The Han Peril: Born to Spy

"Chinese Students Are a Threat." --  FBI Director Chris Wray 

Daily Beast

FBI Director Chris Wray

China is massively exporting students-spies.

Sino-Americans are blasting FBI Director Chris Wray for telling Congress that Chinese students in the United States are covertly gathering intelligence for their government back home.

Wray’s comments came during the Senate intelligence committee’s annual open hearing on the greatest threats to the country. 

A host of Intelligence Community leaders shared a litany of concerns about dangers from around the globe. 

Then Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, asked Wray about “the counterintelligence risk posed to U.S. national security from Chinese students, particularly those in advanced programs in science and mathematics.”
Wray took it from there.
“The use of non-traditional collectors, especially in the academic setting—whether it’s professors, scientists, students—we see in almost every field office that the FBI has around the country,” he said. 

“It’s not just in major cities. It’s in small ones as well, it’s across basically every discipline. And I think the level of naivete on the part of the academic sector about this creates its own issues.”
What’s more, Wray added, the Bureau is actively investigating Chinese government-backed groups that "facilitate dialogues" between Chinese and American academics. 

It was a rare revelation of active FBI investigations—one that drew rage from Sino-Americans.

The FBI declined to comment on a request for additional details about Wray’s comments. 

A spokesperson for Senator Rubio did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Wray isn’t the first FBI official to raise concerns about Chinese government activity and Chinese students spying for China.
Edward You, an agent in the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, told members of Congress last March that the Bureau has concerns about Chinese government-backed efforts to gather massive amounts of data on Americans’ health. 

In some cases, he said, Chinese government-backed hackers have stolen health data. 

But in other cases, Americans give away this data to Chinese government-backed labs that specialize in DNA sequencing and diagnostic tests, You said. 

American health and academic institutions work with these labs, sharing tens of thousands of Americans’ personal health information with these Chinese government-backed entities. 

He described the situation as “a ticking time bomb.”
Rubio spurred Monday’s comments, and said that while the Kremlin poses major threat, China is “the biggest issue of our time.” 

The Trump administration has considered curbing the number of Chinese students studying STEM to “ensure that intellectual property is not transferred to China.”
“They’re exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have, which we all revere,” Wray said in response. 

“But they’re taking advantage of this. One of the things we’re trying to do is to view the Chinese threat as not just a whole of government threat, but a whole-of-society threat, on their end. And I think it’s going to take a whole-of-society response by us. It’s not just the Intelligence Community, but it’s raising awareness within our academic sector, within our private sector, as part of defense.”
With Chinese students taking up a “large majority” of graduate STEM enrollment, it seems that the FBI has taken this to be an intelligence risk.
Intersections of the academic world and Chinese espionage aren’t unprecedented. 

In 2015, the Justice Department announced the indictment of six Chinese nationals, including two who met while working on a Defense Department-funded research project as students at a Southern California university. 

They later stole trade secrets from their employers, which they shared with a university in China, according to the indictment, which said that university went on to use the information to get military contracts.
Court filings show the prosecution is underway.
Espionage isn’t the only concern Rubio and Wray discussed at the hearing. 

Rubio asked Wray if he worries about the Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes, which partner with American universities. 

The senator said one concern, which he recently shared with Institute-partnered universities in Florida, is that these programs aim to covertly change American public opinion on the Chinese government by whitewashing its human rights abuses.
The FBI Director said the Bureau has opened investigations into some of them.
“We do share concerns about the Confucius Institutes,” Wray said. 

“We’ve been watching that development for a while. It’s just one of many tools that they take advantage of. We have seen some decrease recently in their own enthusiasm and commitment to that particular program, but it is something that we’re watching warily and in certain instances have developed appropriate investigations into them.”