Foreign Affairs

China’s Espionage Machine Is Overwhelming The West

The Chinese government is conducting espionage activities on such a broad scale that Western governments are struggling to keep Beijing’s spying in check, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

In just the last month, the FBI said that Chinese government-linked hackers breached 260,000 internet-connected devices across the U.S. and Europe, while federal officials alleged that a former top aide to Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul was a Chinese agent and a congressional report found that Chinese-made cargo cranes at America’s ports contained technology that would allow China to control them discreetly, according to the WSJ. Western intelligence agencies are sounding the alarm and asking the public to be vigilant for possible Chinese spying, but deep economic ties between China and the West are making espionage detection a difficult task.

China’s network of state-backed hackers is enormous, and it is thought to outnumber the FBI’s cyber personnel by a ratio of about 50-to-1, with some estimates calculating that China may have as many as 600,000 people working on cyber operations, according to the WSJ.

China Is Rapidly Expanding Its Surveillance Capabilities In America’s Backyard, Report Findshttps://t.co/TKzt3hgyCF

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 4, 2024

China has hacked into U.S. energy and water utility infrastructure, which is concerning some in Washington who worry that the Chinese government could seriously disrupt those crucial services if China tries to take Taiwan by force, according to the WSJ. Chinese hackers also managed to install malicious software inside India’s power grid amid a 2021 border dispute between the two countries, and they may have also compromised telecommunications infrastructure in Guam, an island in the Pacific Ocean that hosts a major U.S. military base.

Other recent, high-profile acts of confirmed or suspected Chinese espionage include a massive breach of U.K. voter registration records that potentially exposed the home addresses of up to 40 million people and accessing U.S. broadband providers’ networks, possibly getting access to wiretaps used in criminal investigations, according to the WSJ. China’s economic espionage has been fairly well-known and publicized for years, and some officials are worried that Chinese hackers are stealing volumes of data to use while developing various applications for artificial intelligence technology.

The espionage risk emanating from China has increased in recent years as the country’s economic growth slowed, a development that increases pressure on Chinese spies to steal information or trade secrets to advance the country’s interests, according to the WSJ. Unlike the Soviet Union, China does not seem to care much if its spies are caught and Beijing seldom tries to swap captured agents with the West.

The governments of the U.S. and its allies “are coming to terms with events, in many ways, after the events,” Calder Walton, a national security expert at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, told the WSJ.

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— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) September 4, 2024

Some European officials have warned that China is using Chinese students and researchers as a means of espionage, and that these individuals have learned to more effectively evade suspicion as Western officials have started paying closer attention, according to the WSJ. Five Chinese students studying at the University of Michigan were indicted in early October in connection to a 2023 incident in which they were allegedly spotted with cameras in close proximity to a Michigan National Guard base hosting military exercises involving Taiwanese forces.

In the U.K., Chinese agents have used LinkedIn to reach out to approximately 20,000 people since 2022 to try to get them to provide sensitive materials, according to the WSJ.

The decentralized, private-public design of the Chinese spying apparatus is another issue for the West in its efforts to counter Chinese spying, according to the WSJ. Moreover, China purged a group of officials who were spying on behalf of the U.S. about ten years ago, which has reduced America’s visibility into what is going on in China.