China is regularly accused by the United States and several other nations of state-organized economic espionage and theft of intellectual property, in violation of international trade agreements.
[8]: 108 According to Derek Scissors of the American Enterprise Institute, Chinese firms have been able to spend more on production, undercutting the prices of global competitors, by leapfrogging the often costly research and development phase through intellectual property theft.
[9] According to James Lewis, senior vice president and director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Technology Policy Program, "Chinese policy is to extract technologies from Western companies; use subsidies and non-tariff barriers to competition to build national champions; and then create a protected domestic market for these champions to give them an advantage as they compete globally.
[3] The issue is not limited to the United States, but is also reported in Europe,[13] and according to William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, China directs similar efforts towards other NATO members.
[15] According to Adam Meyers, working for the cyber-security firm CrowdStrike, China's campaign of global cyber-espionage has increasingly targeted big repositories of data, like internet or telecom service providers, making it "more difficult to really pinpoint that they were doing economic espionage".
[14] Co-founder of CrowdStrike, Dmitri Alperovitch, stated in 2018 that China appeared to have ramped up its intellectual property espionage, after a decrease during the end of the Obama administration.
[17] In 2020, FBI director Christopher Wray claimed Chinese economic espionage amounted to one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history.
[13] According to CBS, Chinese state-actor APT 41 has conducted a cyber operation spanning years, stealing intellectual property worth trillions of dollars from about 30 multinational companies.
[14] The attacks were linked to the Winnti group, and is alleged by Cybereason to have seized hundreds of gigabytes of "sensitive documents, blueprints, diagrams, formulas, and manufacturing-related proprietary data".
[30][31][32] In 2019, University of California, Santa Barbara sued Walmart, Amazon, IKEA, Bed Bath & Beyond and Target for selling Chinese-made light-bulbs using illegally acquired patented U.S.
F-Secure security adviser, Tom Gaffney, suggested that the UK-China deal would "just like its US counterpart" not lead to any meaningful change in approach by Beijing because "the government has too much invested in its cyber-attack capability".