This news analysis was originally dispatched as part of Epoch Times China email newsletters. Subscribe to the newsletters by filling your email in the “China D-brief” box under this article.
Chinese telecommunications company Huawei recently unveiled its new P9 smartphone, and as a recent Wired headline states, “Huawei just copied the iPhone—down to the last screw.”
Incidents like this aren’t anything new when it comes to Chinese tech companies. Epoch Times noted back in 2014 that Chinese company Xiaomi had built its entire brand around copying Apple, right down to its CEO dressing like Steve Jobs during product events.
The recent development does, however, highlight an important issue.
Just a few months ago, U.S. leaders were adamant about stopping the Chinese regime’s use of cyberattacks to steal information from U.S. companies. This led to the agreement, announced by President Barack Obama and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, on Sept. 25, 2015, to end the use of cyberattacks for economic theft.
Obama stated at the time, “We’ve agreed that neither the U.S. or the Chinese government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage.”
There is mixed reporting on how effective the agreement was. A “60 Minutes” segment on Jan. 17 noted that the day after the announcement, Chinese cyberattacks on U.S. businesses continued as usual. Cybersecurity company FireEye claimed the agreement did reduce the number of Chinese cyberattacks on U.S. companies, but its claims are also contested by other cyber researchers.
As I mentioned in an article around that time, however, the key problem with the cyber agreement is that it only addressed cyberattacks used for economic theft, and it only addressed economic theft conducted through cyber methods.
In other words, the agreement does nothing to stop cyberattacks used for intelligence gathering. This means the Chinese cyberattacks on the Office of Personnel Management, which stole 21.5 million records on current and former U.S. federal employees, fall outside the program.
And just as importantly, the agreement does nothing to stop Chinese economic theft using methods other than cyberespionage.
That last part is important. The part that’s often overlooked in China’s use of cyberattacks for economic theft is that cyber activity is merely one of many tools the Chinese regime uses for theft of information, and all its tools are in turn just extensions of a system being directed by regime policy.
The Chinese regime still has a large focus on using conventional spies to steal information. Over the course of just three weeks in April, there were four cases of alleged Chinese spies targeting the United States.
Even this month, there has already been one case of an individual conducting what resembles espionage on behalf of the Chinese regime. A former U.S. Army contractor was sentenced to six months of home confinement for lying on his security clearance form by concealing that he formerly served in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The individual had also violated security protocols by connecting a USB drive to a computer on the Army network, and then trying to cover his tracks.
