'Unprecedented in Human History': Five Eyes Intelligence Chiefs Sound Alarm on China's Technology Theft

(L–R) Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Director-General Mike Burgess, Canadian Security Intelligence Service Director David Vigneault, FBI Director Christopher Wray, New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Director-General of Security and Chief Executive Andrew Hampton, and MI5 Director General Ken McCallum pose for a group photo during the Emerging Technology and Securing Innovation Summit in Palo Alto, Calif, on Oct. 16, 2023. (FBI/Handout via PA0) 

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Communist China's espionage operations, including theft of intellectual property in technology and other trade secrets, pose significant threats to the West and is "unprecedented in human history," intelligence chiefs from the Five Eyes alliance warned.

In an interview with CBS News's "60 Minutes" on Oct. 22, the intelligence leaders from the Five Eyes alliance shared their concerns about the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) threats, what it means to democracies, as well as the message they want to send to Beijing.

The Five Eyes alliance was founded after World War II as an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and New Zealand.

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The Chinese regime "is the defining threat of this generation. ... There is no country that presents a broader, more comprehensive threat to our ideas, our innovation, our economic security, and ultimately our national security," FBI Director Christopher Wray said.

The FBI chief said that the CCP's spying operations could be seen in many fields, including agriculture, aviation, biotech, health care, robotics, and academic research. Furthermore, Beijing's tech theft is not limited to big businesses, like Fortune 100 companies, but extends to smaller startup firms.

"We probably have somewhere in the order of 2,000 active investigations that are just related to the Chinese government's effort to steal information," Mr. Wray said.

'Unprecedented in Human History'

The Chinese regime deploys many tools for its espionage operations, including hacking. Mr. Wray said the CCP has "the biggest hacking program in the world by far, bigger than ever other major nation combined ... stolen more of our personal and corporate data than every nation, big or small, combined."

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In September, the State Department revealed that hackers linked to the CCP have secretly breached thousands of email accounts of U.S. government agencies, affecting officials such as Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Daniel Kritenbrink.

Mike Burgess, the director of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, emphasized that the scale of the CCP's espionage efforts is "unprecedented."

"All countries spy. Our countries spy. All governments have a need to be covertly informed. All countries seek strategic advantage," Mr. Burgess said. "But the behavior we're talking about here goes well beyond traditional espionage. This scale of the theft is unprecedented in human history. And that's why we're calling it out."

A sign opposing a corn mill in Grand Forks, N.D., stands near 370 acres recently annexed by the city for the project. Many residents don't want the project in the city because the owner has reputed ties to the Chinese Communist Party through its company chairman. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)

Canadian intelligence chief David Vigneault told "60 Minutes" about the national security risks associated with Chinese companies purchasing land or properties near sensitive and strategic areas in Canada for spying operations.

Mr. Wray said Chinese businesses have also attempted to “acquire businesses, land, infrastructure ... in the United States in a way that presents national security concerns.”

In 2022, U.S. officials sounded the alarm when a Chinese agriculture company and its subsidiary, Fufeng USA, which has ties to the CCP, bought hundreds of acres of farmland in Grand Forks, North Dakota, near Grand Forks Air Force base.

Since 2016, Guanghui Energy Co. Ltd., owned by Chinese billionaire Sun Guangxin, who's reportedly connected to the CCP, reportedly began purchasing up to 140,000 acres of farmland in the border town of Del Rio—next to Laughlin Air Force Base. The company stated that it would use the land to build wind turbines.

According to Ken McCallum, the director general of the UK's intelligence agency MI5, theft by the CCP occurs through various means. Employees of companies targeted by Chinese spies are frequently manipulated without their knowledge.

"We have seen, for example, the use of professional networking sites to reach out in sort of masked, disguised ways to people in the UK, either who have security clearance or who are working in interesting areas of technology," Mr. McCallum said.

"We've now seen over 20,000 examples of that kind of disguised approach to people in the UK who have information that the Chinese state wishes to get its hands on,"  he added.

Transnational Repression

The intelligence chiefs said that the CCP's threat is not just spy campaigns but also involves targeting Chinese dissidents living overseas. Mr. Wray cited an example of the CCP's effort to intimidate and suppress a U.S. congressional candidate who criticized Beijing.

"The efforts were initially to try to see if they could come up with dirt on the candidate to derail his candidacy. And then to try to concoct dirt, just fiction, about the candidate. And then, if that didn't work, there was even discussion about the candidate befalling a horrible accident," Mr. Wray said.

That was the case of Xiong Yan, a U.S. Army veteran and congressional hopeful in New York City, who was targeted by the CCP in March last year when he sought the Democratic nomination to run for Congress representing a district in Long Island. He had long been a target of the CCP for his participation as a student leader in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and for his later support of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

The Justice Department has charged an alleged Chinese agent who contracted a private investigator (PI) in New York to manufacture a political scandal in the hopes of undermining the congressional campaign of Mr. Xiong. Failing that, Mr. Lin encouraged the PI to physically harm Mr. Xiong by either beating him or forcing him into a car accident.

Xiong Yan is running for Congress in New York's 10th Congressional District, in New York, on July 2022. (Cai Rong/The Epoch Times)

Mr. Wray also brought up the CCP's Operation Fox Hunt, which is aimed at pursuing dissidents abroad through tactics involving harassment, intimidation, or threats to their family members in China, intending to coerce the return of these individuals to China for prosecution.

In June this year, a federal court in Brooklyn convicted three individuals for intimidating a New Jersey family and pressuring them to return to China on behalf of the CCP.

'Threat to Our Way of Life'

Amid the increasing concern over the CCP's technology theft, senior intelligence officials from the Five Eyes alliance convened in California on Oct. 17. They held discussions with 15 Silicon Valley executives and Stanford University to address the imminent threat posed by the Chinese regime, with the aim of safeguarding the intellectual property of their respective companies.

The Chinese espionage program "is a threat to our way of life in a number of ways," Mr. Wray warned.

"The first is that when people talk about stealing innovation or intellectual property, that's not just a Wall Street problem. That's a Main Street problem. That means American jobs, American families, American livelihoods, and the same thing for every one of our five countries directly impacted by that theft. It's not some abstract concept. It has flesh and blood, kitchen-table consequences."

Mr. Wray has a message to the Chinese regime that if it wants "to be a great nation, it's time for them to start acting like one."

Andrew Thornebrooke contributed to this report.