3. ‘Unrestricted Warfare’ With Chinese Communist Characteristics
c. Unrestricted Economic Warfare Is the CCP’s Heavy Weaponry(2)
Many startups in Silicon Valley need capital. China uses taxpayer money to invest in them in order to get its hands on new technologies, including rocket engines, sensors for autonomous navy ships, and 3D printers that manufacture flexible screens that could be used in fighter-plane cockpits.[42] Ken Wilcox, chairman emeritus of Silicon Valley Bank, said in 2017 that within a six-month period, he was approached by three different Chinese state-owned enterprises about acting as their agent to buy technology on their behalf. Though he declined, he said: “In all three cases, they said they had a mandate from Beijing, and they had no idea what they wanted to buy. It was just any and all tech.”[43]
In November 2018, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) published the findings of a Section 301 investigation. The report says that Danhua Capital (currently Digital Horizon Capital) uses China’s venture capital to help the Chinese government gain top technologies and intellectual property in the United States.[44]
The above report by the U.S. government is open for the public to see. The killer weapon that China uses to realize its technological leap forward is the blatant theft of Western technology. China’s aptitude for industrial espionage far exceeds the scope of commercial spies in the past. In order to steal technology and secrets from the West, the regime mobilizes all available personnel and tactics — including espionage, hackers, international students, visiting scholars, Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants working in Western companies, and Westerners lured by monetary interests..
The CCP has always coveted the US F-35 stealth fighter jet. A Canadian permanent citizen, Su Bin from China, was sentenced to five years in prison for stealing F-35 secrets in 2016. Su worked with two hackers from the Chinese military, penetrating the computer systems of Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer, and exfiltrating secrets. The group also stole secrets related to the F-22 stealth fighter. Investigation found that Su’s group had also stolen secrets about Boeing’s C-17 strategic transport aircraft, and 630,000 files from Boeing’s system, totalling some 65 gigabytes of data.[45] The PLA’s own J-20 stealth fighter exhibited in recent years is now very similar to the American F-22, and the smaller Chinese FC-31 is an imitation of Lockheed’s F-35.
Dr. David Smith, a Duke University metamaterials expert, invented a kind of invisibility cloak, an important material for stealth fighters, and the U.S. military invested millions in support of his research. In 2006, Chinese student Liu Ruopeng came to Smith’s lab. In the view of an FBI counterintelligence official, Liu had a specific mission — to obtain the secrets. In 2007, Liu took two former colleagues traveling at Chinese government expense to Smith’s lab, and worked on the invisibility cloak for a period of time. To Smith’s surprise, the same laboratory was later duplicated in China.[46]
On December 20, 2018, the Department of Justice sued two Chinese citizens from the Chinese hacker organization APT 10, which has close ties with the CCP. According to the indictment, from 2006 to 2018, APT 10 carried out extensive hacking attacks, stealing massive amounts of information from more than forty-five organizations, including NASA and the Department of Energy. The information stolen involves medicines, biotechnology, finance, manufacturing, petroleum, and natural gas. The then-FBI Director Christopher Wray remarked: “China’s goal, simply put, is to replace the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower, and they’re using illegal methods to get there. They’re using an expanding set of non-traditional and illegal methods.”[47]
China’s theft of technology and patents is hard to combat and prevent. Kathleen Puckett, a former U.S. counterintelligence officer in San Francisco, said that China puts all its efforts into espionage and gets everything for free.[48]
China moralized, rationalized, normalized, and militarized its stealing spree. It launched a “war against everyone” to loot advanced technology from the West, using patriotism, racial sentiments, money, and prestige. Such appalling conduct is unprecedented historically.
Some have defended China’s activities by arguing that the theft can’t amount to all that much, since by stealing a bit here and there, Chinese firms don’t get the full picture of how technology is deployed and scaled. But it’s very dangerous to look at Chinese industrial espionage this way. Espionage in the electronic age is completely different from that in decades past, in which spies would take a few photos. China steals entire databases of technologies, and in many cases, scoops up not only the technology, but also the experts. With the power of the world factory that China has developed for decades and the R&D potential it has accumulated, the regime is truly able and willing to build a manufacturing superpower based on theft — and it is on course to do so.
The Thousand Talents Program: Espionage and Talent Attraction
From when China opened up in the 1970s until now, millions of Chinese students have studied overseas and have achieved great things. China seeks to recruit and use these talented individuals, invested in and trained by the West, to directly bring back to China the technology and economic information they’ve acquired. This aids the CCP’s ambitions in gaining global supremacy. Since 2008, multiple departments in China have initiated the Thousand Talents Program. On the surface, it’s about recruiting top Chinese talent overseas to return to China for full- or short-term positions. But the real goal behind the program is for state industry to get its hands on new technology and intellectual property from the West.
The FBI released a declassified document about these Chinese talent programs in September 2015. It concludes that recruiting target individuals can allow China to profit in three ways: gaining access to research and expertise in cutting-edge technology, benefiting from years of scientific research conducted in the United States and supported by U.S. government grants and private funding, and severely impacting the U.S. economy.[49]
The National Institute of Health released a report on the Chinese talent programs on December 13, 2018, noting that foreign nationals transferred U.S. intellectual property to their native countries while on the U.S. government payroll. Their actions have unfairly impacted all
U.S. academic institutions.[50] M. Roy Wilson, one of the authors of the report and co-chair of the NIH Advisory Committee, said that a key qualification of becoming part of the Thousand Talents Program is having access to valuable intellectual property. He said that the problem was significant, not random, and that the severity of the intellectual property losses was impossible to ignore.[51]
Peter Harrell, adjunct senior fellow in the energy, economics, and security program at the Center for a New American Security, said: “China is pursuing a whole-of-society approach to its technological capabilities. That includes purchasing innovative companies through overseas investments, requiring Western companies to transfer cutting-edge technologies to China as a condition of market access, providing vast state resources to finance domestic technological development, financing training for top Chinese students and researchers overseas, and paying a hefty premium to attract talent back to China.”[52]
The Thousand Talents Program includes as its targets almost all Chinese students who have come to the United States since the 1980s and who find themselves with access to useful information for the regime’s industrial, technological, and economic development — potentially tens of thousands of individuals. The CCP is mobilizing the capacity of the entire country and population to conduct unrestricted warfare in its recruitment of talent and intellectual properties.
A Sinister, Total National System
In addition to outright stealing, China’s state support and subsidies are also an important means for the CCP to accomplish its ambitions. State support means that the regime can use huge sums of money to support key industries. Effectively, this is about using China’s national power to exert pressure on private businesses in the West. This poses an enormous, unique challenge to countries where leaders are democratically elected and leave business decisions to businesses themselves. It can be said that Western companies have lost before the game has even begun. China’s subsidies — ultimately taken out of the pocket of the unconsenting taxpayer — mean that Chinese manufacturers can ignore the real costs, making them unstoppable predators in international markets.
The solar cell industry is a classic example of the Chinese regime’s subsidies. Ten years ago, there were no Chinese companies among the top ten solar-cell manufacturers, but now there are six from China, including the top two. The green energy industry was heavily promoted during President Obama’s first term, but before long, dozens of solar-panel makers were filing for bankruptcy or had to cut back their businesses in the face of unrelenting competition from China, which undermined the enthusiasm for clean energy at the time.[53] The damage was caused by China’s dumping products on the world market, which was enabled by the regime’s subsidies for its domestic solar industry.
c. Unrestricted Economic Warfare Is the CCP’s Heavy Weaponry(2)
Many startups in Silicon Valley need capital. China uses taxpayer money to invest in them in order to get its hands on new technologies, including rocket engines, sensors for autonomous navy ships, and 3D printers that manufacture flexible screens that could be used in fighter-plane cockpits.[42] Ken Wilcox, chairman emeritus of Silicon Valley Bank, said in 2017 that within a six-month period, he was approached by three different Chinese state-owned enterprises about acting as their agent to buy technology on their behalf. Though he declined, he said: “In all three cases, they said they had a mandate from Beijing, and they had no idea what they wanted to buy. It was just any and all tech.”[43]
In November 2018, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) published the findings of a Section 301 investigation. The report says that Danhua Capital (currently Digital Horizon Capital) uses China’s venture capital to help the Chinese government gain top technologies and intellectual property in the United States.[44]
The above report by the U.S. government is open for the public to see. The killer weapon that China uses to realize its technological leap forward is the blatant theft of Western technology. China’s aptitude for industrial espionage far exceeds the scope of commercial spies in the past. In order to steal technology and secrets from the West, the regime mobilizes all available personnel and tactics — including espionage, hackers, international students, visiting scholars, Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants working in Western companies, and Westerners lured by monetary interests..
The CCP has always coveted the US F-35 stealth fighter jet. A Canadian permanent citizen, Su Bin from China, was sentenced to five years in prison for stealing F-35 secrets in 2016. Su worked with two hackers from the Chinese military, penetrating the computer systems of Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer, and exfiltrating secrets. The group also stole secrets related to the F-22 stealth fighter. Investigation found that Su’s group had also stolen secrets about Boeing’s C-17 strategic transport aircraft, and 630,000 files from Boeing’s system, totalling some 65 gigabytes of data.[45] The PLA’s own J-20 stealth fighter exhibited in recent years is now very similar to the American F-22, and the smaller Chinese FC-31 is an imitation of Lockheed’s F-35.
Dr. David Smith, a Duke University metamaterials expert, invented a kind of invisibility cloak, an important material for stealth fighters, and the U.S. military invested millions in support of his research. In 2006, Chinese student Liu Ruopeng came to Smith’s lab. In the view of an FBI counterintelligence official, Liu had a specific mission — to obtain the secrets. In 2007, Liu took two former colleagues traveling at Chinese government expense to Smith’s lab, and worked on the invisibility cloak for a period of time. To Smith’s surprise, the same laboratory was later duplicated in China.[46]
On December 20, 2018, the Department of Justice sued two Chinese citizens from the Chinese hacker organization APT 10, which has close ties with the CCP. According to the indictment, from 2006 to 2018, APT 10 carried out extensive hacking attacks, stealing massive amounts of information from more than forty-five organizations, including NASA and the Department of Energy. The information stolen involves medicines, biotechnology, finance, manufacturing, petroleum, and natural gas. The then-FBI Director Christopher Wray remarked: “China’s goal, simply put, is to replace the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower, and they’re using illegal methods to get there. They’re using an expanding set of non-traditional and illegal methods.”[47]
China’s theft of technology and patents is hard to combat and prevent. Kathleen Puckett, a former U.S. counterintelligence officer in San Francisco, said that China puts all its efforts into espionage and gets everything for free.[48]
China moralized, rationalized, normalized, and militarized its stealing spree. It launched a “war against everyone” to loot advanced technology from the West, using patriotism, racial sentiments, money, and prestige. Such appalling conduct is unprecedented historically.
Some have defended China’s activities by arguing that the theft can’t amount to all that much, since by stealing a bit here and there, Chinese firms don’t get the full picture of how technology is deployed and scaled. But it’s very dangerous to look at Chinese industrial espionage this way. Espionage in the electronic age is completely different from that in decades past, in which spies would take a few photos. China steals entire databases of technologies, and in many cases, scoops up not only the technology, but also the experts. With the power of the world factory that China has developed for decades and the R&D potential it has accumulated, the regime is truly able and willing to build a manufacturing superpower based on theft — and it is on course to do so.
The Thousand Talents Program: Espionage and Talent Attraction
From when China opened up in the 1970s until now, millions of Chinese students have studied overseas and have achieved great things. China seeks to recruit and use these talented individuals, invested in and trained by the West, to directly bring back to China the technology and economic information they’ve acquired. This aids the CCP’s ambitions in gaining global supremacy. Since 2008, multiple departments in China have initiated the Thousand Talents Program. On the surface, it’s about recruiting top Chinese talent overseas to return to China for full- or short-term positions. But the real goal behind the program is for state industry to get its hands on new technology and intellectual property from the West.
The FBI released a declassified document about these Chinese talent programs in September 2015. It concludes that recruiting target individuals can allow China to profit in three ways: gaining access to research and expertise in cutting-edge technology, benefiting from years of scientific research conducted in the United States and supported by U.S. government grants and private funding, and severely impacting the U.S. economy.[49]
The National Institute of Health released a report on the Chinese talent programs on December 13, 2018, noting that foreign nationals transferred U.S. intellectual property to their native countries while on the U.S. government payroll. Their actions have unfairly impacted all
U.S. academic institutions.[50] M. Roy Wilson, one of the authors of the report and co-chair of the NIH Advisory Committee, said that a key qualification of becoming part of the Thousand Talents Program is having access to valuable intellectual property. He said that the problem was significant, not random, and that the severity of the intellectual property losses was impossible to ignore.[51]
Peter Harrell, adjunct senior fellow in the energy, economics, and security program at the Center for a New American Security, said: “China is pursuing a whole-of-society approach to its technological capabilities. That includes purchasing innovative companies through overseas investments, requiring Western companies to transfer cutting-edge technologies to China as a condition of market access, providing vast state resources to finance domestic technological development, financing training for top Chinese students and researchers overseas, and paying a hefty premium to attract talent back to China.”[52]
The Thousand Talents Program includes as its targets almost all Chinese students who have come to the United States since the 1980s and who find themselves with access to useful information for the regime’s industrial, technological, and economic development — potentially tens of thousands of individuals. The CCP is mobilizing the capacity of the entire country and population to conduct unrestricted warfare in its recruitment of talent and intellectual properties.
A Sinister, Total National System
In addition to outright stealing, China’s state support and subsidies are also an important means for the CCP to accomplish its ambitions. State support means that the regime can use huge sums of money to support key industries. Effectively, this is about using China’s national power to exert pressure on private businesses in the West. This poses an enormous, unique challenge to countries where leaders are democratically elected and leave business decisions to businesses themselves. It can be said that Western companies have lost before the game has even begun. China’s subsidies — ultimately taken out of the pocket of the unconsenting taxpayer — mean that Chinese manufacturers can ignore the real costs, making them unstoppable predators in international markets.
The solar cell industry is a classic example of the Chinese regime’s subsidies. Ten years ago, there were no Chinese companies among the top ten solar-cell manufacturers, but now there are six from China, including the top two. The green energy industry was heavily promoted during President Obama’s first term, but before long, dozens of solar-panel makers were filing for bankruptcy or had to cut back their businesses in the face of unrelenting competition from China, which undermined the enthusiasm for clean energy at the time.[53] The damage was caused by China’s dumping products on the world market, which was enabled by the regime’s subsidies for its domestic solar industry.
