NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE U nited States officials have reportedly identified dozens of intrusions in recent years by Chinese nationals at military bases and other sensitive sites across the country.
The report comes as President Biden pursues a delicate détente with China — a process that China’s Ministry of State Security, possibly to secure further concessions from the White House, recently claimed would be undermined by several of Washington’s policies aimed at combating Beijing’s misbehavior.
Despite Chinese-government pressure, and the White House’s reluctance to disrupt its ongoing talks with Beijing, Congress is not likely to stand down from taking legislative action to address the likely threat of espionage.
A review of the intrusions took place last year and involved the Pentagon, the FBI, and other government agencies, the Wall Street Journal reported this week citing conversations with unnamed U.S. officials. While a handful of related incidents had previously been known to the public, the newspaper’s revelations have brought to light the large scale at which this has taken place in recent years.
Often, the gate-crashers identified themselves as tourists, though at least one incident involved Chinese diplomatic staff posted to the U.S. Of about 100 cases that officials reportedly reviewed, a few also involved people who were deemed to genuinely have gotten lost — including some who were directed by Google Maps to a Burger King location at a military base.
But U.S. officials assess that many of the cases were less benign, with the individuals involved photographing sensitive sites, including Cape Canaveral — from which the military launches satellites — a military site next to White Sands National Park in New Mexico, and Fort Wainwright in Alaska, which houses an Army division focused on the Arctic.
The newspaper spoke to several officials who pointed to the situation as part of Chinese espionage operations on U.S. soil, which have received more scrutiny following the surveillance-balloon incident in February and the revelations about Beijing’s illicit police stations in the U.S.
Experts and officials identified a major gap in Washington’s ability to grapple with this apparent espionage challenge: Many of the perpetrators are apprehended shortly after entering secured sites and often receive trespassing charges. While Beijing can “throw people at collection in large numbers,” Washington can only respond by charging them with trespassing, “and those who don’t get caught are likely to collect something useful,” Emily Harding, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Wall Street Journal.
In 2020, three Chinese nationals arrested in two separate cases after photographing different annexes of the U.S. Naval Air Station in Key West, Fla., received relatively light prison sentences. A judge sentenced Lyuyou Liao to twelve months in prison with a year of supervised release, while Jielun Zhang and Yuhao Wang received prison terms of one year and nine months, respectively, with an additional year of supervised release.
Representative Jason Crow, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told the Journal that lawmakers are concerned that cases aren’t being appropriately dealt with because most trespassing laws are not federal. “We need to work closely with our state and local partners to train them and equip them,” he said.
A spokesman for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence did not respond to a request for comment from National Review.
For its part, Beijing lashed out against the report. In a statement to the paper, the spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, called the revelations “purely ill-intentioned fabrications.” Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times propaganda outlet published an English-language article decrying the Journal’s reporting as “hype” and “an insult to readers’ intelligence.”
“Borrowing a recent buzzword – AIGC (Artificial intelligence generated content), we can say stories in US media obsessed with China’s ‘spy’ operations are typically CIAGC, CIA-generated content,” the Global Times said, attributing the comments to Lu Xiang of the government-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Restoring previous levels of tourism between the U.S. and China has been a major focus of the White House’s diplomatic push, which has continued despite recent news that China has hacked the emails of senior U.S. officials and has built a spy base in Cuba.
Last week, Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo — one of the officials whose email account was hacked — visited China for meetings with senior officials, including Minister of Culture and Tourism Hu Heping. Raimondo and Hu agreed to hold a tourism summit in China next year, the Commerce Department said. Earlier in August, the two countries agreed to double the number of weekly flights between the U.S. and China.