How The Chinese Are Stealing Our Technology

You have probably heard folks talking about nation states stealing our intellectual property. High on that list are China, North Korea, Iran and Russia. But there are many others; don’t think that those four are the only ones.

Rarely, however, do we get an in depth look at how these operations work.

The U.S. federal government runs a lot of research and development labs. One of the crown jewels of that effort is the Department of Energy’s national labs. Originally created to help us create nuclear weapons, they now do research in many, many different areas. A lot of it is classified, but a lot of it is not classified.

Among those labs is the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. A premier R&D facility, the lab attracts major talent from all over the world.

China, in particular, has targeted scientists at Los Alamos for “recruitment”. Especially susceptible to being recruited are scientists of Chinese origin and scientists that have family or relatives in China.

China has an overarching program called the Talent Superpower Strategy. The strategy works two ways. One is to encourage scientists to go abroad, learn (AKA steal) as much as they can and then return home. The other is to recruit scientists who are already over here and convince them to return to China for the good of the motherland.

The bad news is that the success of these programs absolutely helps China’s military goals.

One relatively well known program (and they have many) is the thousand talents program. It has a sister program for younger people called the youth thousand talents program. The purpose of this program is to recruit talent to help China dominate the west by, among other things:

• Accept concurrent part-time technical work positions in China, while still be paid by and working for U.S. companies and government agencies
• Coordinate research cooperation between U.S. (and others) and Chinese entities
• Conduct research in the U.S. that is commercialized by Chinese entities
• Commercialize patents and technology by establishing enterprises in China
• Leverage U.S. institutes to help Chinese employers train their talent
• Introduce foreign technology into western China
• Establish intermediary organizations to facilitate the introduction of foreign technology to China and create more methods to serve the country in addition to the ones above

Between 1987 and 2021, at least 162 scientists who formerly worked at Los Alamos returned to China to support the PRC’s goal of becoming the number one world power. While 162 is a relatively small number out of the total populace of tens of thousands who worked at Los Alamos, these are probably the best scientists conducting very important research, which we paid for and whom we trained and which the Chinese effectively got for free.

China rewards the scientists who return with fancy labs, research grants, benefits for their family, upgraded living conditions and other privileges.

For an in-depth report on this situation, read the Strider report here.

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