FBI Chief: Chinese Threat ‘More Brazen, More Damaging than Ever Before’ 

FBI Director Christopher Wray spoke Monday evening about the Chinese threat to the United States and said it is “more brazen, more damaging, than ever before.”

Wray spoke to a crowd at the Reagan Presidential Library and called out China for stealing American ideas and their massive hacking operations just days before the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Chinese Communist Party hackers have stolen more corporate and personal data than all other countries combined, according to the Associated Press.

Wray said the FBI opens new cases countering Chinese intelligence operations roughly every 12 hours:

When we tally up what we see in our investigations, over 2,000 of which are focused on the Chinese government trying to steal our information or technology, there’s just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, innovation, and economic security than China.

Wray said the threat from China is not recent as it “has been building for a decade” to the level it is at today:

The harm from the Chinese government’s economic espionage isn’t just that its companies pull ahead based on illegally gotten technology. While they pull ahead, they push our companies and workers behind.

That harm — company failures, job losses — has been building for a decade to the crush we feel today. It’s harm felt across the country by workers in a whole range of industries.

I’ve spoken a lot about this threat since I became director. But I want to focus on it here tonight because it’s reached a new level — more brazen, more damaging, than ever before, and it’s vital — vital — that all of us focus on that threat together.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC, called the U.S. government’s accusations a “malicious smear against China” last July when Chinese hackers allegedly hacked Microsoft. “The U.S. has repeatedly made groundless attacks and malicious smear against China on cybersecurity. Now this is just another old trick, with nothing new in it,” the spokesperson said.