The United States has been tracking serious cyberattacks on US infrastructure for years. 

Those attacks are hardly minor--the intrusions threaten all our computer-linked infrastructure, which in the great Venn Diagram of life means basically all our electrical generation, water distribution, pipelines, power plants, communications, and even medical systems. 

Computers and software make life more efficient is many ways, but there is always a trade-off between efficiency and resilience. Our current infrastructure is about as brittle as it has been in a very long time, and China has a hammer they can use to shatter it. 

They want us to know that. 

https://t.co/rXpDvcXaXy

— Dustin Volz (@dnvolz) April 10, 2025

The Wall Street Journal has a scoop about that last bit. For years the Chinese have vigorously denied that the Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party had anything to do with the campaign to infiltrate and disrupt our cybersystems, so when they admitted that they took responsibility for all those intrusions, it took the Biden administration by surprise. 

WASHINGTON—Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting that Beijing was behind a widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring how hostilities between the two superpowers are continuing to escalate.

The Chinese delegation linked years of intrusions into computer networks at U.S. ports, water utilities, airports and other targets, to increasing U.S. policy support for Taiwan, the people, who declined to be named, said.  

The first-of-its-kind signal at a Geneva summit with the outgoing Biden administration startled American officials used to hearing their Chinese counterparts blame the campaign, which security researchers have dubbed Volt Typhoon, on a criminal outfit, or accuse the U.S. of having an overactive imagination. 

U.S. officials went public last year with unusually dire warnings about the uncovered Volt Typhoon effort. They publicly attributed it to Beijing trying to get a foothold in U.S. computer networks so its army could quickly detonate damaging cyberattacks during a future conflict. 

The Chinese official’s remarks at the December meeting were indirect and somewhat ambiguous, but most of the American delegation in the room interpreted it as a tacit admission and a warning to the U.S. about Taiwan, a former U.S. official familiar with the meeting said.

As critical as I am about Joe Biden and his band of foreign policy morons, I must concede that everybody in that room knew full well that China's government was responsible for all these attacks. They weren't surprised to learn that fact, but rather that the Chinese would even obliquely admit it. 

This was a signal--an escalation--tied to Xi Jinping's desire to capture Taiwan before he leaves this mortal coil. Biden, for all his bumbling, matched Xi's ambitions with an abandonment of the US policy of strategic ambiguity and committing to the defense of Taiwan. He did so multiple times, and despite his advisors' furious scrambles to walk back Biden's unusual clarity, Xi got the message. 

Xi's response was similarly clear: if you try to stop us, we can hit you where it hurts. 

Officials say Chinese hackers’ targeting of civilian infrastructure in recent years presents among the most troubling security threats facing the Trump administration.

In a statement, the State Department didn’t comment on the meeting but said the U.S. had made clear to Beijing it will “take actions in response to Chinese malicious cyber activity,” describing the hacking as “some of the gravest and most persistent threats to U.S. national security.” The Trump White House National Security Council declined to comment. 

The Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t respond to specific questions about the meeting, but accused the U.S. of “using cybersecurity to smear and slander China” and spreading disinformation about “so-called hacking threats.”

During the half-day meeting in Geneva, Wang Lei, a top cyber official with China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, indicated that the infrastructure hacks resulted from the U.S.’s military backing of Taiwan, an island Beijing claims as its own, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the conversation.

Wang or the other Chinese officials didn’t directly state that China was responsible for the hacking, the U.S. officials said. But American officials present and others later briefed on the meeting perceived the comments as confirmation of Beijing’s role and was intended to scare the U.S. from involving itself if a conflict erupts in the Taiwan Strait. 

When we think about wars we tend to think of military forces battling it out and blowing each other up. But most wars are whole-of-society affairs because, contrary to popular belief, wars are battles of wills and not just battles of arms. The US won every battle in Vietnam and lost the war because we failed to break the will of the North Vietnamese. Similarly, we lost the Afghanistan war after inflicting what should have been crippling damage on the Taliban, but they waited us out and won. 

None of our recent adversaries even had the ability to inflict massive casualties on us or harm us within our borders. China clearly believes that the US populace will not tolerate the pain it can inflict domestically and is making it clear to US policymakers that it is willing to hit us where it hurts. 

Not just our aircraft carriers but our homeland as well. 

All the war games you hear about focus on the military price the US would pay to defend Taiwan, which would be or could be enormous. But few of them consider the costs that China could impose by shutting down our electrical grid or bringing down communications. 

If you think the supply chain problems caused by COVID were a problem, imagine what a successful cyberattack could do. 

Of course, I have no real idea whether the US could absorb such an attack and rebound quickly, or how good our defenses really are. But if the failure to root the Chinese out of our telecom systems are any indication, they aren't good enough yet. 

Of course, there is another side to the equation: how badly could we hurt China in cyberattacks? Is the US willing to use kinetic attacks on the Chinese mainland in response? 

In other words, is there a deterrence plan, and how good is it? Do the Chinese fear retaliation enough to refrain from unleashing hell?

Deterrence, too, is based on a battle of wills, and the best way to win is to show the other side that for every tit, there will be a tat.