfare, and the face of war has always remained the same: people killing people and breaking things en masse, wholesale slaughter. The means and methods may have changed, but the results, the aftermath has always been the same: smouldering cities and bloodsoaked soil. Are you so vain as to believe that humanity is somehow above all that now and things have magically changed in the past hundred months that haven't changed in the past hundred centuries?
And before you start pointing at 9/11, not even that qualifies. The Romans did far worse to Carthage and they didn't have airplanes or the Internet. Try finding something in Atlanta older than 150 years.
"and that there are people starving to death in America due to WWIII already?"
Any more than, say, the Great Depression? Even with the surge of population in the US since the 1930's, I'd still wager the raw numbers are higher from the '30's, and that was peacetime.
Again, you have zero sense of scale.
Starvation during wartime comes because international shipments of food are seized/sunk and domestic food sources are torched, blighted, salted, or otherwise eliminated by human violence, and everybody knows it. You sure as hell don't start talking about a freakin' obesity epidemic. Hell, look at postwar Japan, and that was even after we called off our submarine fleet.
And, again, this is something North America has not seen in almost 150 years. No rational person would even pretend this qualifies as a war.
I agree with you but prefer to take a more optimistic view. Things ARE getting better in China.
;-)
At the risk of getting modded as a troll, I'm not convinced that democracy would work in a country of over 1.3 billion people. It's a very delicate infrastructure that's holding that entire country together.
The Chinese government feels that their often brutal enforcement of it's policies is preferable to the anarchy that would result from allowing the people to challenge the status quo. It's an awful thing to say but they do have a point. Any sizable civil unrest in China could collapse that very delicate infrastructure and could lead to tens of millions of people starving to death.
As China continues to prosper, hopefully one day a democracy of sorts will be established. The signs are already there. In spite of certain news stories you might hear, the govermnent IS clamping down on local corruption and IS gaining confidence in it's people's abilities to govern themselves locally - maybe even allowing the people to choose their local govenor one day?
The prosperity that comes from trading with the rest of the world is fuelling that confidence. The only thing standing in the way of these changes are the idiots who say "stop trading with China because their government is horrible".
Oh and it's OBVIOUS that they're poking around US millitary systems. The rest of the world is doing it - why not China
well, lessee. I work for a global company. We happen to have offices and plants in china. Those offices are connected directly to the rest of our WAN via IPSec. I'm sure we are part of the majority of American companies in this respect. Do you really think the government that favors corporations over individuals is going to cut those corporations off?
"The economies are indeed too dependant on each other."
The same was said about Britain and Germany in 1913.
Definitely any growing influence needs to be watched but there are "natural" forces that check anyone from rising too far. Look how scary the Japanese economy was in the 1980s -- remember movies like 'Gung Ho' that played on our fears? Here's some reasons why China will plateau before ruling the world: 1. Their main global economic value currently is cheap labor. But their standard of living is rising quickly and salaries are growing. Many, in the cities, have cars and big screen televisions. They won't be cheap for much longer -- in fact they're starting to outsource to Vietnam! 2. Their banking system is flawed, and their corporations are rife with corruption. They will experience a major economic crisis similar to the "economic flu" that hit the other Asian tiger countries. Major scandals will be unveiled, big corporations will default on loans, and the whole house of cards will fall down. 3. Political turmoil. As the social disparity increases, they will get inundated with protests and strikes like any other modern industrial country. 4. Infrastructure problems. 5. Energy and water supply problems. 6. Pollution problems. Don't mistake their transient success of five years with a prolonged dominance.
While I don't approve of this method of cutting corners on R&D the Chinese are doing nothing that the US hasn't done in the past and still is doing today, and not just to nations that could be a potential threat either. The USA also spies on it's own allies and that includes abusing base rights and surveillance assets, supposedly there to be used for the benefit of NATO defense, to conduct industrial espionage on other NATO nations. The US has even used these assets to commit occasional acts of economic sabotage, a famous example would be the Saudi Arab airliner deal that Boeing managed to snatch away from Airbus with Uncle Sam's help. Not that I'm complaning mind you, we Europeans are not exactly angels either and the whole Airbus mess did have two positive results. Firstly we now know that we can't even trust our friends in the USA as far as we can throw them (a lesson they are now slowly learning them selves, in reverse, so to speak) and secondly many corporations here now take communications security more seriously than the military. Judging from the way it has been chewing away at Boeing's market share Airbus certainly seems to have learned it's lesson.
The price of peace is eternal vigilance.... even your friend will stab you in the back to butter his own slice of bread.... learn the lesson, go on and get over it.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
High quality goods are a lot less expensive in China. Many of the new shopping malls in China have over twice the square footage as the pentagon. Though they make less money it goes farther. Also comparing GDP per person doesn't work well when the ratio is on the order of 4:1. When you factor the change in working population the China's GDP per person isn't bad. With the growth rate of a conservative %8, the GDP per person in China will double in 10 years, making them the number one player. A number one player with a much lower payroll that goes farther.
We're an Army-sponsored engineering research group that already worries about this. Just take a look at the China Journal of System Simulation for an amazing look at China's emerging technological dominance.
URL: http://www.china-simulation.com/esite/preview/05-0 5.htm n ew_0035.html
Graphic: http://courses.washington.edu/goodall/MRFM/whats_
As the graphic says, "open strategic advantage (OSA) strategies are easy to understand, impossible to stop, and yield global strategic advantages". Or as China's books on business strategy say: "Deceive the sky, to cross the ocean."
I thought "War on ......" was a American euphemism for "an unsolvable problem we will futilely waste vast resources on in an ongoing and unsuccesful attempt to solve using means and methods long ago shown not to work." (Sounds like a corporate mission statement, doesn't it)
"War on Poverty," "War on Drugs," and "War on Terrorism" are perfect examples.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Sure, it's because you and everyone you know is unwilling to pay $3000 for a computer, which you would if cheap Asian parts vanished, because North Americans figure that it's a right to earn $15 an hour.
Got any hard questions?
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
An excellent point, which is why the vast majority of weapons systems used by the US are built in the US with US components. The COTS gear is another matter. The post-war situation would without a doubt be seriously screwed up, but I'd imagine in-sourcing would come back into fashion.
Luke, help me take this mask off
The Pentagon's web page one day was replaced with a page that said "Hacked by Chinese."
"No, I'm saying that in the past 40 years we've found a new way to accomplish it much more slowly- by destroying the foundation of a nation's economy so that the cities fall apart and anybody who isn't independantly wealthy starves to death trying to pay for fuel and supplies that are reserved for the rich."
That's not war. It doesn't even approach the destruction (economic or otherwise) of war. At worst, economic depression. You cannot change the meaning of the word "war" to suit your whims.
"I call it the revenge of Tojo- since it was McArthur's Japan that started the trend."
Funny, that. Looked at the Japanese banking industry lately? Or their economy in general?
"If we keep going down this path, try finding any buildings that aren't shacks or slums in America that aren't in Bentonville, Alabama where the Chinese are installing their new government in 20 years."
Since the Japanese obviously had a head start, why aren't we all speaking Japanese?
"Actually, during the 30's it was still possible to forage for food- go hunting without a $500 permit or a $20,000 fine."
Wha? In the 1930's you could get a car for $500 and a house for $20,000, and damned nice ones at that.
Of course, it's kinda tough to forage for food in the middle of the Dustbowl.
"Rational is just making up stories to lie about what is really going on."
No, rational is not playing games with terms and accusations as seirous as "war." That's like calling all diseases "cancer."
Consider going to Bejing, Shanghai or Hong Kong.
Beijing is hardly a futuristic city (not really sure why you included that one. It's a beautiful city, but it hardly fits in with the other two). Hong Kong's prosperity is completely and absolutely the result of the British rule and law, and it has diminished since the takeover.
If you go to Shanghai you should try the sooper high speed mag-lev train.
One thing about a statist economy is that you can put billions towards really dumb money sinks, all to get gullible citizens and tourists to proclaim about how futuristic it is. I hear Brazilia in Brazil is a real futuristic city as well.
I was really surprised by the whole energy of the place. When I went to McDonalds and they didn't have my food immediately, they said no problem we will find you and bring it to you when its ready. 2 min latter I had my fries. This particular McDonald's had around 30 registers all open. They said that they served 6000 lunches everyday -- just nuts. You won't find any fast food resturant in the US that can manage that volume and provide good service too.
You're impressed that they brought your food to you? Wow, your opinion really needs to be considered suspect. Fastfood restaurants everywhere bring food to you.
Regarding the McDonalds being big --- if that's your measure of prosperity... That's like saying that a town is a great town because they have the largest Walmart. I'm going to have to presume that you're being sarcastic.
In closing, the US needs to sell $3,000,000,000 in bonds everyday to China just to keep running. If they really wished us harm they could just stop buying our debt. Once China no longer relies on exports we will be at their mercy. That will happen in around 10 - 20 years just when the US needs money to fund SS payments to baby-boomers.
Ah, good old fear mongering and ignorant economics. Ignoring the fact that China isn't a big financer of debt (and hasn't been for some time), countries don't buy bonds because they're benevolent - they do it for their own best interest. In the case of China they buy up US $ (and formerly bonds) to prop up the dollar, which keeps the yuan undervalued and serves China.
Secondly, if China did something (ignoring that they couldn't do anything that could be rapidly circumvented) they would punish the US $, depreciating their own holdings in US bonds (most of which can't be cashed in for years and decades. Boy, win win!
Idiots that don't have the slightest clue about economics, and that are wide-eyed about isolated advantages (OMG! I hear that North Korea has gigantic pyramid towers! They must be super first world!) should just keep their ignorance to themselves. China is eventually joining the ranks of the first world, and will soon earn some "problems" like citizens that don't like being poisoned by the air and water, and who like some rights, but this pissy nonsense about how the US is doomed reeks of ignorance.
War on War.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke