WASHINGTON (Newsmax) – China’s leaders believe they are in a “generational fight” to make their country the “world’s only superpower by any means necessary,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Axios reported.
Delivering a speech at the Hudson Institute, Wray said that Beijing uses numerous techniques to achieve its goals, including economic espionage, intelligence gathering, encouraging censorship at universities, and “malign foreign influence” by attempting to make powerful people advocate for China’s interests in the U.S.
The FBI director emphasized that Beijing is taking advantage of the open system in the U.S. while maintaining its own closed system, using the way the Chinese government works through ostensibly private Chinese companies to achieve state goals as an example.
Wray stressed that various “seemingly inconsequential pressures add up to a policymaking environment in which Americans find themselves held over a barrel by the Chinese Communist Party.”
He said that he was presenting “more detail on the Chinese threat than the FBI has ever presented in an open forum.” This is a sign that increasingly aggressive behavior under General Secretary Xi Jinping, especially the multi-faceted efforts by China to take advantage of Americans and of U.S. innovation and technology, is sounding alarm bells in the U.S.
Wray pointed out that “If you are an American adult, it is more likely than not that China has stolen your personal data,” emphasizing that “Our data isn’t the only thing at stake here — so are our health, our livelihoods, and our security.”
The FBI director made the case that the situation is dire enough that “We’ve now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case approximately every 10 hours.”
