Sunset of the Forbidden City, Beijing (northwest cornor of the Forbidden City) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
June 11, 2012: Jianyu Huang, a Chinese scientist working in the United States, has been arrested and charged with passing stolen technology back to China. Huang was fired from his nanotechnology research job in April and has been charged with stealing and lying to security officials about these activities. Huang was born in China but moved to the U.S. and became an American citizen.
American intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies have increasingly been paying close attention to Chinese born American scientists, seeking out the minority that use their access to American technology secrets to either give or sell this valuable material to government or commercial organizations in China. This is all part of extensive Chinese intelligence efforts to steal American technology.
China sees this kind of broad-spectrum intelligence gathering as a major operation and one they intend to keep going as long as possible. Thus, during the last four years China has established eight National Intelligence Colleges in major universities. In effect, each school now has an “Espionage Department”. With this about 300 carefully selected applicants are accepted each year, to be trained as spies and intelligence operatives, and future commanders of these operations. The college trained operatives expect to make a career out of stealing Western technology. China has found that espionage is an enormously profitable way to steal military and commercial secrets. While Chinese Cyber War operations in this area get a lot of publicity, the more conventional spying brings in a lot of stuff that is not reachable on the Internet.
