By Greg Levesque, CEO, Strider
Are the United States and our allies willing to do what is necessary to effectively counter the People’s Republic of China’s Military-Civil Fusion Doctrine?
The People’s Republic of China’s expansive ambitions to dominate the global technology sector knows no bounds. Yet – despite a seemingly endless stream of warnings, thefts, and provocations – the U.S. and our allies still have no coherent plan to counter China’s bold actions which erase the line between the commercial sphere and geopolitical strategy. To China, commercial conflict and nation-state conflict are not separate; they are part of the same ongoing effort for global dominance.
The latest: China announced a few weeks ago that it is restricting the exports of two metals – gallium and germanium – vital for the manufacturing of semiconductors. This comes on the heels of other disturbing actions. A former Samsung executive in South Korea was recently arrested for stealing technology to build a copycat semiconductor plant in China. In June, a researcher at one of Japan’s premier government research institutes was arrested for leaking data to a company based in China. Meanwhile, China has clamped down on information about business activities in an effort to obscure its commercial and military activities from Western analysts.
The U.S. and our allies need to reimagine our toolkit to address the full scope of the threat and develop a comprehensive strategy that includes stopping wide-scale IP theft and economic espionage as part of a national defense strategy vis a vis China.
Today, the United States is conducting a review of our National Defense Strategy led by former Congresswoman Jane Harmon and former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman. The goal, which was mandated by the 2022 Defense Authorization bill, is to examine the 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) and make recommendations for its implementation, with a focus on assumptions, objectives, defense investments, force posture and structure, operational concepts, and military risks.
As part of this strategy review, the United States needs to give further consideration to how we and our allies think about China’s military-civil fusion strategy. China doesn’t draw a line between commercial and nation-state conflict; neither can we, if we are to effectively counter the threat. So the U.S. needs to develop a public-private partnership to take on the challenge.
Beijing doesn’t hide its national ambitions; it uses all aspects of its military and civilian infrastructure to achieve its goals. China doesn’t just seek military dominance (though of course it does), but sees hard power and soft power inextricably linked.
And to achieve these goals, China has launched a systematic effort to recruit technologists, business leaders, and academics who have trained in the West and bring to China the Intellectual property and know-how of Western companies. Strider recently released a report showing how China has systematically recruited 30,000 technologists and business executives from European companies to PRC-headquartered companies. And when they move to China, they find financial support from national and regional governments to compete against the very companies they left.
But the effort goes much further than that. The PRC will obfuscate the true ‘ownership’ of a company, so it looks like a private company, but the reality is that it’s essentially a front company for the government. Or talk to any CISO of a global company or security leader of a national lab, and they will tell you story after story about PRC efforts to compromise their data, people, and supply chains. That’s also the case with ongoing efforts to steal the intellectual property of US-based companies, particularly in strategic areas like quantum computing, AI, autonomous vehicles, drones, or rare-earth metals and semiconductors. The cost of China’s activities against U.S. businesses alone has been tagged at $200-$600 billion a year.
This is a known-known. The Senate Intelligence Committee last year released a damning report on the state of our nation’s security. It is a broad indictment of our country’s ability to protect itself from foreign intelligence operations. The report concludes: “The U.S. [Counterintelligence] enterprise is not postured to confront the whole-of-society threat landscape facing the country today.”
To confront the threat, the United States and our allies clearly need to take a whole-of-society approach as well – including both national assets and the private-sector.
There’s good news in this battle. Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed the birth of a private-sector intelligence community delivering new capabilities for many organizations that find themselves under siege but without adequate protection from the government. Government transformation and the growth of the private sector intelligence companies are both necessary and critical to addressing the Free World’s counterintelligence challenges.
Governments, academia, and corporations alike must recognize that the PRC’s actions have turned Western institutions into arenas of geopolitical competition. Acknowledging this reality should catalyze a change of mindset as well as government and corporate policies to protect sensitive technologies and intellectual property that ensure businesses and research organizations operate on a level playing field to pursue research & development, business operations, and global scientific collaboration.
The time is now for the West to respond and counter the threat.
Greg Levesque is the CEO and a co-founder of Strider, which provides cutting-edge strategic intelligence to help organizations protect their technology, talent and supply chains from geopolitical threats.
