The Daring Ruse That Exposed China’s Campaign to Steal American Secrets; The New York Times Magazine, March 7, 2023

 Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, The New York Times Magazine ; The Daring Ruse That Exposed China’s Campaign to Steal American Secrets

"Although China publicly denies engaging in economic espionage, Chinese officials will indirectly acknowledge behind closed doors that the theft of intellectual property from overseas is state policy. James Lewis, a former diplomat now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recalls participating in a meeting in 2014 or so at which Chinese and American government representatives, including an officer from the People’s Liberation Army, discussed the subject. “An assistant secretary from the U.S. Department of Defense was explaining: Look, spying is OK — we spy, you spy, everybody spies, but it’s for political and military purposes,” Lewis recounted for me. “It’s for national security. What we object to is your economic espionage. And a senior P.L.A. colonel said: Well, wait. We don’t draw the line between national security and economic espionage the way you do. Anything that builds our economy is good for our national security.” The U.S. government’s response increasingly appears to be a mirror image of the Chinese perspective: In the view of U.S. officials, the threat posed to America’s economic interests by Chinese espionage is a threat to American national security.'

Like China’s economy, the spying carried out on its behalf is directed by the Chinese state. The Ministry of State Security, or M.S.S., which is responsible for gathering foreign intelligence, is tasked with collecting information in technologies that the Chinese government wants to build up. The current focus, according to U.S. counterintelligence experts, aligns with the “Made in China 2025” initiative announced in 2015. This industrial plan seeks to make China the world’s top manufacturer in 10 areas, including robotics, artificial intelligence, new synthetic materials and aerospace. In the words of one former U.S. national security official, the plan is a “road map for theft.”"

Scientists With Links to China May Be Stealing Biomedical Research, U.S. Says; The New York Times, November 4, 2019

Gina Kolata, The New York Times; Scientists With Links to China May Be Stealing Biomedical Research, U.S. Says

""The investigations have fanned fears that China is exploiting the relative openness of the American scientific system to engage in wholesale economic espionage. At the same time, the scale of the dragnet has sent a tremor through the ranks of biomedical researchers, some of whom say ethnic Chinese scientists are being unfairly targeted for scrutiny as Washington’s geopolitical competition with Beijing intensifies...

The alleged theft involves not military secrets, but scientific ideas, designs, devices, data and methods that may lead to profitable new treatments or diagnostic tools.

Some researchers under investigation have obtained patents in China on work funded by the United States government and owned by American institutions, the N.I.H. said. Others are suspected of setting up labs in China that secretly duplicated American research, according to government officials and university administrators...

The real question, [Dr. Michael Lauer, deputy director for extramural research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md] added, is how to preserve the open exchange of scientific ideas in the face of growing security concerns. At M.D. Anderson, administrators are tightening controls to make data less freely available."

People Are Looking At Your LinkedIn Profile. They Might Be Chinese Spies; NPR, September 19, 2019

Ryan Lucas, NPR; People Are Looking At Your LinkedIn Profile. They Might Be Chinese Spies

"Demers took over leadership of the National Security Division in February 2018 after being confirmed by the Senate. Since taking the helm, he has spent a considerable amount of time on China and what he calls its prolific espionage efforts against the United States.

They're vast in scale, he said, and they span the spectrum from traditional espionage targeting government secrets to economic espionage going after intellectual property and American trade secrets...

It's a play that has also been used to target folks in the business world and academia, where China is hungry for cutting-edge technology and trade secrets. For years, the Chinese intelligence services have hacked into U.S. companies and made off with intellectual property.

Now, U.S. officials say China's spies are increasingly turning to what is known as "nontraditional collectors" — students, researchers and business insiders — to scoop up secrets."