FBI Director Christopher Wray said intellectual property theft campaigns against the United States by the Chinese government, including economic espionage aimed at U.S. government-funded research, has the “perverse effect” of U.S. taxpayers funding China’s rise.
Wray, who has served as FBI director following former FBI chief James Comey’s firing in 2017, made the comments during an appearance before the Democratic-led House Homeland Security Committee’s hearing on worldwide threats on Thursday.
“The Chinese view themselves as in an international talent war, and they recognize that American innovation and research is the envy of the world and, frankly, the envy of China,” Wray told lawmakers. “And when they can’t innovate and research themselves, they send people over here — in some cases, legitimately, but, in many cases, not — who engage in intellectual property theft, taking information, American research, and bringing it back to China to advance China’s national security goals, which has the perverse effect, since a lot of this research is taxpayer funded, has essentially the perverse effect of having American taxpayers funding China’s advancement at our expense.”
The Pentagon released a report in early September detailing China’s growing military power. The Justice Department has increased its scrutiny of China’s activities recently, starting the China Initiative in 2018 and prosecuting Chinese nationals in espionage cases, cracking down on hacking schemes, prosecuting efforts to steal trade secrets, and going after the Thousand Talents Program, including Harvard professor Charles Lieber.
Republican ranking member Rep. Mike Rogers pressed Wray on the threat posed by Chinese theft in the U.S., noting that “the Department of Justice has recently announced many FBI investigations that led to the arrest of Chinese nationals conducting highly-sensitive research that have been found to have been connected to the Chinese military” and that “the growing number of these types of cases and the nonpublic details of those arrests raise alarm bells for me.”
Multiple members of the Chinese military have been charged by the Justice Department in recent months for concealing their ties to China’s military and allegedly committing visa fraud while acting as students or researchers at U.S. universities. A number of researchers have also been arrested recently after allegedly concealing their ties to the Thousand Talents Program while receiving U.S. government grants and stealing research to bring back to China.
Rogers asked Wray how Congress could help combat the threat.
“Well, certainly, we appreciate the Congress’s allocation of resources to our counterintelligence efforts — that’s an important part of it,” Wray said. “I think I publicly acknowledged that the FBI now has over 2,000 counterintelligence investigations related to China — by far, the biggest chunk of our counterintelligence portfolio — and we are opening a new Chinese counterintelligence investigation about every 10 hours. And so, the scope and scale of this threat is really breathtaking.”
Wray stressed that “it’s not just a government problem” and that the FBI must work with private companies and academia.
“It varies significantly from university to university about how sensitive and how cooperative with us they’ve been, but I think this is, frankly, one of the bright spots over the last couple of years,” Wray said. “I’ve been to all 56 FBI field offices, and I will tell you, I’m struck by the number of offices where universities that three or four years ago wouldn’t have wanted an FBI agent anywhere near campus to some that now have office space set aside for our people. And I think that’s not just because they’re idealistic and believe in the country, I hope, but rather, it’s recognition that the information that’s being stolen is their information. So, it’s about protecting their research, their professors, their hard work, frankly. And I think the more of that we can have, the better off we’ll be.”
The Education Department said in August that schools have anonymized $8.4 billion in foreign money and, since 2010, colleges and universities have “hidden the true source” of at least $600 million from China. Wray said he was seeing progress recently in how seriously colleges, and people in the U.S. generally, were taking the Chinese threat.
“I’m very encouraged by the response we’ve gotten from both the private sector and, frankly, the academic sector,” Wray said. “Lately, I think people in this country are starting to wake up to the threat and voluntarily undertaking appropriate measures. So, the Congress can be very helpful … in highlighting the importance of the threat and communicating, in effect, back to the Chinese that this is an issue that’s bipartisan, that all Americans care about, and that we’re not going to tolerate anymore.”
Wray warned about “the increasingly blended threat of state-sponsored economic espionage facilitated by cyberintrusions” and pointed to a July indictment of two Chinese hackers accused of working with the Chinese Communist Party’s Ministry of State Security to target companies worldwide, including those researching coronavirus vaccines. The FBI director also pointed to a Wednesday announcement charging five Chinese hackers “who were targeting victims around the world from their safe haven in China.”
The FBI director made clear that “with that kind of behavior, China continues to undercut their own claims of being a trusted and effective partner of the international community.”
The intelligence community released an assessment in August that China “prefers” President Trump not win reelection and is “expanding its influence efforts ahead of November 2020,” as Iran “seeks to undermine” Trump’s presidency. It also warned that Russia is “using a range of measures to primarily denigrate” former Vice President Joe Biden.
