CCP’s espionage threatens military, critical infrastructure systems worldwide

FORUM Staff

To modernize its military under General Secretary Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has sought to steal critical industrial and military information and advanced technologies from foreign corporations, governments, militaries and universities through a range of techniques, according to defense experts.

“The behavior we’re talking about here goes well beyond traditional espionage,” Mike Burgess, director general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), said in October 2023, according to Reuters.

“The Chinese government is engaged in the most sustained scaled and sophisticated theft of intellectual property and expertise in human history,” Burgess said.

Intellectual property theft by companies, usually Chinese, with ties to the CCP has been documented from France, Germany and the United Kingdom to Cambodia, Hong Kong, Japan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, The Guardian newspaper reported in February 2024.

“This sort of thing is happening every day in Australia, as it is in the countries here,” Burgess said, referring to the members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and the United States. In May 2023, the group warned of a broad Chinese spy operation targeting critical infrastructure and other sectors. In September 2023, the ASIO uncovered a CCP plot to steal secrets from an Australian research institution, Reuters reported.

The CCP targets allies and adversaries alike using conventional espionage techniques — such as spies, honey traps, blackmail and bribery — and contemporary approaches that rely on cyber hacking and clandestine data collection. Besides using government agencies and state-run organizations and companies, the CCP recruits members of the Chinese diaspora, including entrepreneurs, researchers and students, as well as foreign nationals through its Confucius Institutes, which the party promotes as cultural centers, to advance its efforts.

Such activities threaten foreign militaries and key global infrastructure. Moreover, CCP cyber espionage campaigns are set to increase in scope and severity with the proliferation of generative artificial intelligence and machine learning, Dr. Benjamin Jensen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ International Security Program, testified in September 2023 before the U.S. Congress.

Much of the CCP’s espionage falls under Xi’s military-civilian fusion (MCF) strategy, which he pushed to start implementing in 2017, to tie military efforts to seemingly harmless civilian activities. In practice, the CCP defies international ethical standards and norms to achieve its military modernization.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) “has mobilized vast resources in support of its defense modernization, including through its MCF Development Strategy, as well as espionage activities to acquire sensitive, dual-use, and military-grade equipment,” according to the U.S. Defense Department’s 2023 China Military Power Report. “The PRC has substantially reorganized its defense industrial sector to improve weapon system research, development, acquisition, testing, evaluation, and production.

“The PRC’s efforts to acquire sensitive, dual-use, or military-grade equipment included aviation technologies, radiation-hardened power amplifiers and supervisory circuits, radiation-hardened integrated circuits, monolithic microwave integrated circuits, accelerometers, gyroscopes, naval and marine technologies, signals decoders, syntactic foam trade secrets, space communications, military communication jamming equipment and dynamic random access memory,” the report said.

The CCP has copied or reverse-engineered an array of technologies from other militaries. The Rostec Corp., a Russian defense conglomerate, accused Beijing in 2019 of copying aircraft engines, Sukhoi planes, deck jets, air defense systems, portable air defense missiles and medium-range surface-to-air systems, among other technology. Russian President Vladimir Putin founded Rostec in 2007.

Analysts say the CCP continues targeting Russia to acquire sensitive military technology, according to a May 2022 report by Check Point, an Israeli-U.S. cybersecurity firm.

Using phishing and hacking, the CCP in recent years tried to infiltrate Russian institutes for research on satellite communications, radar and electronic warfare technology, The New York Times newspaper reported.