by Eric Lendrum
On Monday, FBI Director Christopher Wray declared that the greatest foreign threat to the United States is the country of China, adding that the nation’s recent escalation of tensions regarding the country of Taiwan are “more brazen” and “more damaging” than anything seen in recent history.
The New York Post reports that Wray made his remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. Just days before the start of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Wray said that China poses a threat “to our economic security and to our freedoms: Our freedom of speech, of conscience, our freedom to elect and be served by our representatives without foreign meddling, our freedom to prosper when we toil and invent.”
“I’ve spoken a lot about this threat since I became FBI director,” Wray continued. “But I want to focus on it here tonight because in many ways it’s reached a new level — more brazen, more damaging than ever before, and it’s vital, vital, that all of us focus on that threat together.”
Wray pointed to the tendencies of President Xi Jinping’s government to steal “staggering” amounts of intelligence information from around the world, which leads to “deep, job-destroying damage across a wide range of industries — so much so that … we’re constantly opening new cases to counter their intelligence operations, about every 12 hours or so.”
One of China’s tactics, according to Wray, is to announce plans to build up a particular industry within their own nation, “like robotics, green energy production and vehicles, aerospace, biopharma, and so on,” and then proceed to “throw every tool in their arsenal at stealing that technology to succeed in those areas.” Wray cited as one example the Chinese breach of the Microsoft Exchange email service back in 2021, which infected over 30,000 companies’ servers with ransomware, leading to the compromising of private information of tens of thousands of American citizens.
China has been criticized, by the United States and other countries, for many years for such tactics as hacking and cyber warfare, intellectual property theft, and weakening the American economy by using borderline slave labor to produce their goods, thus reducing the price of Chinese goods so that goods made in America cannot compete. More recently, China has taken a more aggressive stance in tightening its grip on certain territories, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan; their actions toward the latter have led to intense speculation that China could invade the small island nation sometime in the near future.
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Eric Lendrum graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was the Secretary of the College Republicans and the founding chairman of the school’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter. He has interned for Young America’s Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, and the White House, and has worked for numerous campaigns including the 2018 re-election of Congressman Devin Nunes (CA-22). He is currently a co-host of The Right Take podcast.
Photo “Christopher Wray” by Federal Bureau of Investigation. Background Photo “Forbidden City Entrance” by Ekrem Canli. CC BY-SA 3.0.
