Alleged Chinese theft of U.S. corporate secrets

For example, the image of China as a country whose intelligence agencies are implicated in the stealing of intellectual property (IP) from the United States is vividly narrated in the March 19-25, 2012 issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The cover page of the issue boldly reads “Hey China! Stop Stealing Our Stuff.” The article provides, in […]

For example, the image of China as a country whose intelligence agencies are implicated in the stealing of intellectual property (IP) from the United States is vividly narrated in the March 19-25, 2012 issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The cover page of the issue boldly reads “Hey China! Stop Stealing Our Stuff.” The article provides, in the words of the magazine, “a compendium of intellectual thievery,” by way of numerous specific instances where Chinese nationals and Chinese-Americans have stolen critical competition-sensitive materials from their employers in the U.S. and sent them to China. International corporate giants (such as Apple, Boeing/Rockwell International, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Dow Chemical, Dupont, Ford Motor, General Motors, Goodyear Tire and Rubber, L-3 Communications, Motorola, Northrup-Grumman Aerospace, and Paragon Power) have been identified as victims of Chinese thievery.
The Chinese government has routinely denied any involvements in the stealing of U.S. companies’ IPs or trade or process secrets. In the developments of two weeks ago, the Obama administration has obtained what it considered to be beyond-the-shadow-of-a-doubt, caught-red-handed, information, including the photographs of real people and their aliases, to back up the U.S. government’s protracted claim of Chinese-government-sponsored stealing of the secrets and IPs of U.S. companies. The five shamed Chinese officers, whose photos appear all over the Internet, are alleged to be members of the Shanghai-based Chinese military’s Computer Espionage Unit 61398, also known as the “Comment Crew.” These government officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China were indicted two weeks ago in a U.S. federal court in Pittsburgh and were quickly placed at the top of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) “Cyber’s Most Wanted” list.
According to speculations, the U.S. also has its cyber radar on more than twenty Chinese hacking groups, over half of which concern the Chinese military. These groups have been alleged to break into a multitude of U.S. government agencies, and have sought to obtain information on American drone technology and nuclear weapon parts, to name a few.
The reaction from the Chinese government on the indictment of its military officers came as expected: “We did not do it,” with a vehement denunciation of the indictment. I even learned that China threatened to suspend its participation in the United States-China working group on cybersecurity. I will suspect that the U.S. wouldn’t see much value in such cooperation either.  I have read various articles on the current matter concerning the PLA, from both pro-U.S. and pro-China perspectives. Suffice it to say that many of these articles are mere rhetoric, if not outright absurdities. Analogies have been made between the current Chinese espionage and some details in the Edward Snowden’s U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) leaks and Wikileaks. For example, one source stated that “the U.S. spies regularly for economic advantage when the goal is to support trade talks,” citing the alleged U.S. bugging of a Japanese limousine that was supposedly done to obtain information beneficial to the three biggest auto companies.  The alleged U.S. prying into the servers of Huawei, the Chinese Information and Communications Technology (ICT) company, was also cited.
Evidently, the U.S. has doubted the missions of Huawei, with the disposition that Huawei might actually be fronting for the Chinese government in the area of espionage intended to help accelerate the advancement and competitiveness of Chinese companies. U.S. prying into Huawei’s business is allegedly for the purpose of confirming the country’s suspicion of Huawei’s espionage missions. There are also opinions that the U.S. wants to hide inside Huawei’s systems to find the companies that buy Huawei’s systems, perhaps so that the U.S. secrets are not compromised via those third-party companies.
The indictment of the Chinese army officers by the U.S. is obviously symbolic since China will probably not hand over the accused folks to the U.S. for trial.
As they say, the devil is in the details of any event. However, one thing is certain: One will be hard-pressed to accept theories suggesting the U.S. spies on Chinese companies for IPs and trade secrets. I would say it actually sounds ludicrous. The reasons are clear. The first powered flight in the U.S. happened in 1903, and the U.S. airline industry is approximately sixty years old. On the other hand, China is still working very hard to come up with its first fully home-grown commercial-grade aircraft. America walked on the moon over fifty years ago; in fact, some aerospace experts believe that China is approximately 40 years behind the U.S. in space technology. Furthermore, if you look at high tech (computers, Internet, GPS, etc.), I am yet to see any innovations that originated from China, as virtually all these came to us courtesy of U.S. government-funded research results. Similar dispositions exist in soft items such as the establishment of copyright laws which were established in the U.S. for over a century, but only in 1990 in China. China’s manufacturing industry (trains, real estate construction,…, but not cars) is obviously well-developed, although issues of quality control in Chinese manufactured products sometimes make the headlines. Obviously, “every master was once a disaster,” and it’s my guess that, given the ambition and aggressiveness of the Chinese government, the country may end up being an innovator.
The bottom line in this article is that the U.S. government shamed five members of the Chinese army, with their photos and all, on the grounds of hacking to steal intellectual properties and trade secrets of certain energy and manufacturing companies in the U.S.