In what Bloomberg billed as the White House’s “latest salvo in the trade war between the world’s two largest economies”, the Trump administration released a 35-page report late last night fleshing out its national security concerns emanating from China’s theft of intellectual properties as well as economic policies that shield domestic Chinese companies from competition.

The report, titled “How China’s Economic Aggression Threatens the Technologies and Intellectual Property of the United States and the World“, accuses China of achieving its brisk economic growth through “aggressive acts, policies, and practices that fall outside of global norms and rules (collectively, ‘economic aggression’)” (surprisingly, not through nosebleed levels of debt issuance), before it lists two categories of said “economic aggression” that are the focus of the report; they are:

• Acquire Key Technologies and Intellectual Property From Other Countries, Including the United States.
• Capture the Emerging High-Technology Industries That Will Drive Future Economic Growth15 and Many Advancements in the Defense Industry.

The cites comments from the US intelligence community, which note that “Chinese actors are the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage” and that China covets technology in key industries like “electronics, telecommunications, robotics, data services, pharmaceuticals, mobile phone services, pharmaceuticals, satellite communications and imagery and business application software.”

When thefts of technology are reported, China does everything it can to stymie investigations. Indeed, economic espionage is a main focus of China’s intelligence services, and the US believes that China’s Ministry of State Security has no fewer than 50,000 intelligence officers operating abroad – and no fewer than 40,000 operating domestically.

The report also offers details about how China violates US export-control laws by exploiting the growth in “dual-use” technologies (aka those that have civilian and military purposes). As an example, the report cites a conspiracy involving a naturalized US citizen who was born in China.

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