LONDON (Washington Insider Magazine) – While intelligence analysts in Washington published a report about Beijing’s attempts to sway local and state politics in the U.S., FBI Director Christopher Wray delivered his sternest alert yet regarding the national security threat that China poses to the West in a joint speech with his British counterpart in London.
Wray raised the likelihood that China might be edging closer to invading Taiwan during a joint appearance with the head of Britain’s MI5, the country’s domestic intelligence agency, on Wednesday. He noted that China has been attempting to protect its economic system from sanctions that would follow such a move.
According to a statement released by the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Wednesday, “the U.S. has worked hand in glove with NATO to hype up competition with China and stoke group confrontation in order to deceive the people.”
The MI5 and FBI top brass appeared together for the first time at a public gathering, according to MI5 Director General Ken McCallum. He reiterated what Wray and American lawmakers from both parties have been saying in recent years: that President Xi Jinping’s administration’s actions have crushed long-held hopes for China’s progress.
Both officials reiterated earlier worries about Chinese industrial espionage, which employs both conventional and cyber spies. They also claimed that China is stealing intellectual property from the West using intimidation, threats, and economic might as part of a plot to replace Europe and the United States as the superpower rather than engage in friendly commerce.
McCallum claimed that compared to 4 years ago, his agency is currently conducting 7 times as many investigations into China. Every 12 hours, according to Wray, a new counterintelligence investigation involving China is launched by the FBI.
The U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center, which is a division of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, released an unclassified bulletin shortly after the two government representatives spoke in London warning of a broad Chinese effort to sway local and state government authorities in the U.S., according to NBC NEWS.
According to the report, China allegedly provides free travel to local and state authorities, tries to take advantage of city-to-city collaborations, and offers economic investments to suffering localities in exchange for their support of Beijing’s objectives.
According to the research, China is concentrating on municipal and state governments as a result of Washington’s bipartisan consensus becoming more antagonistic to Beijing.
According to a 2019 research by a Chinese Community Party think tank and a Chinese university, each of the 50 governors of the United States was evaluated and scored according to whether their views on China were viewed as friendly, hard-line, or unclear. Their genders, ages, employment histories, political leanings, and states according to their geographical position, economic size, and volume of commerce with China were also included in the study.
