MI5, FBI chiefs warn over China in rare joint address

the Chinese authorities have been spying for commercial secrets for years - this is how they developed their technology so quickly. Anyone who has had involvement in cyber-security knows full well that Chinese state -backed hackers are everywhere. They aren't there to blackmail or disrupt but to lurk and steal, so less likely to be noticed or to be in the headlines.

Cyber espionage is a large part of it and the AK-630 point defense weapon carried by most modern Chinese combat ships is perhaps the poster child for this. It is a nearly exact copy of the Dutch Goalkeeper gun system but the Dutch never shared that design with the Chinese. The Chinese stole it.

However to manufacture in China foreign firms are required to take a Chinese equity partner in a joint venture. That equity partner is there to learn your way of designing and manufacturing whatever it is you build. They often require western firms to hand their intellectual property to their Chinese equity partner as a term of doing business. Too many western firms did this. Toyota for example learned the hard way when their partner started making and selling exact copies of the RAV 4 in China at price that undercut what Toyota could sell them for in China. There are many other examples of this.

Another tactic is for Chinese companies to buy up and coming tech firms in the US and other advanced western nations and in this way acquire advanced tech they could not develop on their own in China.

 That said, despite what you have written, the USS Connecticut is believed to have been hunted down, incapacitated and even given a face-saving escape route - that it hit some sea mountain by accident.

Either the PLA Navy has game or the US submarine is incompetent and inept.

Where did that sea story come from? It was incompetence on the part of the commanding officer. The area was poorly charted. In such situations a prudent skipper leaves a margin for error when planning depths and courses used. After investigating the mishap the Navy concluded the commanding officer didn't leave sufficient margin considering the low fidelity of the available charts. His is not the first sub to operate close to Chinese forces in that same area. We operated there in the 1980s and nobody's sub struck the bottom. This skipper didn't exercise enough caution and it bit him.

That's strange, how can the Chinese spies stole the things neither US or UK owned or patented?

The Chinese routinely steal patented and copyrighted proprietary information from western firms.

https://www.mandiant.com/resources/apt1-exposing-one-of-chinas-cyber-espionage-units

https://www.mandiant.com/resources/apt-groups

https://www2.fireeye.com/rs/fireye/images/rpt-apt28.pdf

Unfortunately, the ‘made in China label’ doesn’t instil much confidence…

Anyone taking a trip on one of China’s high speed trains must surely notice the uncanny similarities to Japan’s Shinkansen; uncanny!

And Elon Musk copied Henry Ford. Seriously, the Chinese are good at copying. They are literally trying to duplicate the sun.

China's $1 trillion 'artificial sun' fusion reactor just got five times hotter than the sun. Its artificial sun has broken a record for the longest sustained nuclear fusion. This might help with the energy issues mankind faces in the future.

Anyone taking a trip on one of China’s high speed trains must surely notice the uncanny similarities to Japan’s Shinkansen; uncanny!

No, they're just smarter than us and a 3000 year continuous cultural history HAS to count for something...

Well then all should bow to Australian Aboriginals who have the worlds longest continual culture at over 40,000 years. Makes China's 3,000 years look like school children. If continuous cultural history counts for anything at all, it shows an ability to simply remain. For Aborigines they have lived in harmony with their environment for over 40,000 years, better than anyone else.

China's "high tech" is all based on tech transfer from western nations and Japan plus South Korea.

There's not going to be much to fight over at the rate China is buying up foreign land. A lot of Australia is already owned by China.

And it is no surprise that anything they buy is subject to Australian law and in the event of conflict or conduct against Australian interests it would be seized and nationalized. It really does not matter how much land China buys through companies or individuals anywhere, as it can never be ruled by China. We will take their money and then at some point we may take all the land back and sell it to someone else. In the meantime they pay rates to Australia, taxes to Australia and it always remains Australian territory. The idea that China can do what it likes is false and not much of an argument.

In 2020, China had the most patent grants worldwide with 530,127 patents granted to resident and non-resident companies or organizations. The United States followed with 351,993 granted patents the same year.

In technology, you build upon technology. Someone invents the air carrier, then the catapult air carrier, then the steam catapult carrier, and the electromagnetic catapult. Some think there is only the beginning and everything else is copied and stolen.

The U.S. and the UK have way more to gain technologically spying on China than China has to gain spying on the U.S. and UK and they certainly do spy on China.

@William Bjornson - you are wrong - the Chinese authorities have been spying for commercial secrets for years - this is how they developed their technology so quickly. Anyone who has had involvement in cyber-security knows full well that Chinese state -backed hackers are everywhere. They aren't there to blackmail or disrupt but to lurk and steal, so less likely to be noticed or to be in the headlines.

@desert tortoise

You have provided good background information and no military is invincible. That said, despite what you have written, the USS Connecticut is believed to have been hunted down, incapacitated and even given a face-saving escape route - that it hit some sea mountain by accident.

Either the PLA Navy has game or the US submarine is incompetent and inept.

That's strange, how can the Chinese spies stole the things neither US or UK owned or patented?

The two also warned that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which Beijing views as its territory, would cause a massive disruption to global commerce and industry.

This is just silly. Taiwan is not going to declare independence, and China is not stupid enough to invade Taiwan.

They are selling FEAR and nothing else. 

If you are selling home security systems, you'll need to dial up the fear of crime. The defense contractors are doing just that with China. It has been the case with Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and so on. China is just the latest.

The Uighurs in Xinjiang didn't work, Hong Kong and Tibet failed, and so has Taiwan since 1995. There's nothing else in China that would cause a split. If I were the MIC, I'd pit the Chinese on mainland against the Chinese on mainland. That's where the split would occur not these little potatoes.

@william, the PLA isn't ten feet tall and invincible. They are better than the Russians by far that is true, but they have some pretty significant technology gaps compared to the west and in particular the US. The US has a new 2nd generation stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider, in production right now in Palmdale with the first unit undergoing testing, a 6th generation fighter called NGAD in testing nearing a production decision and a stealthy long range UAS called the RQ-180 that is more or less an unmanned B-2 Spirit. The Navy and Air Force are on their second generation of a high energy electromagnetic pulse weapon. China has no tilt rotor aircraft and nothing at all like the 250+ knot Sikorsky S-97. China doesn't have a true all aspect low observable aircraft. The J-20 isn't there yet. The total number of helicopters in China, civil and military, of all descriptions is less than the number of UH-60s just in the US Army. Their air forces are smaller than those of the US too, quite a bit smaller.

China has to steal their technology from the west because the people who should now be their senior engineers and scientists and who should be leading their research were all either killed or run off by the Red Guards. I know this because my wife is such a person. Now she is an engineer here. All the Chinese have are green horn young engineers from universities who demand bribes for good grades (another problem my wife faced, her family didn't have money to pay the bribes necessary to admissions and to professors, she faced no such problems with American universities) with limited experience aside from what they can learn working with a western firm or what they can steal from the west using their considerable cyber espionage abilities. Even still China (and Russia ) have not mastered the material science necessary for high bypass turbofan engines (the throttles on something like an AN-124 have to handled very gingerly to avoid compressor stalls) nor do they have the material science to construct high performance gas turbines such as the engines used in fighter aircraft or combat ships that can last 1500 hours or more between overhauls. The Russian engines only last hundreds of hours and the Chinese struggle to even match that level of durability. And that big AN-124 is only pressurized in the cockpit area. The Russians could not make the whole airplane pressurized like the C-5 is without making it too heavy to carry a useful payload. Even still it cannot begin to match the payload and range of the C-5M with its new engines. Chinese aircraft all rely on western avionics and unfortunately they rely heavily on Israel for advanced military technology and operational art.

No surprise there, US and Australia are training for island war. Chinese like the Russian armies are so corrupt that they are doomed to failure. It’s a matter of how many ill trained troops you have to kill rather than how many well trained troops you have to deal with.

Don't be a fool. The Chinese train realistically and train hard. They are a much tougher foe than the Russians. For the most part they have better equipment too, particularly their navy. They would not be a push over in a hot war.

William that is just stupid. It’s a spectacular example of corruption. Yes they have progressed but no where near western standards. The army is conscripts, the weapons like Russia is hit and miss. And the corruption has/will hamper any actual attempt at force projection. The only thing I worry about is does the free world have enough bullets to kill masses of confused conscripts?

20 years too late for the warning!

Modern day China looks a lot like bad days old China recently. Shouldn’t we all be much more careful?

More rabble rousing from the least trustworthy people we know trying to sow fear in the minds of those who do not care to actually pay attention to the world around them.

"By volume, most of what is at risk from Chinese Communist Party aggression is not, so to speak, my stuff. It's yours -- the world-leading expertise, technology, research and commercial advantage developed and held by people in this room, and others like you."

Russia is (was) launching our astronauts into space because we no longer can. China is supplying MOST of the 'high-tech' that is being installed in the world and nothing says that like trump blocking Huawei's 5G tech until America could catch up. Or even America's favorite child, the Military spending our grandchildren's financial futures and still well behind what the others already have online. These guys are just lying to justify their failures and more government largess to incompetent Corporate and their own agencies. They are selling FEAR and nothing else. And if we sent all of the Chinese scientists working is U.S. labs back to China, U.S. science would be crippled. Highly ambitious U.S. scientists building labs and hoping to score that 'breakthrough' heavily recruit Chinese grad students. At least THEY know.

Anyone who has been in the military and looks at Chinese troops and their stunning discipline and attention to detail, and the dedication they showed in kicking the U.S.' butt in Korea despite a significant lack of weapons, equipment, and supplies relative to the Americans, KNOWS that a war with China would be a disaster for the U.S. and the loss of our children for the benefit of our rich unimaginable. Add in Russia, as Western foreign policy pushes then closer and closer together with a common enemy, and the scales dip dramatically in the West's disfavor.

The U.S. and the UK have way more to gain technologically spying on China than China has to gain spying on the U.S. and UK and they certainly do spy on China. If the U.S. and UK really want to spy on something that is leading China to stride so far ahead of the U.S. and UK in almost everything, they could do best spying on China's educational system and significant lack of 'faith-based' mentalities that believe anything they are told by their government.

What we see in the comments quoted here from the U.S. and UK representatives sound more like what a 'loser' might say: "They're CHEATING!". No, they're just smarter than us and a 3000 year continuous cultural history HAS to count for something...

Yet we keep allowing Chinese into sensitive positions in research universities, and China-born people who took on US citizenship last Tuesday into sensitive positions in the private sector because God forbid someone call us "racist".

Best of luck with that.

No surprise there, US and Australia are training for island war. Chinese like the Russian armies are so corrupt that they are doomed to failure. It’s a matter of how many ill trained troops you have to kill rather than how many well trained troops you have to deal with.