Washington [US], June 26 (ANI): Terming China the greatest threat to the US economy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said it is conducting more than 2,000 active investigations connected to the Chinese Communist Party.
FBI Director Christopher Wray called China the greatest threat to the US economy and its democratic principles, Washington Examiner reported citing Fox News.
“There’s no country that presents a broader, more comprehensive threat to America’s innovation, to our economic security, and to our democratic ideas than China does,” Wray said in an interview that aired Wednesday.
“The FBI has over 2,000 active investigations that trace back to the government in China,” Wray said, noting that they represent “about a 1300% increase in terms of economic espionage investigations with a Chinese nexus from about a decade ago.”
Wray further said that the bureau is opening a new counterintelligence investigation that ties back to China every 10 hours.
The Justice Department has increased its scrutiny of China‘s activities recently, starting the China Initiative in 2018 and prosecuting Chinese nationals in espionage cases, cracking down on hacking schemes, prosecuting efforts to steal trade secrets, and going after the Thousand Talents Program.
Wray said the Chinese government is “pursuing a campaign of intellectual property theft, economic espionage, cyber intrusions that target businesses — big and small — all across the country, and our academic research institutions.”
Wray added that Beijing operates “not just through traditional government officials, which they certainly do, but also through what we sometimes call nontraditional collectors — which can be businessmen, high-level scientists, high-level academics … all of whom are in different ways incentivized to steal American innovation and confidential information and take it back to China.”
In November last year, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Sen. Rob Portman, released a 109-page bipartisan report concluding foreign countries “seek to exploit America’s openness to advance their own national interests” and “the most aggressive of them has been China.”
It found China used its Thousand Talents Program, which seeks to recruit academics to gain access to proprietary information, for the past two decades to exploit access to U.S. research labs and academic institutions.
“This is not about the Chinese people or Chinese Americans,” Wray stressed on Wednesday. “This is about the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.”
Chinese ambassador in US secretly recruited scientists: FBI
Chinese Ambassador in Washington and a Chinese diplomat in New York city secretly aided in the recruitment of scientists in the United States, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
An affidavit, filed in federal court last year and unsealed in April, gives a deeper look into China’s tactics, Washington Examiner reported. US officials have often expressed concern about Beijing’s espionage capabilities.
According to Examiner, the affidavit was first reported by the Daily Beast on Monday and the word ‘China’ is almost entirely redacted from the court filing, though it does appear at least once.
An FBI agent who specializes in counterintelligence wrote in the affidavit that the FBI was investigating a scientist in Connecticut who was “knowingly and willfully working in the United States on behalf of government-controlled and government-directed entities for the purpose of recruiting high-level molecular genetics and stem cell stem cell researchers to work at state-controlled universities and laboratories in [China], and for the purpose of acquiring and transferring to those state-controlled universities and laboratories, cutting-edge molecular genetics and stem-cell research and technology developed at leading academic and private-sector research platforms in the United States.”
The FBI further pointed out that “those efforts are undertaken … with the [Chinese] government’s publicly-declared national security objectives of technology transfer and human capital acquisition.”
The scientist, whose name was redacted in court documents, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in November 2009 and spent years working in genetic research in America, most recently at a redacted school determined to be Yale University, which told the FBI it had no policy requiring researchers or professors to disclose their involvement with outside entities. The school did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
The scientist is now believed to be working at Southern Medical University in China.
The Homeland Security Department determined that between October 2017 and October 2018, the scientist spent 300 days outside the US. The FBI affidavit suggested that the professor was associated with China’s Thousand Talents Program, revealing he was associated with efforts to recruit other scientists to share their research with or to work in China.
The unredacted version of the affidavit does not name Cui Tiankai, who has been ambassador to the US since 2013, or the diplomat in New York City.
The Chinese Embassy denied that its diplomats in the US aided in the recruitment of scientists.
“The allegation is nothing but malicious fabrication,” spokeswoman Fang Hong said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
The Justice Department began the China Initiative in 2018 to combat the espionage threat, and the US has arrested and charged a number of scientists who have participated in the Thousand Talents Program.
At least 54 scientists have lost their jobs over a failure to disclose financial ties to foreign governments, the National Institutes of Health said earlier this month. (ANI)
