Beijing‘s espionage has set off alarm bells in the United States. Longtime U.S. scholars of Chinese Communist Party intelligence have warned governments to be on the lookout for Chinese economic espionage and intellectual property plagiarism, and are concerned that artificial intelligence could enhance Beijing’s hacking.
Matthew Brazil, a scholar at the Jamestown Foundation, noted in a lecture organized by The Institute of World Politics In a lecture given by the Institute of World Politics, Matthew Brazil noted that the characteristics of Chinese Communist espionage are not significantly different from those of other countries, but there is more plagiarism of intellectual property from other countries, and mass surveillance of domestic actors, such as the control of Internet information. The situation has worsened since Chinese President Xi Jinping took office.
“The CCP has not focused more on external threats (from foreign countries) to its borders and national interests, as other countries have done, because it believes that threats from within are greater. More accurately, the CCP and its intelligence community focused more on and maintained the government’s power to rule internally.” Bashi said.
In his speech, Bashi also took a detailed inventory of the history of the CCP’s intelligence activities, saying that any foreigner or foreign institution with access to it can be a target for Beijing’s spies, and that thanks to technology, techniques such as artificial intelligence have made it easier for authorities to carry out surveillance. In recent years, the Chinese government has set up millions of cameras on the streets and relied on face recognition technology, location tracking and other means to try to build a national surveillance system of unprecedented scale.
In contrast to other countries’ intelligence efforts, Bash believes the Chinese Communist Party has a massive record of plagiarism against foreign high-tech technology as well as intellectual property. From government departments to private companies, from national security to economic cases, Beijing’s espionage activities are wide-ranging, he said.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told a congressional hearing last year that China’s intellectual property theft and economic espionage threatens the U.S. economy and national security, and that almost half of the FBI’s counterintelligence cases nationwide are now China-related.
“The FBI has now conducted more than two thousand China-related counterintelligence investigations, which is by far the largest portion of our counterintelligence operations. We open a new China counterintelligence investigation about every ten hours, and the scope and scale of the threat is truly alarming.” Ray said at the hearing.
Bash also cited data from the U.S.-China National Committee on Trade, noting that requests for technology transfers from Chinese partners or sponsors to U.S. companies more than tripled from 2019 to 2020, from 5 percent to 13 percent.
“It may be that because Beijing recognizes that U.S. companies are less scrupulous (in their attitudes) than the U.S. government about the threat of illegal technology transfer and trade secret theft, it is possible that it is ‘getting it done while it’s available’ – after all, the U.S.-China relationship is not going to get better anytime soon. ” He said.
According to Bash, the Chinese Communist Party is turning China into a vast surveillance state, and they are also trying to recruit overseas Chinese on a large scale to engage in covert activities in their countries of residence. Among the methods China uses to steal commercial and industrial secrets, Bash cites hacking, using relatives in China as leverage to convince employees of foreign companies to lie, and launching a talent recruitment program called the “Thousand Talents Program” to attract large numbers of foreign scientists.
“(These CCP economic spies) are like the false slogan, serve the motherland, pick flowers in foreign countries and make honey in China.” He lamented at the end of his speech.
Bash had co-authored in 2019 with Peter Mattis, deputy director of the Office of the Committee on China in Congress and the Administration and a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, “Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer” (Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer,” a book detailing Chinese Communist intelligence activities.
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