The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a new program for economic warfare, one that follows a path well trodden in the history of industrial competition.
According to a source in China who conducts business at the top levels of the CCP, the new program was launched in mid-2015 to early 2016 as a legal replacement to the CCP’s former model of using cyberattacks to steal information for economic gain.
On Sept. 25, 2015, then-President Barack Obama met with CCP leader Xi Jinping at the White House, where they announced a new bilateral agreement that said neither country would use cyberattacks to steal intellectual property, trade secrets, or other confidential information for “commercial advantage.”
The background of the meeting was that state-run cyberattacks from China had been stealing from the U.S. economy, and Obama had begun threatening to sanction Chinese companies that profited from the cyberattacks. The agreement diverted the sanctions.
