The United States is responding to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “unrestricted warfare” strategy by ratcheting up its war of words and escalating its countermeasures—a more hard-hitting approach to a threat that previous administrations failed to fully recognize, according to experts.
Top U.S. officials, as well as politicians from both sides of the political aisle, have expressed concern about China’s increasingly aggressive and hostile stance toward the United States. FBI Director Christopher Wray said recently that no country presents such a danger to America’s innovation, economic security, and democratic ideas than the Chinese regime.
National security adviser Robert O’Brien, meanwhile, recently said the United States will no longer be passive in dealing with China.
Aside from the rhetoric, U.S. counteractions have also ramped up. Wray revealed last week that the bureau currently has more than 2,000 active investigations that trace back to the CCP, marking a roughly 1,300 percent increase in economic espionage probes with links to the Chinese regime. He said the bureau opens “a new counterintelligence investigation that ties back to China every 10 hours.”
The recent public proclamations from both the administration and members of Congress “reflect a frustration with China’s aggressive theft of U.S. innovation and technology,” says Nicholas Eftimiades, a former senior U.S. intelligence official and author of the book, “Chinese Intelligence Operations.”
“The U.S. sees China’s large scale economic espionage and covert influence activities as supporting economic predatory practices and military expansion in the South and East China seas,” he told The Epoch Times.
“The Chinese communist government has never been friends with the U.S.,” he said. “It is only now, some American politicians are realizing it.”
Since 2018, the U.S. administration’s efforts to abate China’s espionage, commercial espionage, and intellectual property theft has been increasing, according to Eftimiades. If the United States backs up its current rhetoric with actions, allies will also move more aggressively to counter China, thereby increasing global pressure on the CCP and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to comply with the established global rule of law, he said.
Previous administrations and members of Congress believed China would liberalize as it gained wealth. Eftimiades called the story of U.S.–China relations “a very sad tale of American arrogance, ignorance, political greed, and corruption.”
David Adams
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