FBI Director Christopher Wray warned about the Chinese government’s spying campaign against the United States and vowed that the FBI is “not taking our foot off the gas” despite the Justice Department shuttering the China Initiative.
“Each and every day, the men and women of the FBI are taking on the Chinese government’s broad-scale economic espionage campaign targeting our ideas, our innovation, our economic security,” Wray said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday.
Republicans are pushing for a law that would revive the China Initiative. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) asked the FBI director to explain what happened to it.
“Well, I guess on the China Initiative, I would largely defer to the department on its description of its change to the initiative,” Wray said. “The original initiative was a Justice Department initiative. The changes to it were a Justice Department construct.”
Wray continued: “I will tell you that I have been consistent, both under the initiative and since, with our workforce in my assessment of the threat and that we at the FBI are not taking our foot off the gas. Now, we’re going to do it right, we’re going to follow the facts with proper predication, and we are not going to be basing investigations on race, ethnicity, or national origin — and we haven’t.”
He added: “This is not about the Chinese people. It’s not about Chinese Americans. It’s about the People’s Republic of China and specifically the CCP.”
The DOJ announced in February it was pulling the plug on the 2018 initiative aimed at cracking down on China’s economic espionage following a year of criticism from Democrats, hundreds of university professors, left-wing activists, and the CCP itself.
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Sasse told Wray: “It feels like Main Justice has said they’re killing the China Initiative because of some worries about some rhetorical challenges, where you’ve said many times that China and the CCP are a long-term geopolitical threat.”
Wray said the way he understood it is the change “was an attempt to broaden the focus to make sure that we are also focusing on transnational repression from other nation-states and not just China, which, of course, we have been doing, but it makes that clear.”
Sasse said, “But there is only one nation that could defeat the U.S.”
Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen said in February that he decided to end the China Initiative, replacing it with a more nebulous effort focused on nation-state threats.
The shutdown was sandwiched between the DOJ unveiling a domestic terrorism unit in January and announcing a special task force to target Russian oligarchs in March.
Wray said Thursday: “The same kind of repression in China is an export the People’s Republic of China is engaging in, including right here in the United States.”
The Justice Department unsealed a criminal complaint in March against an agent of the Chinese government and charged him with participating in the CCP’s transnational repression campaign in the U.S. targeting the Chinese diaspora. The Justice Department separately accused the Chinese Ministry of State Security of attempting to undermine the congressional candidacy of a former Tiananmen Square protest leader-turned-retired U.S. Army chaplain in a harassment and intimidation scheme.
Despite Wray’s testimony, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) argued that “the China Initiative led to some abuses by the FBI in who they were going to target” and said it was a “concern” that the FBI was targeting people “based on race and ethnicity.”
The FBI director insisted the China challenge was significant.
“We are opening a new China-related counterintelligence investigation about every twelve hours,” Wray said, telling Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that the threat “represents the potential of who is going to dominate the most significant industry sectors for decades.”
He added: “The Chinese government has a bigger hacking program on the cyber side that we’re up against than that of every other major nation combined and have stolen more of Americans’ personal and corporate data than every nation combined. So we will absolutely need more resources to keep pace with something like that.”
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked Wray if he was working with the Pentagon on the threat posed by Chinese Huawei equipment near sensitive U.S. infrastructure and on the issue of China buying up land near U.S. bases.
“We are working very closely with a number of Department of Defense agencies, and there’s actually quite a lot happening in this space,” Wray replied.
Blackburn also brought up China’s Thousand Talents Program and Confucius Institutes on campus.
“We are trying to work very closely with universities on this subject,” Wray said, adding: “The whole way in which the talent plans are abused involves funding of researchers from the Chinese government to essentially steal U.S. taxpayer-funded research here. And so our investigations inevitably get into that type of issue.”
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Republican lawmakers have called on the Biden administration to improve its monitoring of Chinese influence in higher education.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) released a report last month that details how the Federal Reserve System has been targeted by Beijing in a large-scale economic espionage effort tied to the Thousand Talents Program.
