During the past five years ending in 2019, 67 percent of the technology leaks seized in South Korea were leaked to China.
As a powerhouse in the electronics industry, South Korea is one of the main target countries for the Chinese Communist Party‘s technology theft, and well-known company Samsung Electronics is defenseless. It is no secret that the Chinese Communist Party has been stealing intellectual property rights for a long Time, and it has been stealing by all kinds of means, and the United States and Taiwan are the targets of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Nikkei News recently cited a report submitted to the National Assembly by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) of South Korea, which said that 67% of the technology leaks seized in South Korea in the past five years up to 2019 were leaked to China, many of them involving semiconductors, displays, shipbuilding and other areas of strength for South Korean companies.
Samsung Electronics is defenseless
Samsung Electronics, South Korea’s largest electronics industry company, has been taking steps to avoid technology leaks to China. For example, Samsung employees must disable the camera and recording function of their smartphones when entering a lab or factory; in one of the labs, the printing paper has a metal foil attached to it to prevent employees from printing confidential information, and employees are forbidden to take information out of the lab without permission, otherwise an alarm will go off when they leave the building.
After the outbreak of the Chinese Communist virus (New Crown Pneumonia), Samsung prohibited employees from taking technical data out of the office, despite the South Korean government’s request that employees work from Home.
However, the Chinese Communist Party also uses other methods to obtain information, such as using former and current employees. Engineers at BOE Technology, the largest display manufacturer on the mainland, revealed that many Samsung engineers jumped ship to BOE between 2015 and 2016, and that there are now about 120 Koreans in BOE’s factories and labs, including more than 50 former Samsung engineers.
Sources from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show that 62 patents were filed by Koreans under SMIC’s name. The U.S. has previously determined that SMIC has a Communist Party military background, and the USPTO estimates that more than 100 Korean semiconductor engineers are employed at SMIC.
A major theft incident occurred at Samsung in 2018. The South Korean Water Source Prosecutor’s Office indicted 11 employees of Samsung supplier Toptec, including the company’s CEO, for allegedly leaking Samsung’s OLED folding technology to the Chinese Communist Party.
The defendants set up a shell company and sold their stolen trade secrets to four Chinese manufacturers. The technologies were the result of a six-year process in which Samsung invested more than $130 million and were designated as core national technologies guaranteed by South Korea’s Industrial Technology Protection Act.
Chinese Communist Party “steals all over the world”
In addition to South Korea, the U.S., Taiwan and other high-tech countries and regions are all targets of the Chinese Communist Party’s technology theft.
A recent Bloomberg investigation reported that China (CCP) has used technology suppliers to steal U.S. intelligence for a long time. The U.S. Department of Defense discovered in 2010 that thousands of its computer servers were sending military network data to China, and the investigation found that malicious code was hidden in the chips of its boot program; Intel found in 2014 that Chinese Hackers used a server to hack the company’s network, and that the server downloaded malicious software from a vendor’s website that provided updates.
The Trump administration issued a chip ban on huawei, a company with a Communist Party military background, for stealing trade secrets and spying on users, and both U.S. companies and foreign companies using U.S. technology equipment are banned from supplying chip products to Huawei starting Sept. 15, 2020.
In addition, the Chinese Communist Party sends foreign students and academics to steal technology. For example, Chen Gang, a prominent MIT nanotechnology expert, was arrested in the U.S. in January this year; four Chinese nationals posing as ordinary graduate students who were actually CCP military officers were arrested in the U.S. in July 2020. The U.S. has revoked the visas of more than 1,000 International Students and researchers with CCP military backgrounds since June 2020.
Australia is also wary of theft by Chinese Communist students. Japan will strictly scrutinize visa applications from foreigners starting this year to prevent cutting-edge technology or information related to national security from being leaked to the CCP through foreign students.
In Taiwan, TSMC, the largest chip foundry, has publicly stated that a former employee stole information and then attempted to bring it to China, such as when it was revealed in 2018 that an engineer illegally copied documents related to TSMC’s 28nm process while working at TSMC in September 2017 and planned to bring them to his post at CR ShangHua Technology in Wuxi after leaving the company in December.
Another mainland company continues to “poach” from TSMC with high salaries, and the Republic of China government announced in August 2020 that it would strictly review Taiwan chip designers who provide technology to the mainland.
Recent Comments