© BloombergChristopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), speaks during an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
"China has pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation in any way it can, from a wide array of businesses, universities and organisations," said Christopher Wray, who has served as the head of America's principal federal law enforcement agency since 2017.
Comment: And yet, amongst many other achievements unparalleled by other nations, China was able to navigate to the dark side of the moon.
Beijing's campaign to steal US technology and trade secrets was being waged through intelligence services, state-owned enterprises, "ostensibly private companies" and graduate students and researchers, Wray said, calling the intelligence threat posed by China "broader [and] more severe" than that of any other country.
The threat posed to the US by China was part of what Wray called a "paradigm shift" in the perception of danger to national security, characterised by a "blended threat where cybercrime and espionage merge together in all kinds of new ways".
Comment: An area pioneered by the US, only to be taken up by others due to necessity: After Syria & Venezuela, Russian military prepares for Hybrid war
Addressing the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, Wray said that economic espionage investigations, which dominate the FBI's counter-intelligence programme, "almost invariably lead back to China in nearly all of our 56 field offices".
The US Department of Justice has in recent months launched cyber espionage-related indictments against a number of Chinese entities, including alleged hackers working for China's Ministry of State Security, whom the department said had worked for years to steal commercial aircraft technology.
Comment: Obviously no one in their right mind would want to copy the US' forever faulty F-35s that have cost the US taxpayer over $1 Billion, and counting.
China's largest telecommunications firm, the smartphone maker Huawei, has also faced several federal charges that include the theft of trade secrets from US wireless carrier T-Mobile, which the Chinese company has denied.
That China was taking the long view of a plan to achieve dominance in critical areas was an understatement, Wray said: "They've made the long view an art form."
The FBI director said that greater collaboration between governmental and private spheres was needed in the US to counter such threats, but warned that American companies should not take it upon themselves to "hack back" in retaliation.
"Whole of society threats" such as that posed by China required a "whole of society response", said Wray, arguing that "the next few years will be defined by what kind of progress we can make with public-private partnerships".
To that end, the FBI was conducting "defensive briefings" with private companies to caution them about the potentially nefarious intentions of external business partners, he said.
Nobody wins in a US-China visa war
Communication in both directions was vital, not only with US companies but also with research and educational institutions, Wray said, urging academic bodies to be "more sophisticated and thoughtful about how others may exploit the open academic environment that we revere in this country".
Wray's remarks came after reports emerged last week that the FBI had unleashed a counter-intelligence operation to bar Chinese academics suspected of links to Chinese intelligence agencies from the US, with nearly 30 Chinese professors having had their US visas cancelled or put on administrative review in the past year.
Though declining on Friday to comment on the specificity of any visa-related case, Wray said the FBI had seen many instances where the visa process, vital to ensuring an open and collaborative research environment, was "being abused and exploited".
Comment: The US will suffer the worst of this ban with a further deterioration in academia, not China.
US and China urged to stop blocking academic visas
"I think that's starting to happen more and more often," he said.
The heightened scrutiny, reported by the New York Times, marks a notable departure from the past four decades since the two countries normalised relations, during which the US has generally welcomed Chinese scholars and researchers with open arms.
Beijing, on the other hand, has been more restrictive in allowing US academics to visit China, especially those whose research focuses on politically sensitive events or issues.
Give Chinese scholars, firms a fair chance, Xi tells foreign leaders
But it appears that China has further tightened the space for academic exchanges following the sharp downturn of relations with the US.
Michael Pillsbury, an informal adviser to US President Donald Trump on China policy known for his hawkish stance, was recently declined a visa by the Chinese government to attend a conference hosted by a think tank and an event at the US embassy in Beijing, according to an Axios report.
Over the course of many years, it should have become obvious to anyone with any discernment at all that the US gov't and those who claim to speak for it are a greater threat to the people of the US and what this nation once stood for than China, Russia, N Korea, Iran, etc., etc., etc. all put together.
Calling for a "united front" with the gov't - what a laugh! Only AFTER all criminal, unethical, and/or incompetent gov't officials (that'd be most of them), elected or not, commit seppuku as atonement for their behavior while in office might you reasonably expect the people's disgust with what this gov't has become to begin to dissipate.