The United States has often accused the People's Republic of China (PRC) of unlawfully acquiring US military technology, classified information, personnel data, and trade secrets of US companiesFinkle, J. Menn, J., Viswanatha, J. U.S. accuses China of cyber spying on American companies. Reuters, 19 May 2014 6:04pm EDT.Clayton, M. US indicts five in China's secret 'Unit 61398' for cyber-spying. Christian Science Monitor, May 19, 2014 in order to support China's long-term military and commercial development. Alleged perpetrators include Chinese government agencies, affiliated personnel, civilian-in-name companiesWortzel, p. 9. and their network of academic or business contacts.deGraffenreid, p. 30.
Individuals convicted of traditional espionage include Larry Wu-tai Chin, Katrina Leung, Gwo-Bao Min, Chi Mak, Peter Lee, and Shujun Wang.Wortzel, p. 6. The PRC also uses cyber espionage to penetrate the computer networks of U.S. businesses and government agencies. Notable examples include the 2009 Operation Aurora and the 2015 Office of Personnel Management data breach.Helft, Miguel and John Markoff, "In Rebuke of China, Focus Falls on Cybersecuirty," The New York Times, January 13, 2010. Units of the People's Liberation Army have also been implicated in a number of cyber intrusions.
US law enforcement officials have identified China as the most active foreign power involved in the illegal acquisition of American technology.Wortzel, p. 8. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, from 2000 to 2023, there were 224 reported instances of Chinese spying in the United States.
During its martial law period (1949–1987), the Republic of China government on Taiwan spied on its citizens abroad, especially in the United States.
Methods
Human intelligence collection China has used a variety of methods to gather intelligence in the United States. Individuals attempt to obtain targeted information from open sources such as libraries, research institutions and unclassified databases. Chinese travelers are recruited to carry out specific intelligence activities while individuals returning from exchange programs, trade missions and scientific-cooperation programs are debriefed for intelligence.Eftimiades, p. 28. Chinese citizens may be coerced into cooperating.Wortzel, p. 5. China has recruited both Chinese and US citizens in the past. Motivations for the recruited include finances, conviction in the cause, extortion, and ego.
Technology transfer through commerce Much technology acquisition occurs through commerce and commercial regulations. The regulatory and commercial environment in China pressures American and other foreign companies to transfer technology, capital and manufacturing expertise, especially in defense-related or dual-use industries such as computers, to their Chinese partners as part of doing business in China's huge, lucrative markets.Wortzel, p. 4.Wortzel, p. 3. Chinese agents purchase high-tech equipment through front organizations in Hong Kong. China also uses state-run firms to purchase American companies with access to the targeted technology.
Industrial espionage China also accesses foreign technology through industrial espionage, with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement rating China's industrial-espionage and theft operations as the leading threat to US technological security.US Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People's Republic of China, (Washington, DC: July 2007), p. 29. In 2021, acting NCSC Director Michael Orlando estimated that China stole between $200 billion and $600 billion worth of American intellectual property every year. Between October 2002 and January 2003, five Chinese businessmen were accused of illegally shipping equipment and trade secrets from California to China,Polmar, Norman and Thomas B. Allen, Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage, Second Edition, (New York: Random House Reference, 2004), p. 125. and US officials prevented a Chinese man from shipping a new, high-speed computer used in classified projects (including nuclear-weapons development) from Sandia National Laboratories.
Use of Artificial Intelligence AI models like DeepSeek have been employed by State-affiliated cybergroups like Grimfengxi that used the tool for creating exploit codes, Huapi that targeted an email system of a Taiwanese company, and Teleboyi that allegedly used the platform to "collect 1,000 IP addresses" from the internet and map a company’s domains. According to the US Justice Department, activity linked to one of these groups overlaps with operations attributed to Mustang Panda, another group that is backed by the Chinese government.
However, Chinese hackers have also used American AI for such activities. According to the cybersecurity firm CyCraft, ChatGPT has been used during an attack on a Western think-tank. A group known as Slime22 managed to use Anthropic's Claude Code to infiltrate the systems of a Taiwanese technology company before.
FBI counterintelligence assessments In July 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray called China the "greatest long-term threat" to the United States. He said that "the FBI is now opening a new China-related counterintelligence case every 10 hours. Of the nearly 5,000 active counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China."
Targeting of US officials US Representative Eric Swalwell, who served on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, was in the past targeted by a Chinese woman believed to be a clandestine officer of China's Ministry of State Security. The alleged Chinese spy later participated in fundraising for Swalwell's 2014 congressional election bid and helped place an intern inside Swalwell's congressional office. The FBI gave Swalwell a "defensive briefing" in 2015, informing him that the woman was a suspected Chinese agent.
In 2013, a Chinese driver was employed by Senator Dianne Feinstein who was notified that the driver was being investigated for possible Chinese spying. At some point, he visited China and was recruited by China's MSS. He worked for Senator Feinstein for several years. The FBI concluded the driver hadn't revealed anything of substance.
Operation Fox Hunt and pressure on dissidents In 2015, the Obama administration protested to Beijing after discovering that Chinese agents, as part of Operation Fox Hunt, were tracking down Chinese dissidents in the United States to pressure them to return to China for prosecution.
In October 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that "when it couldn't locate a Fox Hunt target, the Chinese government sent an emissary to visit the victim's family here in the United States. And the message they said to pass on? The target had two options: Return to China promptly or commit suicide. And what happens when Fox Hunt targets refuse to return to China? Their family members, both here in the United States and in China, have been threatened and coerced; and those back in China have even been arrested for leverage."
In July 2021, ProPublica reported that Operation Fox Hunt, nominally focused on economic crimes, was targeting "Tibetans, Hong Kongers, followers of the Falun Gong religious movement and, perhaps most visibly, the Uyghurs." ProPublica reported that a team of Communist Party operatives and police based in Wuhan had been roaming the United States pressuring Chinese immigrant communities, with the spies performing stalking in plain sight and hiring a US-based private investigator. For example, in a 2018 New Jersey court case, a former Chinese official living in the US was sued by the Wuhan-based Xinba Construction Group. The expatriate was harassed outside of court and received notes threatening his family. Later, he received a video from his family in China imploring him to return with a staged shot, implying the video was coerced by the Chinese government, according to investigators.
In 2017, MSS officials entered the United States on transit visas while posing as cultural officials. They met with dissident Guo Wengui to pressure him to return to China, but Guo recorded the conversations and alerted the FBI. The officials were later confronted by FBI agents and ordered to leave the country after admitting they were security officials. Before departing, they visited Guo a second time, but he again refused their offer. The FBI considered arresting the officials on charges including visa fraud and extortion, but the arrests were reportedly canceled to avoid a diplomatic crisis. The FBI did confiscate the officials’ phones before they left the United States.
MSS structure and geographic focus The eighteenth bureau of the Ministry of State Security (MSS) is dedicated to espionage against the United States. According to Nicholas Eftimiades, PRC intelligence collection activities focus on educational, research, and manufacturing centers in states such as Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, New Jersey, and Texas.
Targeting of former federal employees and data brokers A May 2025 study by researchers at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies found that a Chinese government-backed intelligence operation has been targeting laid-off US government employees through fake job websites such as LinkedIn and social media. Data broker companies are also targets.
Nuclear espionage
Information is collected through espionage, reviews of US technical and academic publications and interaction with US scientists.deGraffenreid, p. 98. China tasks a large number of individuals to collect small pieces of information (which are collated and analyzed), and individual agents can more easily escape suspicion. US government personnel suspect that China's intelligence-gathering efforts directed towards the development of modern nuclear weapons are focused on the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where nuclear weapons were first developed in the 1940s, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. China is known to have stolen classified information on the W-56 Minuteman II ICBM, the W-62 Minuteman III ICBM, the W-70 Lance short-range ballistic missile (SRBM), the W-76 Trident C-4 submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), the W-78 Minuteman III Mark 12A ICBM, the W-87 Peacekeeper ICBM and the W-88 Trident D-5 SLBM and weapon-design concepts and features.deGraffenreid, p. 100.
In 2016, the US Justice Department charged China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) with stealing nuclear secrets from the United States. The Guardian reported: "According to the US Department of Justice, the FBI has discovered evidence that China General Nuclear Power (CGN) has been engaged in a conspiracy to steal US nuclear secrets stretching back almost two decades. Both CGN and one of the corporation's senior advisers, Szuhsiung Ho, have been charged with conspiring to help the Chinese government develop nuclear material in a manner that is in clear breach of US law."
A 2022 report by Strider Technologies, a strategic intelligence firm, found that over the past two decades, China has recruited at least 154 Chinese scientists from LANL to support China's development of military technologies that pose threats to US national security.
1999 Cox Report
Cyberwarfare
China conducts political and corporate espionage to access the networks of financial, defense and technology companies and research institutions in the United States. Email attachments attempting to enter the networks of US companies and organizations exploit security weaknesses in software. A recipient opens an email attachment, apparently from a familiar source, containing a program which embeds in the recipient's computer. The remotely controlled program allows an attacker to access the recipient's email, send sensitive documents to specific addresses and turns on such instruments as web cameras or microphones.