Under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s orders, Communist China is increasing its already vast effort to steal intellectual property. China is escalating its already impressive technical ability to sink U.S. warships. China is determined to replace the United States as the architect and arbiter of international order.
These three concerns underline why the FBI and other government agencies are right to prioritize China-related espionage concerns. And why it is both absurd and dangerous for the U.S. to restrain related investigative efforts out of some kind of misguided concern over “equity.”
Unfortunately, the Biden administration appears to be OK with restraining effective counterintelligence activity. The administration has already suspended the Justice Department’s “China Initiative” to identify and disrupt Chinese intelligence efforts in sensitive areas of academia. Equally problematic, too many in academia appear to believe that patriotism and national security are things of the past rather than enduring concerns of the present.
The China Initiative was broadly and unfairly criticized across academia. But as the Wall Street Journal reported this week, academics aren’t satisfied with the initiative’s suspension. Instead, researchers of Chinese descent are giving up their academic positions over what they say is their fear of being unfairly investigated by the U.S. government.
Frankly, this is pathetic, as China puts far more aggressive pressure on ethnic Chinese living in the U.S. than the U.S. government ever has. But the basic point is one of prudent expectation. National security journalists, for example, know that the FBI might look closely at them in order to try and identify their sources. Every prospective government employee knows that the FBI will study intimate details of his private life to assess whether he can be trusted with classified material. Politicians, celebrities, and senior business executives understand that their work sometimes draws uncomfortable public attention.
In the same way, an academic working on sensitive research should not resent declaring links to Chinese entities. And if they do resent it? Well, they should stop said research.
I suspect there is a fundamental mismatch here between what academia and the public believe are tolerable China-related espionage threats. Regardless, the threat of industrial-level spying by China’s Ministry of State Security and the People’s Liberation Army is not debatable.
Take private intelligence company Strider’s report this week on China’s longtime extraction of exceptionally sensitive expertise from the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos research lab — yes, the same Los Alamos laboratory where the atomic bomb was developed. Strider notes that “between 1987 and 2021, at least 162 scientists who had worked at Los Alamos returned to [China] to support a variety of domestic research and development programs. … Since returning to China, Los Alamos alumni have helped [China] advance key military and dual-use technologies in areas such as hypersonics, deep-earth penetrating warheads, unmanned autonomous vehicles, jet engines, and submarine noise reduction.”
To be clear, these technologies will have been used to enable the People’s Liberation Army to identify, target, and kill American service personnel in war better. The theft of these technologies has thus caused profound damage to U.S. national security.
Put simply, the U.S. government must ensure that China is less able to steal the most sensitive research. If academics don’t like that, then they should quit.
