A Norwegian city has discovered that electric buses it purchased from China were equipped with software that could remotely prevent them from operating. Norway is not the only place where this happens (buses in the Portuguese city of Braga, which has a large Brazilian community, are of the same brand). And China is not the only country doing this. The United States also has everything from tractors to weapons that can be neutralized by higher orders.
The possibility of remote jamming is obvious. On a day when European cities are filled with such vehicles, like the European Union’s own climate plan, a remote push of a button could be enough to cause chaos in the continent’s largest metropolitan area.
And the problem is not limited to Europe. Given the number of government buildings in Africa that China has “donated”, one might wonder whether the same type of vulnerability does not exist, and what real sovereignty would look like in a country where government buildings could be momentarily “suspended.”
What is surprising about these signs is the time scale that governs them. There is little point in thinking about whether there was a plan from the beginning or whether opportunities present themselves from time to time. What is certain is that the remote jamming strategy will only work on days when such buses are in large numbers in the most important cities. This reveals future plans decades and generations into the future. China is often said to think long-term, and these examples support that theory.
Compare what China is doing with what Russia is doing. Moscow also engages in subversive activities within European Union territory, but they are more aggressive and less sophisticated, with some incidents being treated with some degree of caution by European authorities, such as drone overflights of infrastructure in Poland and Denmark.
The difference in nature between China’s plan and Russia’s attack is not surprising. Russia is a declining empire in a hurry, while China is a rising empire that can afford to wait.
Therefore, a large-scale war against Ukraine seemed pointless until the day it happened. As Polish-American Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser in the Jimmy Carter administration, said, the Russian government appears to believe that “with Ukraine, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”
However, there is still an element of urgency to this idea, as evidenced by President Putin’s pseudo-historical paper “On the Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” published in 2022. Without Ukraine, Russia wouldn’t even be Russia. In the Kremlin’s view, the existence of an independent Ukraine poses an existential threat to Russia.
If Russia were the only actor participating in this plan, it would be enough to deplete its forces and create a quagmire in Ukraine. But a unique feature of modern times is that the Empire of Haste and the Empire of Patience are working together. While Russia is distracting European countries, China is putting pawns on the board.
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