Beijing has been branded the “biggest long-term threat to economic security” by the head of the FBI and the leader of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency.
FBI chief, Christopher Wray, in a rare joint appearance with Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, warned business leaders that the Chinese government was purportedly “set on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market”.
In a speech at MI5’s London headquarters, Wray and McCallum reaffirmed previously voiced concerns about economic espionage and hacking operations ostensibly being carried out covertly by Beijing.
“We consistently see that it’s the Chinese government that poses the biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security, and by ‘our’, I mean both of our nations, along with our allies in Europe and elsewhere,” Wray said.
According to Ken McCallum, MI5 was currently running seven times as many investigations into China’s activities as it had been four years ago. Aware of the growing “threats”, he added that the agency planned to consistently tackle the “attempts at inference” which pervade “so many aspects of our national life”.
The British intelligence officer who has been serving as the Director General of MI5 since 2020 hailed the fact that this was the first time the heads of the FBI and MI5 had shared a public platform.
“We’re doing so to send the clearest signal we can on a massive shared challenge: China,” McCallum said. He went on to denounce Beijing’s purported “covert pressure across the globe,” which amounted to “the most game-changing challenge we face.”
In response, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, slammed the unsubstantiated allegations spearheaded by the western leaders.
China, “firmly opposes and combats all forms of cyber-attacks,” he underscored in an emailed statement to the Associated Press.
“We will never encourage, support or condone cyber-attacks,” the statement added.
FBI Director Christopher Wray had brought up the alleged proliferation of cybersecurity attacks linked to China earlier in the year, as Federal Bureau of Investigation asserted that intelligence officials were facing cybersecurity and espionage threats from Beijing that were “unprecedented in history.
“The biggest threat we face as a country from a counterintelligence perspective is from the People’s Republic of China, and especially the Chinese Communist Party,” Wray stated in an interview at FBI headquarters on April 21, cited by a “60 Minutes” broadcast.
Wray yet again accused China of targeting American innovation, trade secrets, and intellectual property “on a scale that’s unprecedented in history.”
China has been consistently dismissing such allegations, calling on Washington, in turn, to adopt a more responsible position on cyberspace and stop cyberattacks against China.
"China urges the US government to take a more responsible position on cyberspace and stop malicious network activity immediately," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said earlier this year, while slamming the US a "hacker empire."