Spending time at Washington Dulles International Airport is torturous. As with its ludicrously archaic people movers, the airport provides a disgraceful first impression of Washington, D.C.
Still, at least the Chinese intelligence services are especially displeased with the airport.
China’s Embassy to Washington railed on Monday that U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, and presumably FBI agents, “have continuously and unjustifiably harassed, interrogated, and deported Chinese nationals entering the U.S., especially students and scholars.” The embassy continued, “According to incomplete statistics, nearly 300 Chinese citizens have been deported by the US since July 2021, including more than 70 Chinese students with legal and valid materials. Since November 2023, at [Dulles] alone, there have been 10 cases of Chinese students being harassed, interrogated and, with their visas canceled, deported. … Such acts by the U.S. side far exceeded the scope of normal law enforcement and are driven by strong ideological bias.”
Never to be outdone in Communist Party patriotic rage, Beijing’s Global Times newspaper claimed that “The U.S., guided by populism and xenophobia, is now clearly destroying its own soft power and appeal to the world. … This will be a path to self-destruction for the US, rather than a way to protect its strengths.”
Befitting its most natural tendency, the Chinese Communist Party is lying. And it is doing so shamelessly. These statistics do not evince an alarming campaign of prejudice against Chinese citizens. On the contrary, they represent a woefully insufficient effort by the U.S. government to prevent Chinese spies from easily entering the United States. Woefully insufficient, because the expulsions that do occur are drops in the ocean when compared to the scale of Chinese espionage.
As the South China Morning Post reports, “According to data from the Institute of International Education, Chinese students have outnumbered any other foreign group studying in the U.S. for 15 consecutive years. In the school year ending in September 2023, there were 289,526 Chinese students in the U.S.”
To be clear, most of those students are in America for the right reason: to learn and to contribute to the learning of others. But even if actual spies constitute a small minority of the total student figure, a large number of Chinese visitors are also engaged in espionage. Their activity is either by patriotic choice or because the Communist Party has threatened them or their families if they refuse said actions. This is not a debatable point. Nor is it debatable that U.S. efforts to confront Chinese espionage are way out of kilter with the threat that espionage poses. Unlike Chinese authorities tasked with monitoring foreign spies in China, the FBI’s counterintelligence squads do not have anywhere near the resources necessary to provide effective monitoring of all Chinese intelligence officers/agents once they gain access to the U.S. Hence why stopping spies at the border is so important — at all borders, you would think. Indeed, the U.S. is sometimes facilitating Chinese espionage.
The Biden administration made a grievous error, for example, in ending the Justice Department’s “China Initiative” to better intercept Chinese espionage in academia. China learned a lesson here in the value of preaching prejudice in the face of U.S. counterintelligence efforts. Via its latest complaint, Beijing clearly wants to use the Biden administration’s interest in preelection stability to extract reduced scrutiny of Chinese visitors.
That must not happen.
Whether orchestrated by the Ministry of State Security, the People’s Liberation Army or a number of smaller intelligence outfits, Chinese espionage against America operates at great scale and with great ambition. It includes the theft of intellectual property in medicine, technology, and military fields. It includes the bribery or coercing of Americans in Beijing’s service. It includes threats to Chinese Americans on U.S. soil. It includes efforts to infect U.S. critical infrastructure with malware. It includes the use of social media companies and telecommunications firms as mechanisms to gather vast amounts of data on Americans and their vulnerabilities.
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It’s hard to overstate the danger these varied efforts pose to U.S. interests. But Chinese espionage occurs on campus, within sites of the highest national security sensitivity, and everywhere in between. So reflexive is President Xi Jinping’s appetite for espionage that it targets even those nations that might otherwise be inclined to make agreements in Beijing’s favor. And while they continue to share a deep suspicion of each other, connections between the Russian and Chinese intelligence services are growing.
Top line: the Biden administration must not yield to China’s utterly disingenuous pressure. If the administration does so, Congress must hold it to account.