Belgium — Den of Chinese spies and gateway for China

The host to EU institutions and NATO headquarters, the European nation is an alluring draw card for China: 250 Chinese spies were working in Brussels — more than from Russia.

By Alan Crawford and Peter Martin 

When a suspected Chinese spy was extradited to the US last year, the US Department of Justice praised the “significant assistance” given by authorities in Belgium.
Xu Yanjun was arrested in Belgium after going there to meet a contact “for the purpose of discussing and receiving the sensitive information he had requested,” the US indictment said.
Xu was charged with attempting to commit economic espionage, with GE Aviation the main target. The case is pending.
Belgium might seem an unlikely destination for a Chinese agent, but it is a den of spies, the Belgian State Security Service (VSSE) says.

It says the number of operatives is at least as high as during the Cold War and Brussels is their “chessboard.”
Host to the EU’s institutions and NATO headquarters, Belgium is an alluring draw card for aspiring espionage-makers. 

Diplomats, lawmakers and military officials mingle, sharing gossip and ideas, while Belgium’s strategic location makes it important to China in its own right as a place to exert its influence in Europe.
“The mere fact that we hold international institutions such as NATO and the EU makes Belgium a natural focus for China,” Brussels-based Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations research fellow Bruno Hellendorff said. 

“It’s common knowledge that there are many spies in Brussels, and these days espionage from China is a major and growing concern.”
German newspaper Die Welt in February cited an unpublished assessment by the EU’s European External Action Service that about 250 Chinese spies were working in Brussels — more than from Russia.

Famous Chinese spy Song Xinning

Song Xinning, a Chinese director of the Confucius Institute at VUB Brussels University, was in October barred from entering the EU Schengen area for eight years after being accused of espionage.
An insight into the methods employed by China are outlined in the Xu indictment.

His duties included obtaining trade secrets from aviation and aerospace companies in the US, “and throughout Europe.”He used aliases and invited experts on paid trips to China to deliver presentations at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, operated by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. 

He ensured targets carried a work computer whose data could be captured.
The US remains at the core of Beijing’s espionage activities — the head of the FBI in July said that China was trying to “steal their way up the economic ladder at our expense.”
Yet Europe appears increasingly in focus, with cases of interference by China identified in Poland, France, Germany and the UK.
“The Chinese are becoming far more active than they were 10 or 20 years ago,” said former British diplomat Charles Parton, who has more than two decades of experience of China.
Espionage is “the far end of the spectrum” of interference that ranges from academia to “technological spillover” — collecting data to send back to China for mining, London-based Royal United Services Institute senior associate fellow Parton said.
Belgium’s elite generally has a relaxed attitude toward China that can open it to charges of complacency. 

A fractured political system makes it harder to craft a unified strategy — there is still no government six months after elections.A delegation to China this month included four ministers responsible for trade relations — a federal minister plus one each for Dutch-speaking Flanders, Francophone Wallonia and Brussels.
Even as the EU adopts a more skeptical stance toward China — losing its naivety, as one senior European official put it — Belgium is opening the gates to Chinese investments in strategic areas from energy to shipping and technology.
Belgium is responding to China’s rise “in a pragmatic way,” stressing its advantages in areas such as logistics, while ensuring “attention to the sustainability of the projects and respect for international standards,” the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
“They [Belgium] have very advanced technologies that China needs,” said Renmin University Institute of International Affairs director Wang Yiwei 王義桅, a former Chinese diplomat based in Brussels. 

“Through Brussels you can access Europe and even the United States.”
He said that Chinese innovation is fast catching up with the US.
All nations make efforts to win over hearts and minds, and much influence-building is legitimate diplomatic activity, but there is also a gray zone and it can be “difficult to tell the hand of the Chinese state from a much more diffuse web of influence-peddling,” the European Council on Foreign Relations said in a 2017 report.

Flemish Quislings

Brecht Vermeulen, chairman of the Belgian parliament’s home affairs committee until losing his seat this year, joined parliament’s China friendship group soon after his election in 2014 as a lawmaker for the Flemish nationalist N-VA party, the largest group in the then-ruling coalition.
Over the course of his five-year term, Vermeulen made several trips to China, where officials briefed him on technological advances in artificial intelligence, facial recognition and cybersecurity.
During that time, N-VA policy evolved from sympathizing with efforts by some in Taiwan and Hong Kong to keep a distance from China, toward what Vermeulen called “Realpolitik.”
“I think we must open more doors to the Chinese and see how they react,” Vermeulen said in an interview in Ghent. 

“If they open their doors, too, then it’s good on both sides. Of course, we are a small country and China is enormous, but if we act in one way and there’s a reaction in the same way, then OK, we can proceed, step by step.”
Still, there are signs that the Belgian authorities are attuned to potential threats.
State Grid Corp of China, which has more employees than Brussels has inhabitants, in 2016 bid for a stake in energy company Eandis. 

A last-minute leak of a VSSE dossier urged “extreme caution,” citing the risk that Belgian technology could be used by the Chinese military, and a planned vote on the bid never took place.
Engaging with China’s influence apparatus is not without risks.
Filip Dewinter, a regional lawmaker with the far-right Vlaams Belang party, was investigated over his ties to an organization suspected of spying for China. 

The probe was dropped after it was found Dewinter had committed no crime.
“Maybe I had too much faith in these people,” De Morgen cited Dewinter as saying in February, adding that he was now “more informed” about Chinese espionage and the need “to be careful.”
However, while there is now “some strategic thinking” on China in Belgium, the institutional setup means it is not across the board, Hellendorff said.
He sees “little to no dialogue between regions on the implications of growing Chinese investment in the country, not only in economic terms, but also in terms of its impact on values and influence.”That lack of coordination between regions and layers of government allows Antwerp Mayor Bart de Wever to play an outsize role in ties with Beijing. 

Antwerp is home to Europe’s second-largest port and has a direct rail link to China.
Wang thinks bilateral relations are developing well.
“In Europe there’s a saying that small is beautiful,” Wang said. 

“Belgium is beautiful in the Chinese understanding.”

America's 350000 Chinese Spies

China is using Chinese students to steal secrets
By Zachary Cohen and Alex Marquardt

Chinese "student" spies

"Student" spy Ji Chaoqun

Washington -- In August 2015, an electrical engineering student in Chicago sent an email to a Chinese national titled "Midterm test questions."
More than two years later, the email would turn up in an FBI probe in the Southern District of Ohio involving a Chinese intelligence officer who was trying to acquire technical information from a defense contractor.
Investigators took note.
They identified the email's writer as Ji Chaoqun, a Chinese student who would go on to enlist in the US Army Reserve. 

His email, they say, had nothing to do with exams.
Instead, at the direction of a high-level Chinese intelligence official, Ji attached background reports on eight US-based individuals who Beijing could target for potential recruitment as spies.
The eight -- naturalized US citizens originally from Taiwan or China -- had worked in science and technology. 

Seven had worked for or recently retired from US defense contractors. 

All of them were perceived as rich targets for a new form of espionage that China has been aggressively pursuing to win a silent war against the US for information and global influence.

Ji was arrested in September last year, accused of acting as an "illegal agent" at the direction of a "high-level intelligence officer" of a provincial department of the Ministry of State Security, China's top espionage agency, the Department of Justice said at the time.
He was formally indicted by a grand jury on January 24. 

Ji appeared in federal court in Chicago and pleaded not guilty, according to Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for the US attorney's office in Chicago. 

While Ji has not been convicted, the circumstances outlined in his case demonstrate how China is using people from all walks of life with increasing frequency, current and former US intelligence officials tell CNN.
Beijing is leaning on expatriate Chinese scientists, businesspeople and students like Ji -- one of roughly 350,000 from China who study in the US every year -- to gain access to anything and everything at American universities and companies that's of interest to Beijing, according to current and former US intelligence officials, lawmakers and several experts.
The sheer size of the Chinese student population at US universities presents a major challenge for law enforcement and intelligence agencies tasked with striking the necessary balance between protecting America's open academic environment and mitigating the risk to national security.
While it remains unclear just how many of these students are on the radar of law enforcement, current and former intelligence officials told CNN that they all remain tethered to the Chinese espionage machine in some way.
It's part of a persistent, aggressive Chinese effort to undermine American industries, steal American secrets and eventually diminish American influence in the world so that Beijing can advance its own agenda, US officials, analysts and experts told CNN.
CIA Director Gina Haspel warned last year that China intends "to diminish US influence to advance their own goals."
China's approach to espionage is taking on added urgency as ties between Beijing and Washington sour over trade differences, cyberattacks and standoffs over military influence in Asia.

"China's intelligence services exploit the openness of American society, especially academia and the scientific community, using a variety of means," according to the intelligence community's World Wide Threat Assessment.

Lawmakers are also sounding the alarm.
"There is no comparison to the breadth and scope of the Chinese threat facing America today, as they actively seek to supplant the US globally," Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida told CNN, noting that Russia and China have taken similar approaches when it comes to nontraditional espionage.

'Covert influencers'
For more than a decade, US law enforcement and intelligence officials have raised internal concerns about US universities becoming soft targets for Chinese intelligence services that use Chinese students and staff to access emerging technologies, according to multiple former US officials.
But in recent months, senior officials have expressed a renewed sense of urgency in addressing the issue and sought to increase public awareness by highlighting the threat during congressional testimony and while speaking at various security forums.
While US officials stress that they believe some Chinese students are here for legitimate purposes, they have also made it clear that the Trump administration continues to grapple with counterintelligence concerns posed by Chinese agents seeking to exploit vulnerabilities within academic institutions.
Rather than having trained spies attempt to infiltrate US universities and businesses, Chinese intelligence services have strategically utilized members of its student population to act as "access agents" or "covert influencers," according to Joe Augustyn, a former CIA officer with firsthand knowledge of the issue from his time at the agency.
Creating this degree of separation allows the Chinese government to maintain some deniability should an operation become exposed, Augustyn said.
"We allow 350,000 or so Chinese students here every year," William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said last April during an Aspen Institute conference. 

"That's too much. We have a very liberal visa policy for them. It is a tool that is used by the Chinese government to facilitate nefarious activity here in the US."
Chinese students now constitute the largest foreign student body in the US, according to data from the Institute of International Education.
US intelligence officials have taken note of the steady increase in Chinese students entering the country each year and are well aware of the challenges associated with that trend.
Along with cyber-intrusion and strategic investing in American businesses, senior US intelligence officials told CNN on Tuesday that China is tapping into its massive network of Chinese students to compress the time it takes to acquire certain capabilities.

"In a world where technology is available, where we are training their scientists and engineers, and their scientists and engineers were already good on their own, we are just making them able to not have to toil for the same amount of time to get capabilities that will rival or test us," a senior official in the office of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said.

Addressing that problem is difficult given the large population of Chinese student spies sent to the US each year.
"We know without a doubt that anytime a graduate student from China comes to the US, they are briefed when they go, and briefed when they come back," according to Augustyn.

"There is no question in my mind, depending on where they are and what they are doing, that they have a role to play for their government."

In Ji's case, he was first approached by a Chinese intelligence officer who, initially at least, used a false identity, according to FBI Special Agent Andrew McKay, who filed a criminal complaint against Ji in the US District Court in Chicago.
The complaint charges Ji with one count of knowingly acting in the US as an agent of Chinese government without prior notification to the attorney general. 

Ji has been detained since his arrest in September, according to his lawyer.
Like thousands of Chinese nationals who come to the US each year, Ji entered the country on an F1 visa -- used for international students in academic programs.
Citing immigration records, the complaint states that Ji's goal, when he landed in Chicago in August 2013, was to study electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he ultimately earned a master's degree.
By December, Ji had been approached by the high-level Chinese intelligence official, who presented himself as a professor at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Ji, now 27, eventually realized who this official and his colleagues really were, according to the criminal complaint.
Still, court documents say he would funnel them background reports on other Chinese civilians living in the US who might be pressured to serve as spies -- in this case, in the strategically critical US industries of aerospace and technology. 

And he would lie to US officials about it, according to the complaint filed by FBI investigators.
In their response, the Chinese government did not comment on the current status of Ji's case.
But in September, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told CNN he was "unaware of the situation" when asked about Ji's arrest during a press briefing.
According to the complaint, FBI agents discovered about 36 text messages on one iCloud account that Ji and the intelligence officer exchanged between December 2013 and July 2015. 

In 2016, after he graduated, Ji enlisted in the US Army Reserve under a program in which foreign nationals can be recruited if their skills are considered "vital to the national interest."
As part of his Army interview and in his security clearance application, Ji was asked if he'd had contact with foreign security services, the complaint says.
He answered "no."
The Washington Post previously reported that Ji's case has been linked to the indictment of a Chinese intelligence officer named Xu Yanjun.
Xu's indictment was unsealed in October after he was arrested in Belgium for stealing trade secrets from US aerospace companies. 

He is the first Chinese intelligence officer to be extradited for prosecution in the US. 

He has pleaded not guilty.

Complex counter intelligence challenge
FBI Director Christopher Wray, in the past year, has sought to focus repeatedly on the threat from Chinese students in US universities trying to get access to sensitive military and civilian research.
"They're exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have," Wray told a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last year, expressing concern that academic officials aren't taking the threat from China seriously enough.
But Wray told Senate lawmakers he has seen reasons for optimism.
"One of the things that I've been most encouraged about in an otherwise bleak landscape is the degree to which -- as Director Coats was alluding to -- American companies are waking up, American universities are waking up, our foreign partners are waking up," Wray said.

Still, the issue continues to pose a complex counterintelligence challenge for the US.

The Chinese are notorious for appealing to the nationalism and loyalty of their citizens to coerce them into carrying out acts of espionage, lawmakers and intelligence officials say.
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the leading Democrat on the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence, stressed that it is important to recognize "that the Chinese government has enormous power over its citizens."
"In China, only the government can grant someone permission to leave the country to study or work in the United States and we have seen the Chinese government use their power over their citizens to encourage those citizens to commit acts of scientific or industrial espionage to the benefit of the Chinese government," he told CNN.
The ruling Communist Party in China has tightened its grip over all aspects of Chinese society, including academia, under Xi Jinping, who has routinely said that "the Party exercises overall leadership over all areas of endeavor in every part of the country."

The State Department has considered implementing stricter vetting measures for F1 Visa applicants like Ji in an effort to address the problem, administration officials have told CNN, though the details of that plan remain unclear.
The Trump administration has also insisted that any trade deal with China must address concerns about Beijing's use of covert operations to steal US government secrets and intellectual property belonging to American private-sector businesses.
Ahead of President Donald Trump's December dinner meeting with Xi in Buenos Aires, the top US trade negotiator released a 50-page report showing Beijing had done little to fix unfair policies and that it continued to conduct and support cyber-enabled economic espionage that has stolen trillions of dollars in intellectual property.
The Trump administration has said the huge waves of tariffs it has slapped on Chinese goods are part of an effort to stop Beijing from unfairly getting its hands on American technology.

Prior to releasing the National Intelligence Strategy, The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued new warnings and information to technology and aviation companies believed to be targets to help the private sector guard against growing threats from Chinese intelligence entities.
A US intelligence official told CNN that American companies need to be alert to the growing threat. "Whether it is a Chinese national, student, businessman or through cyber means, companies need to know they are up against China who wants their information," the official said.
US authorities are also taking action beyond just issuing warnings.
Since August 2017, the Justice Department has indicted several individuals and corporations on charges related to economic espionage and intellectual property theft, predominantly in the aerospace and high-technology sectors.
One October 2018 indictment accused two Chinese intelligence officers of attempting to hack and infiltrate private companies over the course of five years in an attempt to steal technology.
The indictment also targeted six of what it said were the officers' paid hackers and two Chinese nationals, employed by a French aerospace company, who were told by the officers to obtain information about a turbofan engine developed in partnership with a US-based plane maker.

And prior to that, in September, US authorities arrested Ji for allegedly spying on behalf of Beijing.
McKay and the FBI used search warrants to scour emails and texts that were used to piece together what they claim is the story of how Ji was lured in and exploited by his Chinese spymasters.
They sent an undercover agent who pretended he'd been directed by Chinese intelligence to meet Ji after one of the student's alleged handlers had been arrested.
Video and audio recordings captured Ji telling the undercover FBI officer he knew he'd been helping a "confidential unit" of the government -- exactly the actions he'd denied in his interviews for both a student visa and his entry to the US Army Reserve program, according to the complaint.
"Ji specifically denied having had contact with Chinese government within the past seven years," the Department of Justice said in a press release, citing the complaint.

Still, US officials say addressing the issue requires striking a delicate balance and more than just outreach.
"Despite active engagement with academia, industry, and the greater public on this issue, however, Chinese efforts to exploit America's accessible academic environment continue to grow," E.W. Priestap, assistant director of the FBI's counterintelligence division, told lawmakers last year. 

"In particular, as internet access, cyber exploitation, transnational travel, and payment technologies proliferate, so, too, do Chinese options for exploiting America's schools for domestic gain."

China's Cyberattacks

Chinese hacker who obtained details of 78 million people is charged in US with one of the worst data breaches in history
by Robert Delaney

This photo provided by the FBI shows a wanted poster of Wang Fujie (left). The US Justice Department says a grand jury has indicted Wang and another man identified only as John Doe for hacking into the computers of health insurer Anthem Inc and three other, unnamed companies, in an indictment unsealed May 9, 2019, in Indianapolis. 

A US federal grand jury on May 9 charged a Chinese national in a hacking campaign described by the Justice Department as “one of the worst data breaches in history”, an effort that yielded the personal data of 78 million people.
Wang Fujie, also known as Dennis Wang, and another individual in the indictment, have infiltrated the US-based computer systems of US health insurer Anthem and three other companies, the Justice Department said in a statement on May 9.
“The allegations in the indictment unsealed today outline the activities of a brazen China-based computer hacking group that committed one of the worst data breaches in history,” Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski, said in the announcement.
“These defendants attacked US businesses operating in four distinct industry sectors, and violated the privacy of over 78 million people by stealing their [personally identifiable information].”
The indictment was the latest in a series of efforts by the US Federal Bureau of Investigations to tackle hacking operations and cybertheft emanating from China.

The bureau has become increasingly vocal about the country.
The second suspect, who was identified in court documents as John Doe and through aliases including Zhou Zhihong, conducted the hacking activities in China.
The other three companies affected by the hacks, conducted between February 2018 and January 2019, operated in the technology, basic materials and communication services sectors, according to the department.
Information taken from the companies included health identification numbers, birth dates, social security numbers, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, and employment information.
Wang and Doe obtained personal information by installing malware on the victim companies’ computers systems through “spearfishing” emails sent to the companies’ employees, according to the indictment, which was filed with the Indianapolis division of the federal court’s Southern District of Indiana, where Anthem is based.

The information obtained by the defendants was encrypted and sent through multiple computers to destinations in China. 

The files installed in the victim companies’ computers systems were then deleted.
Anthem and the other US companies involved notified the FBI when they became aware of the operation, allowing the federal investigators to monitor the activity and trace it to the defendants, according to the Justice Department.
The FBI has worked closely with companies in recent years to respond to attempts by Chinese to steal information from US companies. 

GE Aviation, for example, had worked with the bureau for more than a year to lure Xu Yanjun, a spy working for China’s Ministry of State Security, into a law enforcement trap in Belgium last year. Xu was then extradited to the US and is now awaiting trial.
According to Xu’s indictment filed in the Southern District of Ohio, the MSS officer sought GE Aviation technology used in the development of fan blades and engine encasements.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has been an outspoken critic of China since he assumed his post in 2017.
Last year, Wray accused Beijing of increasing its use of “non-traditional collectors” – such as professors, scientists and students – for its intelligence gathering.
“One of the things we’re trying to do is view the China 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,” Mr Wray testified at a Senate hearing in February 2018.
Eight months later at another hearing, Mr Wray declared China “the broadest, most complicated, most long-term” counter-intelligence threat confronting the US – surpassing even Russia, whose interference in the 2016 election dominated headlines for more than two years and continues to roil the country.
Speaking at a separate Senate hearing in December, Bill Priestap, the FBI’s assistant director of counter-intelligence, also called for more coordinated action to counter espionage and cybertheft originating in China.
“There are pockets of great understanding of the threat we’re facing and effective responses, but in my opinion we’ve got to knit that together better,” he said.
Warning against what he called “ad hoc responses”, Priestap added: “We need more people in government, more people in business, more people in academia pulling in the same direction to combat this threat effectively.”

Born to Spy

China is using student spies to steal secrets

By Zachary Cohen and Alex Marquardt

Born to spy: Chinese students in the USA

Washington -- In August 2015, an electrical engineering student in Chicago sent an email to a Chinese national titled "Midterm test questions."
More than two years later, the email would turn up in an FBI probe in the Southern District of Ohio involving a Chinese intelligence officer who authorities believed was trying to acquire technical information from a defense contractor.
Investigators took note.
They identified the email's writer as Ji Chaoqun, a Chinese student who would go on to enlist in the US Army Reserve. 

His email, they say, had nothing to do with exams.

Ji Chaoqun arrested in US on spying charges

Instead, at the direction of a high-level Chinese intelligence official, Ji attached background reports on eight US-based individuals who Beijing could target for recruitment as spies, according to a federal criminal complaint.
The eight -- naturalized US citizens originally from Taiwan or China -- had worked in science and technology. 

Seven had worked for or recently retired from US defense contractors. 

The complaint says all of them were perceived as rich targets for a new form of espionage that China has been aggressively pursuing to win a silent war against the US for information and global influence.

Ji was arrested in September last year, accused of acting as an "illegal agent" at the direction of a "high-level intelligence officer" of a provincial department of the Ministry of State Security, China's top espionage agency, the Department of Justice said at the time.
He was formally indicted by a grand jury on January 24. 

Ji appeared in federal court in Chicago on Friday and pleaded not guilty, according to Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for the US attorney's office in Chicago. 

He is due to appear in court next on February 26 and will remain in detention until then, Fitzpatrick said.
While Ji has not been convicted, the circumstances outlined in his case demonstrate how China is using people from all walks of life with increasing frequency, current and former US intelligence officials tell CNN.
Beijing is leaning on expatriate Chinese scientists, businesspeople and students like Ji -- one of roughly 350,000 from China who study in the US every year -- to gain access to anything and everything at American universities and companies that's of interest to Beijing.
The sheer size of the Chinese student population at US universities presents a major challenge for law enforcement and intelligence agencies tasked with striking the necessary balance between protecting America's open academic environment and mitigating the risk to national security.
While it remains unclear just how many of these students are on the radar of law enforcement, current and former intelligence officials told CNN that they all remain tethered to the Chinese government in some way.
It's part of a persistent, aggressive Chinese effort to undermine American industries, steal American secrets and diminish American influence in the world so that Beijing can advance its own agenda.
CIA Director Gina Haspel warned last year that China intends to diminish US influence to advance their own goals.
China's approach to espionage is taking on added urgency as ties between Beijing and Washington sour over trade differences, cyberattacks and standoffs over military influence in Asia.

"China's intelligence services exploit the openness of American society, especially academia and the scientific community, using a variety of means," according to the intelligence community's World Wide Threat Assessment released Tuesday.
The problem is with the Chinese government, a US official told CNN, adding that the counterintelligence issue is making sure those individuals are coming to the US for legitimate purposes.
Lawmakers are also sounding the alarm.
"There is no comparison to the breadth and scope of the Chinese threat facing America today, as they actively seek to supplant the US globally," Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida told CNN, noting that Russia and China have taken similar approaches when it comes to nontraditional espionage.

'Covert influencers'
For more than a decade, US law enforcement and intelligence officials have raised internal concerns about US universities becoming soft targets for Chinese intelligence services that use students and staff to access emerging technologies, according to multiple former US officials.
But in recent months, senior officials have expressed a renewed sense of urgency in addressing the issue and sought to increase public awareness by highlighting the threat during congressional testimony and while speaking at various security forums.
US officials made it clear that the Trump administration continues to grapple with counterintelligence concerns posed by Chinese agents seeking to exploit vulnerabilities within academic institutions.
Rather than having trained spies attempt to infiltrate US universities and businesses, Chinese intelligence services have strategically utilized members of its student population to act as "access agents" or "covert influencers," according to Joe Augustyn, a former CIA officer with firsthand knowledge of the issue from his time at the agency.
Creating this degree of separation allows the Chinese government to maintain some deniability should an operation become exposed, Augustyn said.
"We allow 350,000 or so Chinese students here every year," William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said last April during an Aspen Institute conference. 

"That's a lot. We have a very liberal visa policy for them. And it is a tool that is used by the Chinese government to facilitate nefarious activity here in the US."
Chinese students now constitute the largest foreign student body in the US, according to data from the Institute of International Education.
US intelligence officials have taken note of the steady increase in Chinese students entering the country each year and are well aware of the challenges associated with that trend.
Along with cyber-intrusion and strategic investing in American businesses, senior US intelligence officials told CNN on Tuesday that China is tapping into its network of students to compress the time it takes to acquire certain capabilities.

"In a world where technology is available, where we are training their scientists and engineers, and their scientists and engineers were already good on their own, we are just making them able to not have to toil for the same amount of time to get capabilities that will rival or test us," a senior official in the office of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said.
But addressing that problem is difficult given the large population of Chinese students sent to the US each year.
"We know without a doubt that anytime a graduate student from China comes to the US, they are briefed when they go, and briefed when they come back," according to Augustyn.
"There is no question in my mind, depending on where they are and what they are doing, that they have a role to play for their government."
In Ji's case, he was first approached by a Chinese intelligence officer who, initially at least, used a false identity, according to FBI Special Agent Andrew McKay, who filed a criminal complaint against Ji in the US District Court in Chicago.
The complaint charges Ji with one count of knowingly acting in the US as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification to the attorney general. 

Ji has been detained since his arrest in September, according to his lawyer.
Like thousands of Chinese nationals who come to the US each year, Ji entered the country on an F1 visa -- used for international students in academic programs.
Citing immigration records, the complaint states that Ji's goal, when he landed in Chicago in August 2013, was to study electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he ultimately earned a master's degree.
By December, Ji had been approached by the high-level Chinese intelligence official, who presented himself as a professor at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Ji, now 27, eventually realized who this official and his colleagues really were, according to the criminal complaint.
Still, court documents say he would funnel them background reports on other Chinese civilians living in the US who might be pressured to serve as spies -- in this case, in the strategically critical US industries of aerospace and technology. 

And he would lie to US officials about it, according to the complaint filed by FBI investigators.
In their response, the Chinese government did not comment on the current status of Ji's case.
But in September, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told CNN he was "unaware of the situation" when asked about Ji's arrest during a press briefing.
According to the complaint, FBI agents discovered about 36 text messages on one iCloud account that Ji and the intelligence officer exchanged between December 2013 and July 2015. 

In 2016, after he graduated, Ji enlisted in the US Army Reserve under a program in which foreign nationals can be recruited if their skills are considered "vital to the national interest."
As part of his Army interview and in his security clearance application, Ji was asked if he'd had contact with foreign security services, the complaint says.
He answered "no."
The Washington Post previously reported that Ji's case has been linked to the indictment of a Chinese intelligence officer named Xu Yanjun.

Xu Yanjun is accused of seeking to steal trade secrets from a US company that leads the way in aerospace

Xu's indictment was unsealed in October after he was arrested in Belgium for stealing trade secrets from US aerospace companies. 

He is the first Chinese intelligence officer to be extradited for prosecution in the US. 

He has pleaded not guilty.

Complex counter intelligence challenge
FBI Director Christopher Wray, in the past year, has sought to focus repeatedly on the threat from China and its use of Chinese students in US universities to try to get access to sensitive military and civilian research.
"They're exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have," Wray told a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last year, expressing concern that academic officials aren't taking the threat from China seriously enough.
But on Tuesday, Wray told Senate lawmakers he has seen reasons for optimism.
"One of the things that I've been most encouraged about in an otherwise bleak landscape is the degree to which -- as Director Coats was alluding to -- American companies are waking up, American universities are waking up, our foreign partners are waking up," Wray said.
Still, the issue continues to pose a complex counterintelligence challenge for the US.
The Chinese are notorious for appealing to the nationalism and loyalty of their citizens to coerce them into carrying out acts of espionage.
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the leading Democrat on the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence, stressed that it is important to recognize "that the Chinese government has enormous power over its citizens."
"In China, only the government can grant someone permission to leave the country to study or work in the United States and the Chinese government use their power over their citizens to encourage those citizens to commit acts of scientific or industrial espionage to the benefit of the Chinese government," he told CNN.
The ruling Communist Party in China has tightened its grip over all aspects of Chinese society, including academia, under Xi Jinping, who has routinely said that "the Party exercises overall leadership over all areas of endeavor in every part of the country."

The State Department has considered implementing stricter vetting measures for F1 Visa applicants like Ji in an effort to address the problem, administration officials have told CNN, though the details of that plan remain unclear.
The Trump administration has also insisted that any trade deal with China must address concerns about Beijing's use of covert operations to steal US government secrets and intellectual property belonging to American private-sector businesses.
Ahead of President Donald Trump's December dinner meeting with Xi in Buenos Aires, the top US trade negotiator released a 50-page report showing Beijing had done little to fix unfair policies and that it continued to conduct and support cyber-enabled economic espionage that has stolen trillions of dollars in intellectual property.
The Trump administration has said the huge waves of tariffs it has slapped on Chinese goods are part of an effort to stop Beijing from unfairly getting its hands on American technology.

Prior to releasing the National Intelligence Strategy, The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued new warnings and information to technology and aviation companies believed to be targets to help the private sector guard against growing threats from Chinese intelligence entities.
A US intelligence official told CNN that American companies need to be alert to the growing threat. "Whether it is a foreign national, student, businessman or through cyber means, companies need to know they are up against nations who want their information," the official said.
US authorities are also taking action beyond just issuing warnings.
Since August 2017, the Justice Department has indicted several individuals and corporations on charges related to economic espionage and intellectual property theft, predominantly in the aerospace and high-technology sectors.
One October 2018 indictment accused two Chinese intelligence officers of attempting to hack and infiltrate private companies over the course of five years in an attempt to steal technology.
The indictment also targeted six of what it said were the officers' paid hackers and two Chinese nationals, employed by a French aerospace company, who were told by the officers to obtain information about a turbofan engine developed in partnership with a US-based plane maker.

The Chinese government did not respond to CNN's request for comment on the case.
In September, US authorities arrested Ji for spying on behalf of Beijing.
McKay and the FBI used search warrants to scour emails and texts that were used to piece together what they claim is the story of how Ji was lured in and exploited by his Chinese spymasters.
They sent an undercover agent who pretended he'd been directed by Chinese intelligence to meet Ji after one of the student's handlers had been arrested.
Video and audio recordings captured Ji telling the undercover FBI officer he knew he'd been helping a "confidential unit" of the government -- exactly the actions he'd denied in his interviews for both a student visa and his entry to the US Army Reserve program, according to the complaint.
"Ji specifically denied having had contact with a foreign government within the past seven years," the Department of Justice said in a press release, citing the complaint.
Still, US officials say addressing the issue requires striking a delicate balance and more than just outreach.
"Despite active engagement with academia, industry, and the greater public on this issue, however, Chinese efforts to exploit America's accessible academic environment continue to grow," E.W. Priestap, assistant director of the FBI's counterintelligence division, told lawmakers in June last year. "In particular, as internet access, cyber exploitation, transnational travel, and payment technologies proliferate, so, too, do Chinese options for exploiting America's schools for domestic gain."

Steal or Die

China Accelerates Cyberspying Efforts to Obtain U.S. Technology
By David E. Sanger and Steven Lee Myers

General Electric Aviation’s factory in Cincinnati. A Chinese intelligence official is accused of trying to obtain trade secrets from the company.

WASHINGTON — Three years ago, Barack Obama struck a stupid deal with China: Xi Jinping agreed to end his nation’s yearslong practice of breaking into the computer systems of American companies, military contractors and government agencies to obtain designs, technology and corporate secrets, usually on behalf of China’s state-owned firms.
The pact was celebrated by the Obama administration as one of the first arms-control agreements for cyberspace — and for some few months, the number of Chinese attacks plummeted.
But the "victory" was fleeting.
Soon after President Trump took office, China’s cyberespionage picked up again and, according to intelligence officials and analysts, accelerated in the last year as trade conflicts and other tensions began to poison relations between the world’s two largest economies.
The nature of China’s espionage has also changed.
The hackers of the People’s Liberation Army — whose famed Unit 61398 tore through American companies until its operations from a base in Shanghai were exposed in 2013 — were forced to stand down, some of them indicted by the United States.
But now, they have begun to be replaced by stealthier operatives in the country’s intelligence agencies.
The new operatives have intensified their focus on America’s commercial and industrial prowess, and on technologies that the Chinese believe can give them a military advantage.
That, in turn, has prompted a flurry of criminal cases, including the extraordinary arrest and extradition from Belgium of a Chinese intelligence official in October. 
Trump administration officials said the arrest reflected a more determined counterattack against a threat that has infuriated some of the country’s most powerful corporations.
“We have certainly seen the behavior change over the past year,” said Rob Joyce, President Trump’s former White House cybercoordinator, speaking at the Aspen Cyber Summit in San Francisco this month.
President Trump and administration officials often suggest that all technology-acquisition efforts by China amount to theft.
In doing so, they are blurring the line between stealing technology and negotiated deals in which corporations agree to transfer technology to Chinese manufacturing or marketing partners in return for access to China’s market — a practice American companies often view as a form of corporate blackmail but one distinct from outright theft.
The stealing of industrial designs and intellectual property — from blueprints for power plants or high-efficiency solar panels, or the F-35 fighter — is a long-running problem.
The United States Trade Representative published a report earlier this month detailing old and new examples.
But the administration has never said whether cracking down on theft and cyberattacks is part of the negotiations or simply a demand that China cease activity that Beijing has already acknowledged was illegitimate.
But as President Trump and Xi prepare to meet at the Group of 20 gathering in Argentina this weekend, China’s corporate espionage has once again emerged as a core American grievance.
Whatever the reason for the renewed hacking, it is a cautionary tale as President Trump tries to use tariffs and threats of more restrictions to strike a new trade deal with Xi, one that presumably would address, once again, the Chinese practices that Obama naively thought Xi had halted.
American trade and intelligence officials, as well as experts from private cybersecurity firms, all acknowledged that the previous agreement had completely fallen apart.
And that, they agreed, has made it still more difficult to imagine how any new agreement struck between President Trump and Xi would become a permanent solution to a problem that reaches back years, and seems rooted in completely different views of what constitutes reasonable competition.
“Our two systems are so dissimilar that I think there was never real hope that crafting an agreement like this would last that long anyway,” said Matthew Brazil, a former government official who now runs Madeira Security Consulting, a firm in San Jose, Calif.
Why the espionage has spiked again is a matter of debate.
Some officials and analysts call it a cause of the worsening trade relationships, others a symptom. Still others argued that the tightening of American export controls in critical industries like aerospace and rules on Chinese investment in Silicon Valley has led the Chinese once again to try to steal what they cannot buy.
The impetus for the 2015 accord was one of the most blatant espionage operations ever conducted by the Chinese government: the removal, over a period of more than a year, of 22 million security-clearance files on American officials, military personnel, contractors and American intelligence officers.
The Obama administration, out of embarrassment, said little about the breach, never naming the Chinese publicly — except by mistake when the director of national intelligence blurted out the truth.
American intelligence officials concluded that the Chinese were assembling a giant database of who worked with whom, and on what, in the American national security sphere, and were applying “big data” techniques to analyze the information. 
The C.I.A. could not move some officers to China, for fear their cover had been blown. 
Publicly, Obama administration officials offered millions of Americans credit protection for a few years in the wake of the data breach — as if Xi’s agents were looking for credit card numbers.
Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who is now a China analyst for the International Crisis Group, said that China had a fundamentally different understanding of what was acceptable in espionage.
While the Central Intelligence Agency, say, would not act to help a private company gain a competitive advantage over a foreign competitor, he said, China’s Communist Party, which has control over practically all aspects of policy there, would make no such distinction.
“If you view economic growth as an existential pillar of your party’s political legitimacy and in fact your national security, it follows that you would do anything possible to maintain that competitive edge,” he said.
Indeed, the latest spike in corporate espionage cases — including some not yet made public — has focused on industries critical to Xi’s Made in China 2025 program.
That is a plan to jump ahead of the United States and others in cutting-edge industries like aerospace, automation, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
“We are seeing it in high tech, in law firms, in insurance companies,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, one of the founders of CrowdStrike, who early in his career was one of the first to identify the teams of state-run Chinese hackers aiming at the United States.
With the arrest of the intelligence officer in Belgium in October, the Trump administration claimed it had exposed what the assistant F.B.I. director, Bill Priestap, called “the Chinese government’s direct oversight of economic espionage against the United States.”
That case involves Xu Yanjun, a deputy division director in the Jiangsu branch of the Ministry of State Security, China’s main intelligence agency.
According to a secret criminal complaint filed in Ohio in March but not unsealed until October, Xu tried to recruit an employee of General Electric Aviation and entice him to provide proprietary information about jet fan blade designs.
Instead the employee alerted the company, which went to the F.B.I. and organized a sting.
Xu flew from China to Belgium in April on the hope he would be able to copy the employee’s computer hard drive.
He was arrested on April 1 when he arrived in Brussels and was extradited to the United States on Oct. 9, the day before the Justice Department made the case public.
China’s Foreign Ministry denounced the criminal case as “pure fabrication,” but it has neither confirmed nor denied that Xu was an intelligence officer.
China’s relatively muted reaction could be an effort to minimize attention on an embarrassing intelligence failure and leave room for quiet negotiations for an exchange.
Xu’s was the most high profile of several recent cases, including two others that had links to the Ministry of State Security’s branch in Jiangsu Province, which extends north from Shanghai.
In September, the Justice Department announced the arrest of Ji Chaoqun, a 27-year-old graduate student who had joined the Army Reserves under a special waiver for foreigners.
The F.B.I. affidavit in the case said that Ji’s handler — presumably Xu — had been arrested, allowing the bureau to send an undercover officer to meet the student in April.
Ji, the affidavit said, had been recruited to gather background information about eight potential recruits for the Jiangsu branch.
Xu, who went by at least two aliases, often claimed to represent the Jiangsu Association for International Science and Technology Cooperation and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, both based in the provincial capital, Nanjing.
The reasons Jiangsu has become a hotbed of China’s cyberespionage are not entirely clear, though it is an important manufacturing center, with many foreign investments, and is thus one of China’s richest provinces.
In 2016, the director of the Jiangsu intelligence branch, Liu Yang, declared that “the national security departments should actively cooperate and promote enterprises” in their efforts to expand and compete globally, according to a report from the Suzhou General Chamber of Commerce.
In January, Liu was promoted and is now the vice governor of the province.
Another American criminal case of espionage in the same region of China was announced Oct. 30. The Justice Department accused two other intelligence officers from that branch, as well as five hackers and two employees of a French aerospace company in Suzhou.
The target was Safran, which operates a joint venture, CFM International, that builds jet engines with General Electric.
The hackers were accused of using a variety of sophisticated techniques and tools against the Suzhou plant, and against other companies.
But the suspects are believed to still be in China and thus beyond the reach of American law enforcement.