US-China Tech Race: Spies and Lies (Part Two)
FT News Briefing
Forhecz Topher
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2022
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the second episode of this season of Tech Tonic, James Kynge, the FT’s Global China Editor, asks how significant Chinese intellectual property theft has been to the country’s rise as a global tech superpower.
We hear from an FBI agent based in Silicon Valley whose job is to prevent the theft of trade secrets, and ask whether China’s ‘talent programmes’, under which Beijing funds scientists and engineers around the world, are actually spy recruitment networks or whether they are genuine attempts to lure home professionals and plug China’s talent gap. Experts are warning the growing distrust between the US and China could put the future of scientific and technological exchange at risk.
Featuring interviews with Nick Shenkin, FBI special agent and director of the Strategic Technology Task Force for the FBI's San Francisco field office; an interview between the FT’s Demetri Sevastopulo and Michael Orlando, acting director of the US National Counterintelligence and Security Center; Rui Ma, China tech analyst and creator of the Tech Buzz China podcast; Wang Huiyao, founder and president of Center for China and Globalization in Beijing; Winston Ma, author and adjunct professor at the NYU law school; and Gisela Kusakawa, assistant director at the Anti-Racial Profiling Project at Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
Check out stories and up-to-the-minute news from the FT’s technology team at ft.com/technology
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Presented by James Kynge. Interview with Michael Orlando conducted by Demetri Sevastopulo. Edwin Lane is senior producer. Josh Gabert-Doyon is producer. Manuela Saragosa is executive producer. Sound design is by Breen Turner, with original music from Metaphor Music. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.
News clips credits: NBC, Global News, Micron, The Oregonian
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The FT News Briefing is supported by Equinole, the UK's energy partner. |
| 0:06.3 | Learn more at equinole.co.uk |
| 0:10.8 | To be honest, I mean at cocktail parties, with people I don't know well, |
| 0:15.3 | I usually just say, I'm a lawyer who works for the Department of Justice, |
| 0:19.7 | it's there's very little you can say about what we do. |
| 0:23.5 | Nick Shenkin works in Silicon Valley, and if that's where you work, |
| 0:28.0 | well, you may have met him, you just wouldn't know he's actually an FBI agent. |
| 0:34.1 | I tend to just bore them by telling them I'm a lawyer who works for the Department of Justice, |
| 0:39.3 | which isn't false, but it's boring enough that nobody has any follow-on questions. |
| 0:43.6 | And there's something else you probably wouldn't know. |
| 0:46.1 | The FBI has its own dedicated field office in California's capital for all things tech. |
| 0:53.0 | Nick's job to prevent industrial espionage and the theft of intellectual property, |
| 0:59.5 | IP theft, at America's biggest tech companies. |
| 1:03.9 | The best estimates that I've seen from private entities put the damage to the US economy |
| 1:09.3 | from IP theft somewhere between $450 and $850 billion per annum, |
| 1:15.4 | but I can tell you that a very, very significant percentage of that is coming out of Silicon Valley. |
| 1:21.3 | And Nick says that the biggest threat of industrial espionage in Silicon Valley |
| 1:26.3 | has increasingly come from one place, China. |
| 1:30.8 | What's concerning about that is a trend that we've seen of more and more aggressive |
| 1:36.8 | intellectual property acquisition by the Chinese Communist Party. |
| 1:41.7 | They're targeting biotech, nanotech, ag tech, quantum technologies. |
| 1:45.8 | If you look at their five-year plan, the breadth of the technologies that they intend to acquire |
... |
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