Source: Daily Wire News
FBI Director Christopher Wray recently delivered a speech in which he warned Americans about three things that they need to know about what the Chinese Communist Party is trying to do to the United States.
In remarks given at the Hudson Institute last month, Wray warned that the Chinese Communist Party was working to become the world’s only superpower by “any means necessary.”
“If you are an American adult, it is more likely than not that China has stolen your personal data,” Wray said. “We’ve now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours. Of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China. And at this very moment, China is working to compromise American health care organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and academic institutions conducting essential COVID-19 research.”
Wray said that the American people needed to know three things about the Chinese Communist Party and what they want to do to the United States.
“First: We need to be clear-eyed about the scope of the Chinese government’s ambition. China—the Chinese Communist Party—believes it is in a generational fight to surpass our country in economic and technological leadership,” Wray said. “That is sobering enough. But it’s waging this fight not through legitimate innovation, not through fair and lawful competition, and not by giving their citizens the freedom of thought and speech and creativity that we treasure here in the United States. Instead, China is engaged in a whole-of-state effort to become the world’s only superpower by any means necessary.”
“The second thing the American people need to understand is that China uses a diverse range of sophisticated techniques—everything from cyber intrusions to corrupting trusted insiders,” Wray continued. “They’ve even engaged in outright physical theft. And they’ve pioneered an expansive approach to stealing innovation through a wide range of actors—including not just Chinese intelligence services but state-owned enterprises, ostensibly private companies, certain kinds of graduate students and researchers, and a whole variety of other actors working on their behalf.”
Wray noted that China steals American technology in nearly every industry imaginable, ranging from military hardware to agriculture.
“China is engaged in a highly sophisticated malign foreign influence campaign, and its methods include bribery, blackmail, and covert deals,” Wray said. “Chinese diplomats also use both open, naked economic pressure and seemingly independent middlemen to push China’s preferences on American officials.”
“Understanding how a nation could engage in these tactics brings me to the third thing the American people need to remember: that China has a fundamentally different system than ours—and it’s doing all it can to exploit the openness of ours while taking advantage of its own closed system,” Wray added. “Many of the distinctions that mean a lot here in the United States are blurry or almost nonexistent in China—I’m talking about distinctions between the government and the Chinese Communist Party, between the civilian and military sectors, and between the state and the ‘private’ sector.”
“For one thing, an awful lot of large Chinese businesses are state-owned enterprises—literally owned by the government, and thus the Party. And even if they aren’t, China’s laws allow its government to compel any Chinese company to provide any information it requests—including American citizens’ data,” Wray continued. “On top of that, Chinese companies of any real size are legally required to have Communist Party ‘cells’ inside them to keep them in line. Even more alarmingly, Communist Party cells have reportedly been established in some American companies operating in China as a cost of doing business there.”
Video and transcript below:
