Days ago, FBI Director Kash Patel made an unannounced trip to Beijing recently to meet with Chinese government officials. The topic? China’s role in supplying the United States with fentanyl – a drug that killed 48,000 Americans last year and more than 310,000 Americans from 2019-2023.
Patel’s trip was only the latest reminder that China is in the midst of an aggressive campaign to undermine America’s health, national security, and economic security. President Trump is skillfully countering that campaign, as demonstrated by his recent trip to Asia, where he met with China’s President Xi. That meeting yielded important breakthroughs on several issues – from soybeans to semiconductors.
But China’s campaign is multi-dimensional. As the then-FBI Director, Christopher Wray, said last year, “We’ve seen Beijing hit just about every industry we have—everything from biotech to aviation, to advanced technologies like AI, to different forms of healthcare and agriculture—to steal our intellectual property, technology, and research.”
He went on to say, “China is engaged in the largest and most sophisticated theft of intellectual property and expertise in the history of the world, leveraging its most powerful weapons, starting with cyber.”
Consider China-based Huawei Technologies, which is the world’s largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment. In 2020, the company and four of its subsidiaries were indicted in the United States on 16 counts. The charges include a conspiracy to steal trade secrets, which the indictment described as “using fraud and deception to misappropriate sophisticated technology from U.S. counterparts.”
Since then, Huawei has been fighting the charges. But earlier this year a U.S. District Court judge, Ann Donnelly, rejected the company’s attempts to have 13 of the counts dismissed. The indictment laid out, in breathtaking detail, Huawei’s malfeasance.
It said the company tried to grow “through the deliberate and repeated misappropriation of intellectual property” of companies headquartered or operating in the United States. That meant violating confidentiality agreements with competitor companies, recruiting competitor companies’ employees “to gain access to intellectual property of their former employers,” and using proxies (such as professors) to access nonpublic intellectual property.
Even more eye-popping, Huawei encouraged intellectual property theft by its employees, paying them bonuses for confidential information they obtained from competitor companies. And when the company was being investigated by U.S. law enforcement, it instructed its employees to conceal information.
The Huawei issue was the backdrop to the Trump administration’s decision in late June to approve a merger among two American companies that compete with Huawei: Hewlett Packard Enterprises and Juniper Networks.
Huawei factored into the administration’s decision. A senior U.S. national security official told Axios: “In light of significant national security concerns, a settlement … serves the interests of the United States by strengthening domestic capabilities and is critical to countering Huawei and China.” The official said blocking the deal would have “hindered American companies and empowered” Chinese competitors.
China has also made inroads into other sectors of the U.S. economy, such as agriculture. Smithfield, a U.S.-based company that’s responsible for 25 percent of all pork production in the United States, is owned by a Chinese company, WH Group. A recent report by the America First Policy Institute notes that the company has “a proven track record of price fixing, cartel-like market manipulation, preferencing for the export market to China, reckless environmental behavior, and exploitation of child labor.”
The report also points out that WH Group now owns (through Smithfield) massive plots of land in North Carolina, Virginia, and Missouri – each of which is home to large military bases. AFPI calls this land ownership “an immediate threat to national security due to its potential proximity to vulnerable sites critical to military and civil resiliency,” adding that there are also greater opportunities for intellectual property theft and agricultural terrorism.
As for fentanyl, Chinese companies are the source of virtually all of the precursors that enable the manufacturing of the deadly concoction. And the government is complicit in this manufacturing, as a U.S. congressional committee revealed last year.
The committee reported that the Chinese government directly subsidizes the manufacturing and export of fentanyl materials, gives monetary grants to companies trafficking in these materials, holds ownership stakes in companies tied to drug trafficking, and doesn’t prosecute such companies. For Americans aged 18-45, fentanyl is the leading cause of death.
The Trump administration has been vigilant in cracking down on the threat posed by China. That vigilance will need to continue, as China shows no sign of retreat.
Fred Fleitz is a former Chief of Staff to the Trump National Security Council and a former CIA analyst. He is currently Vice Chair of the America First Policy Institute Center for American Security.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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