Late last year, The Drill Down covered a story about the mounting pressure facing the Biden Administration to end the China Initiative —an initiative focused on identifying and prosecuting CCP trade theft and economic espionage. Here’s what we said at the time:
“Since the year 2000, there have been 160 reported instances of Chinese espionage directed at the United States and 1200 cases of intellectual property theft litigation against Chinese entities (these are just the ones we know about). FBI Director Christopher Wren says, “The greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality, is the counterintelligence and economic espionage threat from China.”
In 2018, President Donald Trump and his DOJ took aim at Chinese national security threats: economic aggressions, trade espionage, intellectual property theft, cyber crime —all of it.
And so, the China Initiative was born.
But now, Fox News is reporting that the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice is halting the Trump-era initiative that cracked down on Chinese spying. And with China presenting a bigger threat than ever, everyone is asking the same thing: why now?
“China is stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. intellectual property each year,” columnist and author Gordon Chang told Fox News Digital in response to the announcement. “John Ratcliffe, when he was director of national intelligence, estimated it was about $500 billion annually. So China should be the focus of U.S. efforts and now to drop the China Initiative sends a message to Beijing and everyone else that it’s open season on Americans.”
“It seems it’s become politically incorrect to go after China’s spies, so this is inexplicable in my view,” Chang added.
And Chang is correct. Many feel that the China Initiative is unfairly targeting —wait for it…Chinese people. “These are just folks with minor administrative hiccups,” some say.
“But too often, the Justice Department has brought cases under the China Initiative that have not targeted espionage or intellectual property theft by Chinese spies but minor administrative violations by scientists of Chinese ancestry who are not suspected of affiliation with the Chinese government,” Brennan Center authors Michael German and Alex Liang said.
“That’s crap,” Chang told Fox News Digital. “Look, the reason they went after academics on technical charges was because making an espionage or treason case was too hard. So what they did was they felt the best use of prosecutorial resources was to go for the easy convictions. That’s not to say that these individuals were not guilty of serious crimes.”
Here’s another key point that most people outside of China don’t understand: if China asks you to spy, you don’t say no. You CAN’T say no. Citizens can’t refuse the government’s demand.
“It’s not about race,” Chang said. “It’s about China forcing them to commit acts of espionage. The other thing is we know China targets American nationals of Chinese descent, and so again every ethnic Chinese is a legitimate target of counterespionage efforts because China has made them so. So, let’s drop this political wokeism. Let’s start defending our country, because we’re going to lose it if we don’t.”
Writer and policy expert Ying Ma told Fox News Digital that the threats from China are real.
“The threats from China are real. Let’s hope the Justice Department will find a more effective way than the China Initiative to be vigilant against espionage and the theft of American scientific research.”
Improve it. Don’t end it. China certainly is only getting more aggressive and we know they aren’t ending any “American Initiatives” on their end.
[h/t Fox News]
