Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: Panic grows in Washington about the Salt Typhoon hack of U.S. telecommunications, the Chinese Communist Party sends a signal by publishing an internal speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping on Jan. 1, and the U.S. Defense Department places Chinese tech giant Tencent on a blacklist for military connections.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: Panic grows in Washington about the Salt Typhoon hack of U.S. telecommunications, the Chinese Communist Party sends a signal by publishing an internal speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping on Jan. 1, and the U.S. Defense Department places Chinese tech giant Tencent on a blacklist for military connections.

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U.S. intelligence and security officials are evincing a growing sense of crisis about the sweeping penetration of U.S. telecommunications networks carried out by the Chinese government-linked Salt Typhoon hacking group in recent years.

The full extent of Beijing’s success is not yet public, but there has been steady coverage about the number of affected providers and the extent of the breaches since reports about a severe Salt Typhoon cyberattack emerged last September.

Current and former U.S. officials, speaking on background, have described Washington as “screwed” and the situation as “devastating.” After initially downplaying the threat, the U.S. government is now encouraging personnel to switch to encrypted messaging apps.

At the core of this panic are concerns that China was able to get into backdoors set up by the U.S. government for domestic surveillance. Though not confirmed through reporting, some security analysts have publicly expressed a belief that Salt Typhoon penetrated systems authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The Salt Typhoon breach has far-reaching implications. There is the question of what China was able to access, which could be phone records; recordings of private communications among U.S. politicians, diplomats, and security........

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