FBI Director Christopher Wray provided new details about the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign influence against the United States, including how Beijing’s “Fox Hunt” operation targets and threatens Chinese Americans.
Wray, who took over as the bureau chief in 2017 following the firing of former FBI Director James Comey, laid out China’s efforts to coerce Chinese nationals around the world during a discussion with Walter Russell Mead of the Hudson Institute on Tuesday. China has touted Fox Hunt as a global anti-crime endeavor, but the FBI director said it is nothing of the sort.
“Since 2014, Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping has spearheaded a program known as Fox Hunt. Now, China describes Fox Hunt as some sort of international anti-corruption campaign — it is not,” Wray said. “Instead, Fox Hunt is a sweeping bid by General Secretary Xi to target Chinese nationals who he sees as threats and who live outside of China and across the world. We’re talking about political rivals, dissidents, and critics seeking to expose China’s extensive human rights violations.”
Wray said, “Hundreds of these Fox Hunt victims that they target live right here in the United States, and many are American citizens or green card holders.” According to Wray, “The Chinese government wants to force them to return to China, and China’s tactics to accomplish that are shocking.”
As one example, Wray said that when the Chinese government could not locate a Fox Hunt target, it “sent an emissary to visit the target’s family” in the U.S. “The message they said to pass along?” Wray asked rhetorically, “The target had two options: return to China promptly, or commit suicide.”
The FBI director said that when a Fox Hunt target refuses to return to China, “their family members both here in the United States and in China have been threatened and coerced, and those back in China have even been arrested for leverage.” He said the ultimate goal of the operation was to “suppress dissent and censor dissidents and critics.”
The U.S. government has publicly referenced China’s efforts against Chinese nationals living in the U.S. and against Chinese Americans in the past. The Pentagon’s 2019 report to Congress on China noted that the country “also sometimes uses coercion or blackmail to manipulate overseas Chinese citizens to conduct influence operations on behalf of China, such as threatening ethnic Uighurs living in the United States with imprisonment of their family members.” The Defense Department said that “Chinese intelligence services often facilitate these operations.”
Wray explained that China’s Fox Hunt operation is run more through China’s Ministry of Public Security rather than through its Ministry of State Security or the People’s Liberation Army. China’s MPS is its main police and security force responsible for law enforcement in China, whereas its MSS is the Chinese Communist Party’s intelligence arm, which runs its counterintelligence and its secret police. The PLA is China’s massive armed forces, which have extensive relationships with Chinese businesses operating worldwide.
He said that the Chinese government used a variety of means of coercion to make “unmistakably threatening” comments about family members back in China and called “the Fox Hunt threat” a “rogue law enforcement” effort being conducted by the Chinese government “right here in the United States.”
“I will take this opportunity to note that if you believe the Chinese government is targeting you, that if you believe you are a potential Fox Hunt victim, please reach out to your local FBI field office,” Wray said.
Wray explained that the FBI has more than 2,000 active investigations that trace back to the government in China, half of which are related directly to intellectual property theft. The other half is made up of a variety of counterintelligence investigations. He said these cases represented a 1300% increase from one decade ago and noted the bureau is opening a new counterintelligence investigation tied to China every 10 hours on average.
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.
The U.S. has engaged in an all-out effort to limit Huawei’s global reach, especially in the area of 5G, pushing its “Five Eyes” partners to reject Huawei technology in their communications networks.
The Justice Department unveiled a superseding indictment against Huawei in February, charging it with racketeering and conspiracy to steal trade secrets.
The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, released a report in June detailing how the federal government provided “little-to-no oversight” of Chinese state-owned telecoms for two decades and how China is illicitly targeting U.S. communications the same way it has targeted education, research, and personal data. That subcommittee previously released reports on China’s foreign funding on U.S. campuses, theft of U.S. research, and cyberattacks against U.S. companies.
