(John Ransom, Headline USA) After the Department of Justice went woke and dumped a years-old program over Chinese charges of racial profiling experts are warning that the stoppage of the program will put American national security at risk.
The China Initiative, which flourished under the Trump administration, sought to combat Chinese espionage in the US, including intellectual theft from researchers at America’s higher-education institutions.
In the Intelligence Community’s annual nonclassified assessment made to Congress this week, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said that China still poses the No. 1 threat to the US worldwide, outstripping Iran, North Korea and even Russia.
Gordan Chang: Biden Admin Failed To Deter Russia, But Now Needs To Deter China..!! https://t.co/gI3NnIvURM
— DavidCrockett / [email protected] (@Davcu8741) March 6, 2022
“China increasingly is a near-peer competitor, challenging the United States in multiple arenas—especially economically, militarily, and technologically—and is pushing to change global norms and potentially threatening its neighbors,” said the report.
The Chinese use a variety of tools—including theft of trade secrets, public financing, trade policy and government subsidies—to advance their ability to compete against the US, hurting not just property openers but American workers, added the report.
But by far their biggest asset is espionage.
“When we tally up what we see in our investigations—over 2,000 of which are focused on the Chinese government trying to steal our information or technology—there is just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, our innovation, and our economic security than China,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement at the time the China Initiative was launched.
On Thursday, cybersecurity firm Mandiant warned that Chinese hackers linked to China’s Ministry of State Security have repeatedly gained access over the past year to state-government networks across the United States, according to the South China Morning Post.
Such networks could affect everything kept at the state level, from tax records to motor-vehicles records to voter registration and actual ballots.
“This is theft of America’s future, a mortal wound to our economy,” Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China and The Great U.S.-China Tech War, told Just The News.
“China is trying to destroy the U.S.,” Chang continued. “No country poses a threat even close to that. We need to understand China’s malicious ends.”