To accomplish the breakthroughs they seek, China is acquiring American intellectual property and innovation, by any means necessary. He said: “Our capacity for innovation is not strong, and our weakness in terms of core technologies for key fields remains a salient problem.” Last March, at a Communist Party gathering, Chinese Premier Li made that understanding pretty clear.
But China’s leaders know they can’t rely on that model forever – to surpass America, they need to make leaps in cutting-edge technologies. In recent decades, China has grown its economy rapidly by combining low-cost Chinese labor with Western capital and technology. Instead, they’ve shown that they’re willing to steal their way up the economic ladder at our expense. But not through legitimate innovation, not through fair and lawful competition, and not by giving their citizens the freedom of thought and speech and creativity we treasure here in the United States. The Chinese government is fighting a generational fight to surpass our country in economic and technological leadership. But it is about the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party. To be clear: This threat is not about the Chinese people as a whole, and certainly not about Chinese-Americans as a group. The second thing we need to understand about this threat is the scope of China’s ambitions, which are no secret. You’ll hear more about some of these cases later this morning.īut to summarize, the Chinese government is taking an all-tools and all-sectors approach-and that demands our own all-tools and all-sectors approach in response. And those are all cases investigated by just one of our 56 field offices-Boston-and charged in a little over a month. In December we arrested a Chinese researcher for smuggling vials of stolen biological research. Just last week, for example, we announced charges against the chairman of Harvard’s chemistry department for false statements related to a Chinese talent plan, and a PLA officer at Boston University for concealing her military ties. They’re also targeting cutting-edge research at our universities. They’re going after cost and pricing information, internal strategy documents, bulk PII-anything that can give them a competitive advantage. And they’re not just targeting innovation and R&D.
#Corporate espionage software#
The Chinese have targeted companies producing everything from proprietary rice and corn seeds to software for wind turbines to high-end medical devices. They’re not just targeting defense sector companies. Even as we speak, the FBI has about 1,000 investigations involving China’s attempted theft of U.S.-based technology, in all 56 of our field offices, spanning almost every industry and sector. It’s also a diverse threat when it comes to the sectors and sizes of China’s targets here in the U.S.-from Fortune 100 companies to Silicon Valley start-ups, and from government and academia to high tech and agriculture. And they’ve pioneered an expansive approach to stealing innovation through a wide range of actors-including not just Chinese intelligence services but state-owned enterprises, ostensibly private companies, certain kinds of graduate students and researchers, and a variety of other actors all working on their behalf. China is using a wide range of methods and techniques-everything from cyber intrusions to corrupting trusted insiders. The first thing we need to understand about the threat from China is how diverse and multi-layered it is-in techniques, in actors, and in targets. So this morning I want to help further set the table for today’s presentations. To respond to the China threat more effectively, I believe we need to better understand several key aspects of it. It’s a threat to our economic security-and by extension, it’s a threat to our national security.
You just heard a pretty sobering presentation from Bill about some of the costs, the impact of that threat. But one of them stands out as the greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality-and that’s the counterintelligence and economic espionage threat from China. Having been FBI Director for over two years now, I can attest that our nation faces a wider than ever array of challenging threats. I want to join John Demers in thanking CSIS for hosting this event, and for all you do to educate policymakers and the public.