Article by Anne-Marie Brady in the Washington Post

The Washington Post, recognizing Anne-Marie Brady’s expertise on the issue of China’s influence operations, asked her to write an article on the Zhenhua data leak that revealed that the Chinese company is collecting millions of records on politically prominent individuals. According to the article, “Last week, a small Chinese company made headlines when independent researchers revealed that it has been collecting information on prominent individuals around the world — 2.4 million of them. American researcher Christopher Balding and his colleague Robert Potter discovered the database and were able to recover 10 percent of it. The database was created by Zhenhua Data Information Technology, a firm based in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.” Professor Brady concludes, “The Zhenhua database was clearly in the early stages of its development — but even so, it demonstrates the scale of Xi Jinping’s aggressive foreign policy. The question now is, how will the world respond?”