The FBI is blown away as the Chinese government continues to spy on the U.S. in efforts to steal the country’s technology.
In an interview with the FBI Director Christopher Wray, he revealed that the FBI will be launching an average of two counterintelligence investigations a day to counter the onslaught.
“There is no country that presents a broader, more severe threat to our innovation, our ideas and our economic security than China does,” he said.
According to him, the Chinese government’s efforts to steal US technology shocked him when he became the director of the FBI in 2017.
“This one blew me away. And I’m not the kind of guy that uses words like ‘blown away’ easily,” Wray said.
During a speech at the Reagan Library in California on Monday, Wray warned the public that China’s economic espionage has already reached its new level that is “more brazen, more damaging than ever before.”
Moreover, following the incident last November where Xu Yanjun, a Chinese intelligence officer, was reportedly convicted after he tried to steal closely guarded technology developed by GE aviation for making jet engine fan blades from composite materials, the FBI accused Chinese spies of targeting US innovations including computer chips, nuclear power plants, wind turbines, smartphones and even covid vaccines.
According to the investigators, Yanjun helped “hackers in China get access to company computers and tried to persuade a GE engineer to travel to China.”
“The scale of their hacking program, and the amount of personal and corporate data that their hackers have stolen, is greater than every other country combined,” Wray said in the interview.
However, the Chinese government continued to insist that their government is not stealing U.S. business secrets.
Despite China’s denial, Wray continued to accuse its government of using pressure tactics to stop criticism from dissidents and members of the immigrant community in the United States.
“China may be the first country to combine that kind of authoritarian ambition with cutting-edge technical capability. It’s like the surveillance nightmare of East Germany combined with the tech of Silicon Valley,” Wray stated.
He also made it clear that it’s not the Chinese people that is the problem but the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.
“I’m referring not to the Chinese people, not to people of Chinese descent or heritage. What we’re talking about here is the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.” Wray added.
“We don’t investigate based on race, or ethnicity, or constitutionally protected activity. In fact, in many cases, Chinese Americans are some of the people most victimized by the Chinese government’s tactics that we’re describing.” he continued.
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