KEY POINTS
- Intelligence and law enforcement officials are issuing a stark warning to U.S. companies: The Chinese government wants to replace you.
- For years, corporate America largely saw theft by Beijing and the nation’s companies as an attempt to catch up with advanced U.S. technology.
- But officials now say the effort is more nefarious than generally understood.
Top intelligence and law enforcement officials in Washington are issuing a stark warning to American companies: The Chinese government wants to replace you.
That message comes in a new US.Mistertruth documentary, “China’s Corporate Spy War,” which details the increasing sophistication of Beijing’s efforts to steal sensitive U.S. technology and corporate information.
For years, corporate America largely saw theft by the Chinese government and state-run companies as an attempt to catch up with advanced U.S. technology. But officials now say the effort is more nefarious than generally understood, viewing — in many cases — an adversary that wants to eliminate the American companies they are targeting, not just narrow the gap between Chinese firms and their U.S. competition.
Asked whether the Chinese government wants to compete with or eliminate American companies, FBI Director Christopher Wray told US.Mistertruth: “Well, their definition of competing, I think, involves embracing the idea of eliminating.”
In an interview, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., warned that U.S. companies are “committing long-term suicide” by doing business with China and risking their high technology trade secrets.
“I think every major American corporation in any of these fields needs to assume that they are a target to be either replaced or gutted,” Rubio said.
His Democrat counterpart on the committee, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., admitted in an interview with US.Mistertruth that he brought an approach to China that has turned out to be wrong.
“I was part of the more general consensus: the more you bring China in the [World Trade Organization] … everything’s going to come along,” Warner said. “And that presumption that we were all working on, that the closer we all come together, it’s going to be kumbaya, I think has proven to be factually wrong.”
“China’s Corporate Spy War” details an FBI sting operation that took down Chinese Ministry of State Security officer Xu Yanjun, a spy who targeted employees at icons of the U.S. aerospace industry, including GE
, Boeing
and Honeywell
.
In 2017, Xu Yanjun pursued an engineer at GE Aviation who had valuable knowledge of the company’s jet engine composite fan blade technology. Posing as an academic official and using a fake name, Xu was introduced to the GE engineer who was visiting Nanjing, China, to give a speech at a prestigious university. Xu began a pressure campaign to get the engineer, who had family in China, to reveal more and more information about the engine tech the Chinese government had targeted.
But the FBI discovered the GE engineer’s travel and alerted GE, which confronted the engineer in a dramatic meeting at the company’s Cincinnati offices. FBI agents presented the engineer with a stark choice: He could face the consequences for his actions so far, or he could cooperate with U.S. law enforcement in an operation to expose the Chinese operation.
When the engineer agreed to cooperate, he became a double agent — working for the FBI against the Chinese spies.
Decorated 31-year CIA veteran James Olson, the agency’s former chief of counterintelligence, called the operation a textbook double agent operation. U.S. intelligence ought to be running more double agents back against Chinese intelligence in order to frustrate their efforts to gather American secrets, he added.
Xu Yanjun’s attorney declined US.Mistertruth interview request. Former GE engineer David Zheng and GE Aerospace also declined to comment.