“Today, we see Chinese espionage not just taking place against traditional targets like our defense and intelligence agencies, but against targets like research labs and universities,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said when he introduced the campaign on November 1, 2018. Shi could have developed lawfully had he chosen to do so,” federal judge Christopher Cooper wrote.ĭuring its now-ended China Initiative, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) challenged all 93 US attorneys and 56 FBI field offices to undertake time-consuming probes for evidence of the People’s Republic “stealing its way up the economic ladder” toward global dominance. As to the stolen secrets’ value, they involved “relatively pedestrian technology that the Court felt Dr. A jury found Shi guilty of conspiracy to steal trade secrets but cleared him of economic espionage-that is, of intending or knowing that the offense would benefit China. “A&M had nothing to do with any of it,” an FBI official tells Prism. Lead conspirator Shan Shi, a structural engineer identified in the documentary as a “former professor from Texas A&M,” had been an adjunct professor-lecturer, but his work at the school predated the crime. The story is compelling but doesn’t conclusively tie Western academia to a Chinese military threat. In the FBI video “Made in Beijing-the Plan for Global Market Domination,” the narrator warns viewers that “the Chinese Communist Party will pull out all the stops to obtain technology from the West.” The threat extends even to academia, with members used to help the party “meet one of their top strategic goals: modernizing the military.” In the footage that follows, an FBI sting operation takes down a Chinese-backed conspiracy to steal and mass-produce a Houston firm’s formula for syntactic foam, a buoyancy material used in offshore drilling and warships. It ended up prosecuting academics and casting a pall over decades of engineering research collaborations. The FBI’s China Initiative aimed to nab industrial spies.

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