Chinese espionage in the United States
[3] Chinese government agencies and affiliated personnel have been accused of using a number of methods to obtain U.S. technology (using U.S. law to avoid prosecution), including espionage, exploitation of commercial entities, and a network of scientific, academic and business contacts.
[4] Prominent espionage cases include Larry Wu-tai Chin, Katrina Leung, Gwo-Bao Min, Chi Mak, Peter Lee, and Shujun Wang.
"[22] For example, Eric Swalwell, who serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,[23] was in the past targeted by a Chinese woman believed to be a clandestine officer of China's Ministry of State Security.
[28] In October 2020 FBI Director Christopher Wray said that "when it couldn’t locate a Fox Hunt target, the Chinese government sent an emissary to visit the victim’s family here in the United States.
"[29][30] In July 2021, ProPublica reported that Operation Fox Hunt, nominally focused on economic crimes, was targeting "Tibetans, Hong Kongers, followers of the Falun Gong religious movement and, perhaps most visibly, the Uyghurs".
ProPublica reported that a team of Communist Party operatives and police based in Wuhan had been roaming the United States pressuring Chinese immigrant communities, with the spies performing stalking in plain sight and hiring a US-based private investigator.
U.S. government personnel suspect that China's intelligence-gathering efforts directed towards the development of modern nuclear weapons are focused on the Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.
Both CGN and one of the corporation’s senior advisers, Szuhsiung Ho, have been charged with conspiring to help the Chinese government develop nuclear material in a manner that is in clear breach of US law.
"[37] China conducts political and corporate espionage to access the networks of financial, defense and technology companies and research institutions in the United States.
The remotely controlled program allows an attacker to access the recipient's email, send sensitive documents to specific addresses and turns on such instruments as web cameras or microphones.
[38] In January 2013, The New York Times reported that it was the victim of hacking attempts originating from China during the previous four months after it published an article on Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.
[38] On August 6, 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump officially extended restrictions against Chinese-owned apps by signing two executive orders that would ban U.S. residents from doing business with TikTok and WeChat, a popular messaging platform run by Tencent Holdings Ltd.
[54][55] In a July 2021 joint statement with NATO, the EU, and other Western nations, the US accused the Ministry of State Security of perpetrating several cyberattacks, most notably the 2021 Microsoft Exchange Server data breach.
[65] The People's Liberation Army (PLA) was tied to economic espionage involving stolen business plans, intellectual property, and infringed on private conversations from Westinghouse Electric and United States Steel Corporation.
[67] The protection of the South China Sea is highly important to the U.S. because a Chinese Cyber Unit has already succeeded in an intrusion into the Philippine's government and military networks.
[68] In January and February 2018, Chinese state cyber actors reportedly stole 614 gigabytes of data from a Naval Undersea Warfare Center-affiliated contractor.
[69] The compromised material reportedly included information on a project dubbed "Sea Dragon", as well as United States Navy submarine cryptographic systems and electronic warfare.
[70][71] According to the cybersecurity firm Area 1, hackers working for the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force compromised the networks of the AFL–CIO in order to gain information on negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
[74] In October 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek published a story which alleged that Supermicro's contractors in China had been compromised by the People's Liberation Army in an operation to implant microchips with hardware backdoors in its servers.
[75][76] In March 2019, iDefense reported that Chinese hackers had launched cyberattacks on dozens of academic institutions in an attempt to gain information on technology being developed for the United States Navy.
[77] On May 19, 2014, the United States Department of Justice announced that a federal grand jury had indicted five People's Liberation Army officers for stealing confidential business information and intellectual property from U.S. commercial firms and planting malware on their computers.
[1][2] In July 2020, the United States Department of Justice charged two Chinese hackers who allegedly targeted intellectual property and confidential business information, including COVID-19 research.
According to a report from cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike and a US Justice Department indictment, from 2010 to 2015 the Chinese cyberthreat actor Turbine Panda, linked to the Ministry of State Security’s Jiangsu Bureau, penetrated a number of the C919's foreign components manufacturers including Ametek, Capstone Turbine, GE Aviation, Honeywell, Safran, and others and stole intellectual property and industrial processes data with the aim of transitioning component manufacturing to Chinese companies.
The suspected intelligence operative, known as Christine Fang, developed extensive ties with politicians at local and national levels between 2011 and 2015, including U.S. representative for California's 15th congressional district Eric Swalwell.
[89] During its period of martial law on Taiwan (1949–1987) the Kuomintang (KMT) government of the Republic of China surveilled Taiwanese abroad, most often in Japan and in the United States.
[90]: 5 Student informants to the KMT were part of a surveillance infrastructure called the as the caihong (rainbow) project, named as a play-on-words related to stamping out Red communist bandits.
