An excerpt from the prologue of China Disintegration 2021: A Guide for Japanese to Break Away from China.
Focusing on China’s Thousand Talents Plan, ECRA, the 5G and 6G race, U.S. efforts to block technology leakage, Japan’s lack of an anti-spy law, and the absence of secrecy provisions in its patent system, this passage asks why Japan was left behind in national security, intellectual property protection, semiconductors, and pandemic preparedness.
It is an essential text for understanding the structural weakness of Japan’s legal and strategic defenses.

2020-12-31

From China Disintegration 2021: A Guide for Japanese to Break Away from China.

Why was Japan left behind?
In addition to the fragility of its epidemic prevention system, could it not also be because its patent system has serious flaws?

The following is an excerpt from the prologue of the book below.
It is essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people all over the world.

The Thousand Talents Plan, a program for technological theft.
COCOM was a regulatory framework during the East-West Cold War that prohibited the export of military technology to the Soviet Union, and it did not simply die out with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Strictly speaking, there was also CHINCOM, established in 1952, the China Committee on export controls, but it was largely nominal.
Under ECRA, which was revived as a “second COCOM,” China became the principal target.
Japanese companies remained complacent and took no real countermeasures.
There are about 800 Japanese companies doing business with Chinese firms that have been placed on blacklists.
Sooner or later, an incident similar to the “second Toshiba-COCOM scandal” will occur.

The intention of the Trump administration, at least on the surface, was to protect intellectual property, eliminate industrial spies, and crush China’s “Thousand Talents Plan,” which recruited outstanding mainly Chinese-born talent from places such as Silicon Valley and Harvard University.
The greatest motive behind ECRA was the anxiety and impatience created by the reality that the United States was falling behind China in the development of 5G, the fifth-generation mobile communications system, and AI, which were to become the core technologies of the next high-tech era.
If 5G communications networks were built under Chinese leadership, it could lead to the United States losing technological hegemony.

Alarmed by China’s lead in 5G development, the United States on the one hand declared the development of the next next stage, 6G, and excluded Huawei from international standardization meetings.
On the other hand, it strengthened counterintelligence investigations and began in earnest efforts to block the theft of high technology by Chinese spies.

A symbolic case concerning the Thousand Talents Plan occurred on December 1, 2018, when the United States had Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou detained by Canadian authorities on the pretext that she had been involved in illegal exports to Iran.
Then, on January 28, 2020, it had Harvard University professor Charles Lieber arrested and indicted for traitorous conduct as an agent of China.
Professor Lieber had entered into a secret contract with Wuhan University of Technology in China and was being paid a separate monthly stipend of 50,000 dollars.
He was deeply involved in China’s Thousand Talents Plan.

Professor Zhang Shoucheng of Stanford University, who had been under investigation, died a mysterious “suicide” in San Francisco on the very day of the Huawei CEO’s arrest.
These two incidents revealed the full scope of China’s Thousand Talents Plan.

The Thousand Talents Plan is a program for recruiting overseas talent with specialized knowledge in order to utilize them in Chinese research projects.
Officials including those in the FBI regarded this as a “technology theft program” and had continued counterintelligence investigations.
The targets of the Thousand Talents Plan include researchers, researchers at universities and companies overseas, and executives in charge of patents, with two programs, one for Chinese nationals and one for foreigners.

Universities, research institutes, laboratories, and other organizations jointly conducting development and research projects with the U.S. NIH, the National Institutes of Health, exist in 59 cities across the United States, and 164 million dollars in R&D funding has been allocated to them.
There are 399 researchers involved in vaccine development and related work, and it was found that authorities were investigating 133 of them (Asia Times, June 20, 2020).
There are voices of reflection saying that “it was a mistake in itself to conduct joint research with China,” but in reality many lab personnel are unconsciously cooperating with China.
Is this not, rather than “organ harvesting,” a kind of “brain harvesting,” at which the Chinese government excels?

Japan’s protection of intellectual property is full of holes.
Japan in particular is the problem.
Unlike the United States and European countries, Japan has no anti-spy law.
Some years ago, when an attempt was made to enact a law that resembled one but could hardly be called an anti-spy law, it was the left-wing figures of organizations such as The Asahi Shimbun who cried out against the enactment of an anti-spy law.
The fact that Shin Sugok was one of the leading opponents, and that she fled to Germany at the same time the law was enacted, was in fact almost as though she herself had proved that she had been a spy for the Korean Peninsula.
Her name also seems to hover around the recent installation of the comfort woman statue in Berlin’s Mitte district.
The Asahi Shimbun and the like valued such a person highly, and Weekly Kinyobi, whose president was Takashi Uemura, even made her one of its executives, so in the United States they would all have been prosecuted.
In the China they so dearly love, it would be worthy of the death penalty.
Therefore, the extent to which information leaks out is even worse than in the United States.

Reading the American moves accurately, discussion arose within the Liberal Democratic Party regarding the defect in the patent system known as the “secrecy clause.”
On July 28, 2020, the LDP’s “Parliamentary League for Rule-Making Strategy,” chaired by Akira Amari, began considering whether the Chinese-made short-video posting app TikTok could also be regulated in Japan.
Following India, the United States also banned it, because there was a risk that personal information could leak to China.

Furthermore, there is the problem of Japan’s patent system.
In Japan, all the contents of a patent application are disclosed through the Patent Gazette 18 months after filing.
Since the Patent Gazette is a public document, it is not illegal for it to be translated into Chinese on the very same day.
In the United States, military technology belonging to the highest level of secrecy can be designated a “secret patent” under patent law.
It is commonly called a “submarine patent.”
The LDP committee also entered discussions regarding a secrecy system for patents.

It was already more than 35 years ago that the author wrote The U.S.-Japan Advanced Patent War.
When part of the draft was published in the magazine Jiyu, it was immediately translated into English, and I remember that a technical officer from the U.S. Embassy sought a meeting with me carrying a copy of it.

Japanese civilian technology is highly versatile.
For example, autofocus technology from Nikon and CD reading technology became the “eyes” of cruise missiles, Sony’s video camera technology became the guide for precision-guided bombs, and the coatings made by TDK for recorder magnetic tape were diverted for use in stealth fighter aircraft.
That is why the author argued that a secrecy clause should be added to the patent system, as before the war.

Patent department heads from companies such as Ricoh, Mitsubishi Electric, and Sanyo Electric kindly agreed to be interviewed, and immediately after publication I even received requests to lecture from places such as Toyota’s patent headquarters.
At U.S.-Japan defense symposiums as well, the author several times, as a panelist, appealed for the restoration of secrecy clauses in the patent system.
But 35 years passed, and there was no reform at all.
Patent publication bulletins remained unchanged and continued unlimited disclosure.

What happened during that period?
The United States sanctioned Toshiba for violating COCOM on the grounds that it had provided the Soviet Union, at the time, with technology for eliminating screw noise.
The United States also transferred next-generation semiconductor technology to South Korea over Japan’s head.
Japan’s semiconductor industry clearly fell behind, and only a few companies such as Renesas Electronics remain, while factories producing the most advanced technologies moved to Taiwan and South Korea, to TSMC and Samsung.

Until now, Intel of the United States had led the field in cutting-edge semiconductors with military applications.
Intel built its main factory in Israel, and TSMC stated that, at the strong request of the Trump administration, it would build a new factory in Arizona.
The pushback in semiconductors is now in full swing.

Why, then, was Japan left behind?
In addition to the fragility of its epidemic prevention system, could it not also be because its patent system has flaws?
This essay will continue.