A very strange story in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, and subsequently Daily Mail, reports that “Chinese ‘kill switches’ found in US solar farms” or, the Mail version, “China has installed kill switches in solar panels sold to the West”. And if you’re wondering what’s odd about Western governments falling for crass Communist subversion, it’s how easily humans get used to things that really ought to unsettle them on a daily basis, and remain passive in the face of things that should cause an outcry and stern countermeasures.

On the one hand, this story is hard to believe even while looking at it. Michael Shellenberger’s take on the discovery began:

“It sounds like the far-fetched plot of a cheesy James Bond movie: the Chinese military causes civilization-crippling blackouts around the world, plunging cities from San Francisco to Berlin to Seoul into chaos, while invading Taiwan. Hospitals stall. Subways freeze. Data centers go dark.”

Unfortunately, as he immediately added:

“But it’s not far-fetched. In fact, China just demonstrated that it has the power and may be willing to use it.”

Thus on the other hand, to some of us few things could be less surprising than the Telegraph report that:

“Chinese ‘kill switches’ have been found hidden in American solar farms, prompting calls for Ed Miliband to halt the rollout of renewables. On Thursday, the Energy Secretary was urged to impose an ‘immediate pause’ on his green energy blitz to review whether UK solar plants are also at risk. The components found in the US included cellular radios capable of switching off the equipment remotely, raising serious concerns about grid security, according to Reuters. They were found inside power inverters manufactured by unnamed Chinese companies.”

It is no secret, as we frequently have to remind conspiracy theorists who can’t tell a plot from a plan, that the Chinese Communist Party openly aims to attain world domination by 2049, the 100^th anniversary of the party’s military takeover that they call the “Revolution”, in order to begin laying down the main directions of global development in 2050. Nor is it any secret that Western elites are strangely blithe about planning, by the same year, to have reduced the energy basis of our economies to rubble, with the almost certain consequence that we will be ill-placed to oppose this initiative.

Neither group is kidding, to the bafflement of energy executives and moderate voters in Western nations who expect the zealots to back down as their energy transition plans prove painfully unworkable and the same kind of people who were baffled 50 years ago that the Soviets were trying to take over the world despite their proclaimed intention to do so, and doing it with a strange combination of belligerence, obtuseness, naivete and malice.

As Shellenberger further observes:

“Last November, a Chinese solar company named Deye remotely shut down solar power systems in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Pakistan. ‘This inverter is not allowed use [sic] at Pakistan/USA/UK,’ read the message on the inverter screen. ‘Pls return to your supplier.’ What the Chinese did was simple, and straight out of a Bond movie: they effectively built remote-controlled cellular radios into the inverters.”

If Western politicians, or some voters, consider it an odd thing for the firm to have done, bear in mind Shellenberger’s next point:

“Under China’s National Intelligence Law, Chinese companies are legally obligated to cooperate with state intelligence services upon request.”

This provision of Chinese law is not a secret and its implications are not exactly hard to work out. Nor is it a secret that those intelligence services combine cunning with clumsiness in a very characteristically dictatorial way.

Which is why again, for our part, we are not entirely surprised that, as the Daily Mail wrote:

“Engineers have discovered ‘kill switches’ embedded within Chinese-manufactured parts in American solar farms, raising fears that Beijing could manipulate power supplies or even ‘physically destroy’ grids across the US, UK and Europe. Energy officials are now assessing the risks posed by small communication devices discovered inside power inverters – an integral component of renewable energy systems that connects them to the power grid. While inverters are built to allow remote access for updates and maintenance, the utility companies that use them typically install firewalls to prevent direct communication back to China.”

We are not entirely surprised because what did anyone expect them to do? Western governments, with the usual feeble exception of Canada’s, have been very wary of allowing Chinese technology to be embedded in their critical telecommunications infrastructure for years for precisely this kind of reason.

At the same time, we are a bit surprised because did the Politburo really think nobody would find out? Did they think we were such idiots we wouldn’t look?

To be fair, if they did think so they have some excuse, since the battle of freedom versus totalitarianism over the last century and more has very often been a contest between dumb and dumber, which the enemies of liberty have managed to win though not without spectacular effort. If they underestimate us, we give them many reasons to do so.

To again borrow a line from The Goon Show, if you accuse our leaders of acting like fools on national security they may plausibly reply that they’re not acting. The extent to which China has made itself master of the key minerals necessary for the “green energy transition”, and the manufacture of computer components as well, is not exactly well-hidden. Periodically Western leaders, even Joe Biden, don’t just say something, they do something. But the slow and often feeble nature of our response has predictably tempted our adversaries into believing we lacked the brains or guts to do anything, a situation perilous to both sides.

The prospect of a confrontation with China leading to them suddenly switching off the power, water or both in the West and our politicians going “oops” and surrendering is not fanciful. But nor is the prospect of such a situation in which it is our cyberwarfare capabilities that turn out to dwarf theirs, as for instance the Imperial Japanese triumph at Pearl Harbor, the product of a decade of planning, rehearsing and military buildup, was overturned just seven months later by a ragtag group of improvisors at Midway.

An important lesson of history, one totalitarians cannot learn, is that free societies have deep if often well-concealed reservoirs of intelligence and resolve. And for all their misapprehensions about their sworn enemies, their continued if imperfect reliance on free speech and free institutions gives us a much better understanding of our enemies than they have of us.

The nature of the Chinese Communist regime is such that it cannot stop itself from lapsing into “wolf warrior” diplomacy, treating smaller nations with open contempt, staging dangerous provocations and carrying out acts of technological infiltration bound to be exposed. And the nature of free societies is that no matter how hard many try not to see the obvious, some loudmouth is always going to point it out eventually.

So on balance, we are not surprised that they could not stop themselves from undertaking this weird, brazenly provocative and bound-to-be-discovered initiative. Or that Western governments would get very deeply into the trap before discovering it, and then discover it.

Nor will we be surprised when, after dealing with this issue, our governments naively ignore the next crass play by Beijing, tempting the latter to overplay their hand and blunder into a confrontation as disastrous to all as it should have been easily preventable.