The Sunday Read: ‘The Daring Ruse That Exposed China’s Campaign to Steal American Secrets’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2023

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In March 2017, an engineer at G.E. Aviation in Cincinnati received a request on LinkedIn. The engineer, Hua, is in his 40s, tall and athletic, with a boyish face that makes him look a decade younger. He moved to the United States from China in 2003 for graduate studies in structural engineering. The LinkedIn request came from Chen Feng, a school official at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, in eastern China. Days later, Chen sent him an email inviting him to the university to give a research presentation. Hua arranged to arrive in May, so he could attend a nephew’s wedding and his college reunion at Harbin Institute of Technology. There was one problem, though: Hua knew that G.E. would deny permission to give the talk if he asked, which he was supposed to do. He went to Nanjing, and flew back to the United States after the presentation. He thought that would be the end of the matter. Many scientists and engineers of Chinese origin in the United States are invited to China to give presentations about their fields. Hua couldn’t have known that his trip to Nanjing would prove to be the start of a series of events that would end up giving the U.S. government an unprecedented look inside China’s widespread and tireless campaign of economic espionage targeting the United States, culminating in the first-ever conviction of a Chinese intelligence official on American soil.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, my name is Yudhid Padacharji, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine
0:07.0	where I write about intelligence, national security, scams, and other topics.
0:13.6	This week's Sunday read episode is from a recent story of mine for the magazine about China's
0:19.6	efforts to steal American technology and the human toll of that espionage.
0:26.9	So China's government has spent decades digging for intelligence so that it could hopefully
0:32.8	leapfrog other countries in terms of technological advancement.
0:38.2	Fifty years ago that meant something relatively harmless, like collecting whatever information
0:44.6	was available from open sources like scientific journals and books, and that sort of thing.
0:51.9	But there was a turning point in the 1980s.
0:55.7	China started hunting for secrets from the military and commercial sectors, which meant
1:01.7	looking for intellectual property for everything, from, say, pesticides to wind turbines.
1:09.6	And this time, China also began using a new approach, tapping into Chinese descendants
1:16.1	all around the world.
1:18.7	The approach went something like this.
1:21.5	These agents and civilians would identify people with Chinese roots in other countries
1:27.2	who might work in a pivotal way for a company or a government lab or a university.
1:33.1	Someone who might possess some bits of useful information.
1:37.8	They would court this person with free trips to China, invite them to give lectures, attend
1:43.1	conferences, and of course treat them lavishly with great food, luxury hotels, and maybe
1:50.4	a cash-on-errorium.
1:52.6	All with the goal, experts told me, of building relationships that China could take advantage
1:58.9	of and eventually use to get a trade secret or two into its hands.
	...

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