The GOP House Committee on Homeland Security released a “China Threat Snapshot” which highlighted 60 plus Chinese Communist Party (CCP) espionage cases in the United States since 2001. The snapshot encompassed events in 20 U.S. states and totaled over 220 incidents. According to the report, approximately 80 percent of all espionage cases, and about 60 percent of trade secret theft cases, are somehow linked to the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The report highlights numerous arrests, and the following guilty pleas and convictions in 2024 alone:
- On Dec. 18, 2024, New York City resident Chen Jinping, pled guilty to conspiring to act as an illegal agent for the PRC. Jinping was involved in opening and operating an undeclared overseas police station in lower Manhattan for the PRC’s Ministry of Public Security. According to court filings, Jinping and co-defendant “Harry” Lu Jianwang allegedly obstructed justice by destroying evidence of their communication with the PRC’s government.
- On Dec. 16, 2024, PRC citizen Klaus Pflugbeil was sentenced to 24 months in prison for conspiring to send trade secrets that belonged to a U.S.-based electric vehicle company to the PRC. He and his co-conspirators established a business in the PRC to sell stolen sensitive technology that belongs to a U.S. company. According to court documents, he and his co-conspirators made efforts to hide that they had stolen trade secrets.
- On Nov. 19, 2024, John Chen, a resident of Los Angeles and citizen of the PRC, was sentenced to 20 months in prison for acting as an unregistered agent and bribing an IRS agent in connection with a plot to target U.S.-based practitioners of Falun Gong. According to court documents, the PRC government directed Chen as part of the PRC’s policy of repression against the Falun Gong.
- On Aug. 13, 2024, Korbein Schultz, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, pled guilty to multiple charges, including conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information and bribery of a public official. Schultz sold sensitive military information to a foreign national believed to be connected to the PRC government.
- On Aug. 6, 2024, Shujun Wang, a resident of Queens, NYC, was convicted on four counts including acting and conspiring to act as a foreign agent of the PRC. Wang helped start a fake pro-democracy organization that opposed the PRC government as a tactic to flush out real activists that opposed the PRC. His four co-defendants are officials in the PRC’s Ministry of State Security and remain at large.
- On May 24, 2024, former CIA officer, Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, of Honolulu, Hawaii, pled guilty to conducting espionage on behalf of the PRC government by providing national defense information to the PRC’s Shanghai State Security Bureau. On Sept. 11, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for conspiracy to commit espionage.
- On Jan. 25, 2024, Xiaolei Wu, a Berklee College of Music student and a PRC citizen, was convicted in Massachusetts for threatening and stalking an individual who posted a flier on the Berklee campus in support of democracy in the PRC. The jury found Wu guilty of cyberstalking and interstate transmissions of threatening communication after he harassed, threatened, and intimidated the victim online.
- On Jan. 8, 2024, Petty Officer Wenheng Zhao, of California, was sentenced to 27 months in prison for transmitting sensitive military information to a PRC agent in exchange for bribery payments.
Given then-Senator Marco Rubio’s November 2024 statements of concern regarding the PRC’s hacking of U.S. telecom companies, and both Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation hearing statements regarding the threats of CCP spying, hopefully, the Trump administration will make significant inroads in combatting CCP espionage.
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