Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe says that China is the #1 threat to US national security, democracy, and freedom since World War II, and warns that America faces a “once-in-a-generation challenge” to resist Beijing’s effort to reshape the world “in its own image.”
“The intelligence is clear,” writes Ratcliffe in an Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Beijing intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically. Many of China’s major public initiatives and prominent companies offer only a layer of camouflage to the activities of the Chinese Communist Party.”
China employs what Ratcliffe calls a “rob, replicate and replace” strategy of economic espionage, by which Beijing robs US companies of their intellectual property, copies it, and then replaces the US firm they stole from in the global marketplace.
Ratcliffe points to the case of Chinese wind-turbine manufacturer Sinovel – which in 2018 a federal jury found guilty of stealing trade secrets from American Superconductor – costing the US firm over 700 jobs and $1 billion in shareholder value. Sinovel now sells wind turbines worldwide “as if it built a legitimate business through ingenuity and hard work rather than theft.”
US intelligence agencies, meanwhile, have been hot on China’s trail:…
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