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Articles by Peter Mattis
The CCP's Pursuit of Global Power
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has always operated on a global stage and with global ambitions. At the core of Mao Zedong’s dispute with Joseph Stalin in the late 1940s and early 1950s was which nation, China or the Soviet Union, should lead the international communist movement. Mao, after all, did not order the Great Leap Forward and ultimately starved millions of his people so that China could become Asia’s largest steel producer.
When the world's at stake, go beyond the headlines.
On Oct. 1, 2026, Beijing celebrated the 77th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China and the beginning of the end for the U.S. Air University’s China Aerospace Studies Institute. The institute was one of several centers of excellence established across the U.S. military’s professional military education programs, with the Army, Navy, and Air Force each running a center focused on its own service’s needs.
Protecting Cockroach Labs' Source Code in the Age of AI
Cockroach Labs exists to solve some of the hardest problems in data infrastructure. Our customers rely on us to deliver a database that survives outages, scales globally, and evolves fast enough to meet requirements that change in unpredictable ways. That mission drives every decision we make, including how we manage and distribute our source code. From the beginning, CockroachDB was released as an open-source project.
How to Counter China’s Data Collecting
The Hisense booth at the CES show held in Las Vegas, 2015. Credit: kobbydagan via Depositphotos Nearly 20 years ago, I participated in the governmental debates about Huawei and whether or not the Chinese multinational should be allowed to purchase a telecommunications company that also contracted with the U.S. government. Much of the debate focused on whether there was a smoking gun that connected Huawei to espionage, technology transfers, or other malfeasance. For many, no smoking gun; no problem.
Power, Paranoia, and the People’s Liberation Army
China’s top military leadership has been shaken by a new round of purges at the highest level, raising urgent questions about loyalty, corruption, and combat readiness. What do these removals, and especially the purge of Zhang Youxia, signal about Xi Jinping’s grip on power, the health of the People’s Liberation Army, and Beijing’s appetite for risk abroad?
‘Mainlander’ Narratives Dominate Kuomintang Leadership Race
Executive Summary: Leading candidates in the KMT party chair elections strongly self-identify as Chinese and are advocating to resolve cross-Strait tensions with a dialogue approach rooted in the 1992 Consensus. Notably lacking amongst the leading candidates is someone who represents the “Taiwanese” faction of the KMT, and the three leading candidates—Cheng Li-wun, Hau Lung-pin, and Lo Chih-chiang—all carry benign views of the PRC.
Taiwan needs real-time awareness
By Peter Mattis The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants.
Divergent Implications for Xi’s Power From New Party Regulations
Executive Summary: Speculation is growing about a power struggle at the top of the Party. An announcement of new regulations for influential decision-making and coordinating bodies is a clear sign of change in how the leadership makes policy. Its implications for Xi Jinping’s power remain unclear. One interpretation sees the regulations as evidence of Xi enhancing his vertical control over the system, while another reading sees him being constrained by the rest of the leadership.
Victory Parade Marks Steady March of China-Russia Relations
Executive Summary: Russian President Vladimir Putin and People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping showcased deepened political and military ties during Russia’s May 9 Victory Day celebrations, affirming a shared global vision through strategic declarations on stability and international law.
PRC Malign influence at Home and Abroad-Peter Mattis's Testimony Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
The following is a lightly edited version of testimony delivered by Jamestown President Peter Mattis. The testimony was delivered before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a hearing held on January 30, 2025, on the topic “The Malign Influence of The People’s Republic of China at Home and Abroad: Recommendations for Policy Makers” (SFRC, January 30).
Rules for Thee, but Not for Me
Executive Summary: Beijing’s diplomatic rhetoric advocates upholding international rules and norms, but this diverges sharply from both its words to party officials at home and its actions abroad that undermine and violate international laws and institutions. Beijing benefits from an international order in which other powers are restrained by rules that it claims are biased and so chooses not to follow.
Open Source and Our Crises of National Understanding
The challenges that face the United States and allies require greater understanding on the parts of both government and society. Democratic governance means shared responsibilities. Citizens are not subjects. Open source is the only way to share information and develop a common understanding between our national security communities and everyone else.
Q&A: What was the Relationship Between the United Front System and the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office?
Editor’s Note: Q&A articles are short responses to research queries that we have received from external readers, including government officials and journalists, and that we believe are useful to a wider audience. The Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO) merged with the United Front Work Department (UFWD) across all levels in 2017. Some people who engaged with OCAO prior to the merger defend their engagement on the grounds that OCAO was not conducting united front work.
NATO Summit’s Cautionary Tale for U.S. Allies in Asia
NATO’s Washington Summit should be read in Asia as a cautionary tale about the difficulty of meeting geopolitical challenges posed by the PRC and the wider chaos caused by its collaborators Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Now is the time to prepare. Picture source: NATO, July 11, 2024, NATO, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_227482.htm.
Introducing Jamestown Perspectives
At The Jamestown Foundation, we focus most of our efforts on understanding the world from the Bering Strait and the South China Sea to the Baltic and Mediterranean seas. The strength of our work comes from our analysts who reside in more than 30 countries and have direct, first-hand experience with the countries and developments they analyze. Too often, however, the presentation of analysis follows the pursuit of objectivity in sanitizing the writing and removing the analyst’s experience.
Red Genes: Assessing WuXi AppTec's Ties to the Party-Army-State
Jamestown Senior Fellow Olevs Nikers Interviewed by TVP World on State of Russian-Finnish Border Jamestown Foundation Senior Fellow Olevs Nikers was interviewed by TVP World regarding the current state of affairs along Finland’s border with Russia.
11/23/23 National Security News and Commentary
Quotes of the Day: “We must find the time to stop and thank the people who make a difference in our lives.” - John F. Kennedy "What I love about Thanksgiving is that it's purely about getting together with friends or family and enjoying food. It's really for everybody, and it doesn't matter where you're from." - Daniel Humm “Thanksgiving Day is a jewel, to set in the hearts of honest men; but be careful that you do not take the day, and leave out the gratitude.” - E.P. Powell 1.
“Changes Unseen in a Century”: Seeking American Partnership in US Decline
In his opening remarks this week to US President Joe Biden, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping said “The China-US relationship, which is the most important bilateral relationship in the world, should be perceived and envisioned in a broad context of the accelerating global transformations unseen in a century” (Youtube.com, November 15).
The Cross-Strait Intelligence Contest Continues Without Quarter
Last week, the Taiwan High Court found retired air force Colonel Liu Sheng-shu (劉聖恕) and five serving military officers guilty of espionage for China. The court sentenced Colonel Liu and two of his co-conspirators to approximately 20 years in prison, marking some of the harshest sentencing for espionage in recent years (Taipei Times, October 26). Liu’s spy ring is one of at least 11 rings Taiwanese authorities have broken up over the last two years.
Videos & Webinars
Introduce CockroachDB to your team or meetup! Request a deep-dive into CockroachDB’s architecture and capabilities presented by a CockroachDB engineer. Tech talks can be in-person or virtual, depending on availability and location.
Why we're switching to calendar versioning
One small step for Cockroach Labs, one giant leap for our release numbering. Since our initial launch, Cockroach Labs has used semantic versioning in our release cycle guidelines. Two years, one major release, and n-patch fixes later, we're making the switch to Calendar Versioning. This means subscribers to our release notes will see quite the jump in today's version numbering, from last week's 2.1.5 to today's 19.1 beta. Why the switch?
SQL in CockroachDB: Mapping table data to key-value storage
<!–– Outdated blog post alert! CockroachDB no longer stores each non-primary-key column in a separate value by default. By default, all data in a table is stored in the same column family. Gory details available here. ––!> SQL? I thought CockroachDB was a key-value store?!? In the past we described CockroachDB as a distributed, transactionally consistent, key-value store.
Adventures in performance debugging
As we’ve built CockroachDB, correctness has been our primary concern. But as we’ve drawn closer to our beta launch, we’ve had to start paying significantly more attention to performance. The design of CockroachDB always kept performance and scalability in mind, but when you start measuring performance, there are inevitably surprises. This is the story of the detection, investigation, and fix of just one performance bug. First, a little context about CockroachDB for those new to the project.
Yugabyte vs. CockroachDB: Unpacking competitive benchmark claims
Competition is good. It focuses your energies. It keeps you sharp and pushes you to be better. At Cockroach Labs we welcome competition. It hasn’t escaped our notice that a new entrant in the database landscape is frequently comparing themselves against us, making claims about their performance and functionality vis-a-vis our own. We decided to take a closer look. This is our analysis of CockroachDB vs Yugabyte v2.0.0. All benchmark comparisons were done with CockroachDB v19.2.0. TLDR: CockroachDB vs.
Why database outages still happen: the limits of High Availability
[ Guides ] O'Reilly Definitive Guide to CockroachDB We wrote the book on building unkillable apps. Literally. Get Free Copy Disasters happen. (Most) outages shouldn’t. When multi-billion dollar companies like Zoom, Slack, and Fanduel experience outages, the reaction from users tends to be anger and surprise. Anger, because people need to get their work done and set their fantasy football lineups. Surprise, because it’s 2022. Isn’t high availability the norm? Not all outages are created equal.
How to Spy on China
Over the past few months, as competition with China has intensified, the Biden administration has struggled to provide the United States and its allies with a clear picture of Beijing’s intentions. In mid-February, for example, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that China could soon begin providing Russia with lethal aid for its war in Ukraine—a step that would dramatically change the dynamic of the conflict.
How to Spy on China
Sign in and save to read later Print this article Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Get a link Page url Request Reprint Permissions Over the past few months, as competition with China has intensified, the Biden administration has struggled to provide the United States and its allies with a clear picture of Beijing’s intentions.
1/21/23 National Security News and Commentary
Quotes of the Day: 1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JANUARY 20, 2023 2. U.S. to brand Russia’s Wagner Group a ‘transnational criminal’ entity 3. Russia's Wagner Chief Writes to White House Over New U.S. Sanctions 4. Facebook staffed with multiple fmr. CIA employees: Report 5. China Issues Veiled Warning to US Over Taiwan 6. 10 Reasons Xi Won’t Attack Taiwan Anytime Soon 7. America in Decline? World Thinks Again. 8. Macron boosts French military spending by over a third to 'transform' army 9.
We need an open source intelligence center
In April 2018, Dutch authorities caught four Russian intelligence officers red-handed as they attempted to hack into the network of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) from the hotel across the street. The OPCW was investigating the substances used in the poisoning of a Russian defector living in the United Kingdom, and a chemical attack by Assad-backed forces in Douma, Syria.
Troubled Waters Around Taiwan
August 17, 2022 Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit was met with fury and condemnation in Beijing, as well as new Chinese military exercises in the seas surrounding Taiwan. In the aftermath of the visit, Ryan invited three experts to talk about relations between the United States, Taiwan, and China.
Chinese Communist Espionage
Peter Mattis Peter Mattis is a research fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and a contributing editor at War on the Rocks. He previously was a fellow at The Jamestown Foundation and edited its biweekly China Brief from 2011 to 2013. He also worked as a counterintelligence analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence Explore Foreign Affairs’ coverage of artificial intelligence, including its impact on science technology, its military and civilian uses, how AI is fueling a new age of disinformation and propaganda, and why it poses a threat to democracies and autocracies alike.
A Thorough Explanation of China's Long-Term Strategy
What are the Chinese Communist Party’s intentions? Does it seek to turn China into the hegemon of Asia and a global superpower? Or does it just aim to stay in power by whatever means necessary? Unfortunately, U.S. policymakers and analysts haven’t come to an agreement on how to answer these questions. That’s a problem, because China’s intentions ought to shape how the United States develops its strategy toward the Indo-Pacific. Read Full Article »
A Thorough Explanation of China’s Long-Term Strategy
Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order (Oxford University Press, 2021) If one day China should change her color and turn into a superpower, if she too should play the tyrant in the world, and everywhere subject others to her bullying, aggression and exploitation the people of the world should identify it as social-imperialism, expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow China.
Yes, the atrocities in Xinjiang constitute a genocide
On his way out of office on Jan.
China's Xinjiang Atrocities Meet the Criteria for Genocide
On his way out of office on Jan.
Active Measures
This revelatory and dramatic history of disinformation traces the rise of secret organized deception operations from the interwar period to contemporary internet troll farms We live in the age of disinformation - of organized deception. Spy agencies pour vast resources into hacking, leaking, and forging data, often with the goal of weakening the very foundation of liberal democracy: trust in facts.
Introducing Pebble: A RocksDB Inspired Key-Value Store Written in Go
Get blog posts to your inbox. Since its inception, CockroachDB has relied on RocksDB as its key-value storage engine. The choice of RocksDB has served us well. RocksDB is battle tested, highly performant, and comes with a rich feature set. We’re big fans of RocksDB and we frequently sing its praises when asked why we didn’t choose another storage engine. Today we’re introducing Pebble: a RocksDB inspired and RocksDB compatible key-value store focused on the needs of CockroachDB.
I’m taking this seriously because this argument is being used inside and outside gov’t., so this is going to be a thread. I care less about…
I’m taking this seriously because this argument is being used inside and outside gov’t., so this is going to be a thread. I care less about what direction policy goes (OK, I have preferences) than I care that the US approach is based in reality. 1/30 https://twitter.com/shifrinson/status/1259109990406795264 If you want to argue party congress & plenary documents, certain kinds of speeches & essays are cheap speech, then you must make the argument.
China’s International Right to Speak
As Beijing’s reach continues to expand, Chinese analysts are increasingly troubled by the country’s weak ability to influence how international issues, especially the rise of China, are framed and evaluated—called the “right to speak” or “discourse power” (huayuquan).
So You Want to Be a PLA Expert?
Editor’s Note: This week, War on the Rocks is featuring some old favorites from the archives. This article was originally published in 2015. When the U.S. Department of Defense announced it was considering more aggressive proposals to test freedom of navigation around China’s island reclamation projects, a flurry of articles asked what Beijing would do in response. Part of the answer surely has to do with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
How Retailers Can Become Resilient To Costly Outages
Menu Friday, 15 November 2019 09:21 Written by Peter Mattis, Cockroach Labs Published in Executive ViewPoints Earlier this year, Target had a major database outage as a result of an error made during regular retail information system (RIS) maintenance. During the outage, Target was unable to process consumer credit card transactions for over an hour, resulting in a frustrating experience for shoppers. In 2019, when high availability is the norm, why do retailers still experience outages?
So You Want to Be a PLA Expert?
When the U.S. Department of Defense announced it was considering more aggressive proposals to test freedom of navigation around China’s island reclamation projects, a flurry of articles asked what Beijing would do in response. Part of the answer surely has to do with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
CockroachDB: Architecture of a Geo-Distributed SQL Database
Transcript Mattis: Today I'm going to walk you through some of the high-level components of the CockroachDB architecture, and at times diving down into some of the details. I first want to give you the elevator pitch for CockroachDB: Make Data Easy. This is actually the mission statement at Cockroach Labs. Our thesis at Cockroach Labs was that too much of a burden has been placed on application developers.
Panel: The Promises and Perils of Eschewing Distributed Coordination
Transcript Sridharan: My name is Cindy, and I'm going to be moderating this panel. What was it even called? "The Promises and Perils of Eschewing Distributed Coordination." The Difference between Paxos and Raft Let's start with Paxos, because someone was just talking about Paxos in this previous talk. When you think of distributed consensus, you think of Paxos. At least maybe a decade ago, the reason people used to try to avoid it or not do it was because Paxos was so hard to implement.
America Can’t Beat Beijing’s Tech Theft with Racial Profiling
The U.S. government has begun a long-overdue effort to halt China’s systematic theft of intellectual property and exploitation of Western scientific institutions, meant to support and sustain, among other things, Beijing’s drive to build a “world class” military. The most high-profile part of this effort is a joint initiative by the FBI and the National Institutes of Health to ensure that recipients of federal research grants are properly abiding by requirements that they report foreign ties.
The Third Magic Weapon: Reforming China’s United Front
Last week in Xiamen, Chinese Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Yang presided over a routine conference on cross-strait relations and the relationship with the Taiwanese people. Wang observed that the current trends supported national reunification and national rejuvenation.
Why We're Relicensing CockroachDB
Get blog posts to your inbox. CockroachDB was conceived of as open source software. In the years since it first appeared on GitHub, we’ve tread a relatively typical path in balancing open source with creating a viable business. We’ve kept our core code under the Apache License version 2 (APL), launched a managed service, and gated some features for established companies under an enterprise license.
Jaw-Jaw: Peter Mattis on the Intentions of the Chinese Communist Party
What threat does a revisionist China pose to the United States and democratically minded states around the world? Where should we look to find out the intentions of the Chinese Communist Party? If left unchecked, will China export its illiberal form of government? These and other questions are explored in this week’s episode of Jaw-Jaw. Biographies Peter Mattis is a Research Fellow in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and a contributing editor at War on the Rocks.
Germany’s Self-Delusion About a ‘No-Spying’ Pact with China
Can Angela Merkel persuade China not to spy on Germany? German magazine Wirtschaft Woche is reporting that she is trying to do just that. The report seems credible, given the remarks of other senior German officials, and knowledgeable Germans appear to be taking the report seriously as it has spread over the wires. While visiting Japan last month, the chancellor said she would seek a “solid guarantee” from Beijing and Huawei about the integrity of data on German networks.
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