FBI Director Christopher Chris Wray said that Chinese agents had infiltrated ‘naive’ universities around the country.
According to McClatchy, some 350,000 Chinese students are enrolled in the U.S. universities or about 35 percent of the more than one million foreigners attending universities in the country.
Wray said that the FBI is also monitored academies within universities which are sponsored by the Chinese government. However, he said, such institutions do not know who can spy on their premises.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate intelligence committee that China has aggressively placed operatives at universities, “whether its professors, scientists, students,” and the bureau must monitor them from its 56 field offices across the nation.
Wray said, “I think the level of education in the academic field creates their own issues.” They are exploiting our open research and development environment, which we all revere. But they are taking advantage of it.”
Wray is not the first FBI officer to raise concerns about Chinese government’s activity and medical research. Edward You, an agent in the FBI’s Weapon of Mass District Directorate, told the members of Congress last March 2017 that the bureau is concerned about the efforts of the Chinese government-backed efforts to collect large amounts of data on the health of American governments.
“Wray said the United States needed a more “strategic perspective on China’s efforts to use acquisitions and other types of business ventures.”
U.S. senators and spy chiefs warned on Tuesday at a Senate hearing, China is trying to gain access to sensitive U.S. technologies and intellectual properties through telecommunications companies, academia, and joint business ventures.
