“Every day,” say Peter Navarro and Greg Autry in their best-selling book Death by China, copyrighted by Pearson Education Inc. in 2011, “a loose network of thousands of professionals and amateur Chinese spies gather intelligence in the offices, factories, and schools of America, Europe, and nations ranging from Brazil and India to Japan and South Korea.
“And every minute of every day hundreds of Chinese hackers use thousands of hijacked computers to batter down the firewalls of industrial, financial, academic, political, and military information systems around the world looking for valuable data and quietly documenting vulnerabilities that can be exploited to devastating effect in the future.
“Why do we in America put up with what the US-China Commission has called the most aggressive country conducting espionage against the United States?
“That’s a good question that we must ask ourselves—whether we go to work every day at the White House or on Capitol Hill, or whether we shop every week for cheap Chinese products at our local Wal-Mart.”
In Chapter 9 of their book, Navarro and Autry look carefully at the dark and shadowy world of Chinese espionage on American soil, and elsewhere around the world.
“By the end of these chapters, we hope that everyone in America—from Main Street and Wall Street to the halls of the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon—has an epiphany about naivetè of engaging in unconditional commerce and trade with a country that is using spycraft, both old and new, to systematically strip us of our technologies and probe our defenses for a possible eventual kill,” they said.
They added: “As part of its boots on the ground, traditional spycraft, China’s government, and many of its state-run industries, actively runs a highly sophisticated three-pronged espionage campaign against many nations around the world—with major rivals like America, Europe and Japan drawing much of the attention.”
This three-pronged strategy, they said, involves penetrating academia, industry, and government institutions to steal valuable financial, industrial, political, and technological information, and prepare for possible disruptive and destructive attacks in the event of war.
“In fact, while the United States intelligence infrastructure has been consumed by the War on Terror, Chinese operatives have been allowed to run wild and free in America. Their vehicle is an elaborate “hybrid” espionage network, very different from that of the traditional spycraft of the Soviet Union,” they said.
They explained: “At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s KGB relied on a relatively small number of professional ‘secret agents’ stationed overseas and a seemingly constant supply of new American traitors they ‘turned’ through bribery or blackmail. While China has its own share of secret agents and turned Americans, it relies far more heavily upon a highly decentralized network of low-level spies, the vast majority of which are ethnic Chinese.”
They said China’s cadres of semi-pro spies and amateur informants are typically recruited by agencies such as the Ministry of State Security—China’s KGB—as well as by specific industry groups. Some of these spies may be drawn from the Chinese-American community. As noted by the Intelligence Threat Handbook, they are typically brought into the network in one of two ways: either by appeals to Chinese nationalism and ethnicity or by coercive threats to family members living in China.
They said: “Far more of China’s spies are embedded among the roughly 750,000 Chinese nationals who are issued US visas in any given year. They may be reporters for many agencies like Xinhua, students at American universities, touring business executives, guest workers at American corporations or national labs, or simply tourists. In fact, the vast quantities of legitimate Chinese visitors to America every year coupled with the large Chinese-American community make it easy for recruited spies to fly well below the FBI radar and do as Mao Zedong once advised, “swim with the fish.”
“The case of Li Fengzhi is instructive because it illustrates both how easy it is for a Chinese agent to infiltrate the United States and how deep is Chinese espionage network runs. Li was working as an analyst for the Ministry of Security when he slipped quietly into the United States as a graduate student at the University of Denver in 2003,” Navarro and Autry said.
According to interviews we conducted with Li, his life started out innocently enough as a son born in 1968 to an educated family in Liaoning province. Upon graduating from college in 1990, Li joined a provincial intelligence service; and, within a few years, he moved up to the Ministry of State Security where he worked for Beijing as an agent in his home province.
To Li, as a naïve young man, he saw this as a “very good job and a special career working for the government.” As analyst for China’s version of the KGB, Li spent time gathering intelligence on Eastern Europe and Russia while pursuing a PhD in international politics. In 2003, he was chosen to travel to the United States. Instead of spying against the United States, however, Li had an epiphany, said Navarro and Autry.
As Li saw more and more of the outside world and what freedom looked like, he, in his own words, “began to see that the Chinese Communist Party was evil and that it had been harming the Chinese people.” It was on the strength of this epiphany that Li sought to defect to the United States.
According to Li, when he “left the Ministry of State Security, they had about 100,000 documented agents or informants not counting the very amateur ones, and a large number of individuals who worked as spies within other Chinese governmental departments.” By comparison the FBI has only about 13,000 sworn officers.
Likewise, according to Li, official Chinese agents are Chinese war photographers, NGO members, influential Chinese-American leaders and business people, engineers, and scholars. In Li’s words, while these professional spies “might not have conditions, to get the important information, they will focus on recruiting informants to get that intelligence.”
“What is remarkable about the Li Fengzhi story, besides how easily he was able to slip into the United States despite his background in intelligence, is how much more of a realistic view he has of China than most citizens of the United States,” the authors said.
Ironically, though, the US is China’s biggest borrower. According to Google’s latest news, the US debt to China is $1.13 trillion as of February 2019. “That’s 28 percent of the $4.02 trillion in Treasury bills, notes and bonds held by foreign countries. The rest of the $22-trillion national debt is owned by either the American people or by the US government itself.”
Navarro received his PhD in economics from Harvard University and is a professor emeritus of economics and public policy at the University of California, Irvine. He currently serves as President Donald J. Trump’s trade adviser. Autry, a founder of several technology firms, has taught entreprneuship, strategy and macroeconomics at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California-Irvine.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.