American Thought Leaders - ‘Criminal State’: Unmasking the CCP’s Whole-of-Society Espionage Playbook | Nicholas Eftimiades

Episode Date: May 18, 2025

There are few people who understand the workings of Chinese espionage as well as Nicholas Eftimiades.After a 34-year government career—including time at the CIA, Department of State, and Defense Intelligence Agency—he’s now a professor at Penn State University’s Homeland Security Program and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.“China uses what we call a whole-of-society approach to conducting espionage. … We’re not talking about thousands [of people]. We’re talking about tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people engaged globally in carrying out the CCP’s will,” Eftimiades says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

China uses what we call a whole-of-society approach to conducting espionage. In the U.S. or Canada, so we're not talking about hundreds, or we're not talking about thousands. We're talking about tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people engaged globally in carrying out the CCP's will. There are few people who understand Chinese espionage tradecraft as well as Professor Nicolas Epimiatis. After a 34-year government career, including time at the CIA, State Department, and Defense Intelligence Agency, he's now a professor at Penn State University's Homeland Security Program and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. We have, out of Los Alamos, we've had 116 ethnic Chinese who have worked on critical

technologies who have gone back to China. He's the author of Chinese Espionage, Operations and Tactics. This is extraordinary. U.S. universities that are working for China, developing technologies that the U.S. government has told China it cannot import. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Nicolas Efthimiades, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you very much for having me.

You have incredible in-depth knowledge about the Chinese Communist Party's espionage operations in America and Canada. How big, how deep of a problem is this really? One could argue at a strategic level, it presents the greatest threat to the US and Canada that we've seen since the fall of the Soviet Union, since Nazism. Justify that to me. Well, China uses what we call a whole-of-society approach to conducting espionage. In the U.S. or Canada, whether it's the RCMP or CSIS in Canada, or the CIA or the FBI in the United States, the intelligence agencies work sort of unto themselves.

You know, they recruit spies, they arrest spies. That's what they do. Not so in China. unto themselves. They recruit spies, they arrest spies, that's what they do. Not so in China. China engages entire society for not only collecting information, but the subversion of other nation states. So we're not talking about hundreds,

or we're not talking about thousands, we're talking about tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people engaged globally in carrying out the CCP's will. It's really an extraordinary effort in the magnitude and scale. Well, and here's the thing that I find fascinating and incredibly difficult to deal with is there's this very powerful incentive structure because of this whole society approach that essentially could co-opt almost anybody. Yeah, there actually are two avenues at play. Number one is the incentive structure.

And the incentive structure means because the CCP has such a dominant power control of China, if you want to get anything done, if you want to advance in China, your social credit scores, your businesses, your position, what you might have in China, the safety of your family, you have to be on good terms with the CCP. Don't necessarily have to be a member of it, but you certainly have to be seen favorably by the CCP. Students who go abroad, people who are abroad, are questionable by the CCP. And so they have to do acts to prove themselves to the Chinese Communist Party. So what we find is collection efforts, people flying

drones over military bases, classified facility. We find people penetrating, you know, military bases. We find people doing all sorts of acts of espionage. There is also a concerted effort through the state-owned enterprises. China had 300,000, now they have about 150,000 state-owned enterprises, 50,000 of which are at the central government level. About 112 are really large scale several hundred thousand employees. And those entities are controlled and they do some collection activities, theft of technology

in particular, economic espionage, on behalf of the CCP. So you have that entire structure, which would be unheard of in free democracies. You have universities in the same way, you know, collecting on behalf of the CCP. I mean, we've seen this. I have, you know, over 50 some odd number of universities have been identified in court documents in economic espionage cases. So we see this at the corporate structure. We see this at the university structure.

We see it in China's intelligence agencies. So this is what I mean by strategic threats. It's a threat on a scale far faster than any of our services, our counterintelligence, our security services are used to dealing with. In our democracies, we just don't have the structure to deal with this type of threat. There's this whole approach of collection, which is get a lot of little things and then put them all together back home. Right? So a lot of this opportunistic intelligence gathering is actually part of the plan and actually useful, even though each single piece might in itself might not even be a criminal issue. Right.

Right? We call this a grains of sand approach and the old saying used to be if the Russians wanted to steal sand from a beach they would surface a submarine at night a bunch of a bunch of commandos would paddle in from the shore they would get a bucket of sand you know they'd have a ring around it with guns they'd get a bucket of sand they paddled back out to the sub and disappear under the waves. China would send 10,000 bathers the next day and everyone would come with some sand and

brush themselves off. We see this in their collection operations. Sometimes redundant, but sometimes self-guided, but massive. There's just no way to... The way we are structured, the way our services are structured, we just can't protect against that type of onslaught. I couldn't help but notice that Professor Charles Lieber recently got a position at Tsinghua University. I don't typically like to focus on specific individuals, but I think this case is kind of illustrative, especially since he was found guilty. Maybe if you could kind of paint me that picture and what it means that he's now at Tsinghua University, of all places.

Well, Professor Lieber was arrested because he was taking grants, in this case from the Air Force, for about $15 million and providing the same work to China. I just want to mention, and nanotechnology, like some of the most sensitive, you know, cutting edge, he's like one of the top nanotechnologists in the world. I have to mention that, but please continue. He's one of many, I mean, who do interesting things like that. We have, at a Los Alamos, what they call the Los Alamos Club, we've had 116 ethnic Chinese who have worked with classified clearance, with clearances on critical technologies who have gone back to China. And we have been able to identify some of the areas, including nuclear submarines and weapons systems that they've worked on back in China, because they publish on it.

And so we've been able to track everything that they've worked on. Is this illegal? No. They say I want to go back to China. China is recognizing their citizenship and go back to it. Technically is there should they be taking back the classified knowledge and using that in the development of China's in this case you know military weapons systems? No. They shouldn't be. But we're paralyzed as a bureaucracy in doing anything about this. We have a similar situation with Canada. Two dozen Canadian military pilots

have been in China training the Chinese PLA Air Force. I mean, training them in NATO combat tactics. So we don't have case law that says, hey, that's against the law. We know you're getting $300,000 a year, but you can't do that. So situations like this come up all the time. What about this case of the incredibly prominent nanotechnology professor being found guilty? What exactly was he found guilty of? How serious was the punishment and how is it that he's now working for a Chinese university? Well, the punishment should have been jail time, which he didn't get. In this case, Professor Lieber lied to the government on a contract, and that's called 18 U.S.C. 1001. What he did was he was working for China,

the same thing that he was doing for the Air Force, but not telling them. So you can do that, or you can go work for China, but then the Air Force would have said, you're not taking our money, you know, you're not doing your projects working here. But he didn't do that. He specifically told them, you know, he wasn't. He filled out the paperwork and said, I'm not working for China. So what these cases wind up to be is not so

much the term economic espionage, but fraud, a person really conducting fraud. It's the easiest charge to get on this because it's easily provable. But what you find is that there are many, many, many more cases of this with people working for China while they're cutting edge academics working on nanotechnologies and biotechnologies in the United States. And they're working for China at the same time. The only difference, it's common in academia, the only difference is those are generally considered questions of ownership of the research and not federal charge of fraud because they don't have federal contracts. Okay? We see a number of universities,

and this is extraordinary, U.S. universities that are working for China, developing technologies that the US government has told China it cannot import. So you can't export this technology, and China says, okay, one of our universities goes to partner with a US university and develops a technology. Or Chinese companies like Huawei pay a US non-profit, which then turns around and sponsors research at a university in the United States to provide that technology to China. So we're leaking all over the place in critical technologies, technologies that give China a competitive edge commercially and militarily. It's absolutely astonishing. I happen to know that this sort of thing is happening, but

when you lay it out like this, it's like, what are we doing? Yeah, it's out of control. But even today, where the level of understanding of the China threat is the highest it's been ever by a margin. I imagine you would agree with my statement here. Absolutely. I gave my first testimony before the Congress in the 1990s, based on my first book, four times, testified before Congress. And one of the things I tried to leave with them was saying, look, do something about this problem now, because if you don't do it,

you'll be calling me back in 20 years, screaming, my God, how did it get this bad? Well, we're 30 years later, and it's worse than ever. The only difference now is the realization on the American policy apparatus that they've let it atrophy for so long that we're in a big problem. When you say atrophy, do you mean the counterintelligence work? Not only the counterintelligence work, it's the insider threat awareness. It's the ability

to deal with China's cyber hacking campaigns, theft of intellectual property, trade secrets through cyber. Our response? Build bigger walls. You know, I got it. That's reasonably effective. We're building bigger walls. And if you're the government building bigger walls to protect yourself, then you and I,

the taxpayer, pay for it. If you're a company that's building bigger walls, the consumer pays for it. There's no cost to China. China just steals it like crazy. I mean, what kind of, you think about it. When you say walls, you mean like cyber, physical, cyber. Cyber walls, defensive walls that would build up.

We invest in that, and they invest in offense. Well, generally the offense is the one that wins. And we've seen criminal gangs that support the Ministry of State Security. Not only are they stealing technologies, but they're actually doing denial of service attacks and ransomware attacks and actually doing criminal activities in addition to that. You have a criminal state. It's simply the bottom line.

You have a criminal state that supports's simply the bottom line. You have a criminal state that supports these to degrade the United States and to further the greatest transfer of wealth in history. One of the things that's very interesting in your book is you highlight how the human intelligence works hand in hand with the technical collection, which I think in our systems isn't typical, whereas in China, that is more the standard MO. Right. What we see is that in a number of cases, and by human, we mean human intelligence, the actual collection of information from other individuals, working with technical collection, whether it's penetration of laptops, usually often cyber work that's done, and their operational tradecraft as it's called often integrates both. And I'll give you a couple of quick examples.

There was a case about four years ago dealing with Saffron, French aerospace company, and as it turns out connected to General Electric as well the individuals that were recruited out of that from the main case officer in China Xu Yanzhun he had a human collection going at the same time he had people inside saffron Chinese nationals inside saffron who were director of cyber security. So of course, they were not only allowing the Chinese Ministry of State Security in,

but then covering up and trying to thwart Safran's own internal investigation. So he has a human collection component going and a cyber collection component going, and he has people on the inside who are able to thwart the investigation by the company. So it's a holistic approach to how you conduct espionage. It's really extraordinary to watch. You know, something just struck me. We were talking about counterintelligence. I wonder if there's even some people out there, we hear the term often, but I wonder if there's

some folks who don't even know what that entirely means. Why don't you tell me? Well, for every intelligence service and for their activities, they're trying to counter an opposing intelligence service. So we have counterintelligence, which is you're trying to oppose the general things that a foreign intelligence service does. And we have counter espionage, which is specifically going after an espionage operation, trying to flip it, turn it around, use it to your benefit. In the United States, as in Canada, as in free democracies, those intelligence, counter-intelligence capabilities are built around the classified worlds.

They're built around our classified military information, our classified intelligence information, those types, nuclear information, all that classified stuff. China's strength is that it strikes at the political apparatus where there is not this type of counter capability in place because we have free and open democracies, which is why you see so many accusations and investigations of Canadian parliamentarians

having been, and evidence that they've been supported by the Chinese embassy. We see that all the time. We see the same thing in the United States. Linda saw in a recent case, even at the state level, right? New York State and she, for 12 years, was supporting the state level, right? New York State and she for 12 years was supporting the Chinese Communist Party, you know, the United Front Work Department, and thwarting Taiwan, you know, their policy initiatives. So...

Working for the governor. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm sorry. While she was working for the governor, two successive governors, Kuomintang Ho-chol, over the course of 12 years, you know, thwarting, running China policy for New York basically, right? Running, literally running China policy. Can't write this stuff. No, no, you can't.

It's just amazing. So all these, and that New York state apparatus, that doesn't have any protection in place. It took the FBI, a federal agency, to come look at that and then to ultimately arrest her and her husband. But so she, and it's the same thing in Canada, we have agencies that are on the side that are organized to protect themselves and to protect classified information. They're not organized to protect General Electric

or some food company or something. They're not organized to protect those. Something I've become aware of, and this would be great to hear your thoughts on it, is that the FBI has been less focused in past years on developing counterintelligence capability. But from what you're telling me, it would seem to me like it would be a huge priority for the FBI to have developed this kind of broader counterintelligence, counterespionage capability. Well, that's the term that you've hit on, broader, right?

That counterintelligence capability that the FBI has up until recently has been very focused on just the protection of U.S. secrets, right? 18 U.S. 700, 790. You know, that series of laws, of legislation that says protect U.S. classified information. What they haven't been focused on is covert and political influence. They haven't been focused on threats and manipulation of the democracy advocates and the dissident community. I mean, they have up until recently, two or three years ago, they completely ignored that. And maybe because they don't have resources for it, maybe because it wasn't seen as a threat, but it's pretty much ignored.

And it's a horrible thing because so many people, so many citizens of the United States were subject to harassment and threats and the transnational repression from China, and they were left on their own. And if a nation state serves no other purpose, if it serves nothing else at all, it's there to protect its citizens. Otherwise, why bother? We have not done that for decades.

I read your section about and your case studies of the transnational repression with great interest, including the Linda Son example. But because it's a big area that I've been interested in for decades, you've looked at, I forget, there's almost 900 cases for this book, right? And not of transnational repression, that's just a piece. But can you just explain to me what you found broadly in that realm? In the transnational? Yeah, and also define it for me too, because again, it may seem obvious, but it maybe isn't obvious to everybody. Okay, so let's start with our definition. Yeah. Our definition of this is China,

and in our case China, reaching out past its borders globally to exercise the CCP's will to shut down any dissent, to co-opt and to pull people, organizations, governments, etc., to support the CCP through manipulation, through bribes, you know, whatever, and then to firmly destroy any opposition to the CCP globally. Right? That's their objective, and that's what transnational repression is. It's the second part. Actually it's both parts. It's covert manipulation and corruption, and then it's actually threatening and in some

cases taking action against individuals globally to shut down any global opposition to the CCP. Something else that is really good in your book now that I think about it, right, is you explain very clearly what the United Front Work Department is, what its role is. I'm going to get you to tell me about that because again, it's something that maybe isn't entirely obvious to everybody, but also that in doing the work that you just described, it's not just the United Front Work Department that's functioning, but multiple other major agencies in the Chinese system and the CCP system. Right. So let's start with the United Front Work

Department, which has, I believe, 13 bureaus. And it works domestically as well as overseas. And the idea is to join with organizations that do not share objectives or goals or value systems of the CCP and co-opt them. CCP might call it, or the United Front Work might call it educate them to position where they support the CCP's objectives. Okay? It's very simply.

It's co-opting other organizations. We saw this against the Nationalist, you know, where China sent a million people to join the Nationalist Party and, you know, before... And then eat it out from the inside. Right. And they eat it out from the inside. They destroy it and they destroy meetings and and they argue and fight, and then move up into positions and literally destroy the capability of that organization

to oppose the CCP. I always say the same thing happening now. We see it happening through corruption. We see it happening through covert agents recruited. That's done by the Ministry of State Security. So they actually have a bureau in China's version of the CIA, the Ministry of State Security, which is responsible for doing work

for the United Front Work Department, going out recruiting agents all over the world and getting them to disrupt or turn on their communities, their state or local governments, as well as their federal governments. And we have seen this at every level. And you mean you list some of the most shocking examples. You know, the prominent ones are Fang, Christine Fang, as you describe her. Yes.

Right. Right. And so she was a case, I guess, in around 2015 and was seen often with Congressman Swalwell, who ran for, actually ran for the presidency at that time as well. And the FBI picked her up on surveillance, meeting regularly with a Ministry of State Security officer out of the consulate. They followed her. Turns out she was very close to Congressman Swalwell. Well, and the thing that's most interesting about that case to me is the duration or the commitment to the development of the relationship. I don't have a particular interest in singling out Congressman Swalwell, but just in terms of the tradecraft, if you could paint that picture for me.

Sure, absolutely. In fact, the Ministry of State Security has a term for this, chindiyu, which translates to literally to bottom sinking fish or fish on the bottom of the ocean. It is a long-term asset. So they put a person in place, in this case, someone who is very friendly with politicians, representing the Chinese community as she used to sell herself and representing the Chinese diaspora, getting very close to politicians, and then leave that person in place for decades. That's the objective. And it's not a very large investment on the part of the Ministry of State Security, but it is a long-term investment that always brings forth results.

Over the years, I've managed to talk to a number of people who interacted with her in various capacities. You had this compelling, incredibly assertive personality by all reports. It was almost hard to say no to her sort of thing. A fascinating and deeply troubling area. How many assets of that nature do you think are out there? In the US and in Canada, we see a lot of this as well. But I'm going to say I think in the US and in Canada, Canada we see a lot of this as well, but I'm gonna say, you know, thousands, if not tens of thousands, in those countries. Because it really isn't a tremendous cost to the ministry.

I mean, you know, they have to invest in the person in time. Maybe there's training, they have to keep in touch. They dedicate an individual to handling the asset, as it's called, you know, to meeting her and communicating with her. But it's not like they're paying them tons of money. It's not like they're paying them for nuclear secrets or anything like that. It's a slow burn and something that happens

over a long period of time. And there's so many cases that have come to light of people being arrested. And it's only because in the past few years, law enforcement agencies have turned their attention towards this. Otherwise, they've been unencumbered for decades. Tell me about your background. How is it that you came to be one of the top people around these issues? I did part of my undergraduate and graduate work in Taiwan and mainland China. After that, I went into CIA and for four and a half years after CIA, I was a special agent

for diplomatic security service and counterintelligence working on China. And after that, I went in for the remainder of 34 years in Defense Intelligence Agency. Pretty much the entire part of my life, my entire adult life, I've been working on China and Chinese espionage. I retired in 2017. I became a full-time professor of homeland security at Penn State University in 2018. And I had published during this time, which is not easy while you're in the intel community, but I had published externally on Chinese espionage.

In 2018, I started getting calls, you know, ringing off the hook from US government agencies saying Nick, would you please come in and talk about China? Come in and talk about what they're doing. And I only thought, you know, I mean, God has a sense of humor. You've got to be kidding me. For 30, 34 years, a better part of 34 years, I worked on this issue.

And after I left is when they actually started to get concerned about it. And so since that time, I have, as you noted, I have 900 cases in the database, which allows you to do extraordinary analysis, comparative analysis, lets you understand motivations for recruitment, lets you understand the type of tradecraft applied against aerospace technology or information technology, et cetera. When you have that type of data, it really does let you do a lot of

extraordinary things. So since that time as a university professor, I've been working a lot on these issues for the last eight years or so. I might note, and you do mention this in the book as well, is that these 900 cases, they're cases that we found, not cases that exist, obviously. So there might be some kind of bias in the sample, so to speak. And I'm just wondering, in your thinking about that, do you have any sense of that? Do you think this is representative? I do just because of the volume of cases, and they're worldwide. So, and a lot of them I do get passed from governments or from individuals, companies in particular. And you know, people say is that 10% or 100%?

And the answer is I don't know. And because it's a whole of society approach, Beijing doesn't know, right? They don't know companies that are out there stealing this and that. They don't know companies that are out there stealing this and that. They don't know the universities that are gaining one type of technology vice another. It's a free for all in many ways.

So at provincial levels as well as at the central government level. So they don't have a handle on it at all. I mean what we know is what we know, which is out of these 900 cases, this is the type of trade craft that you can see applied towards X type of targets. And the validating part of that is that it proves out, right?

You see new cases that come about using exactly that same type of trade craft, right? So in espionage, we've seen a new trade craft applied over the past couple of years, which has been recruiting people online, recruiting low-level people online, handling them online, putting security, certain operations security, OPSEC measures in online.

We've seen cases like that. Guess what? The last six, seven, eight years, we've seen many, many cases like that. So the assertion that that's the way they're starting to do their cases is clearly playing out correctly. I remember a few weeks ago when I was starting to read your book, I noticed something in

there about how much like LinkedIn, I think there's like tens of thousands of just cases of attempted recruitment through LinkedIn. I mean, I don't even know how you would do people come to call you and say, hey, they just tried to recruit me or No, actually, in the case of LinkedIn, those statistics were released by the by the governments, you know, the governments that were victims of it. So the Brits released, the Brits said publicly that we had about 20,000 approaches on LinkedIn. about 20,000 approaches on LinkedIn. But how many are there? Can you imagine how many there must be globally? I mean, the US has much greater focus for the CCP than the UK, right?

Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, and it's cheap. And now with artificial intelligence, I happen to know that it used to be an intern's job in the Ministry of State Security to identify people on LinkedIn for approaching, you know, for approachment. I'm going to guess that that's all done with artificial intelligence now. I'm going to guess a lot of the initial approaches and even the responses are all done through AI. Because it's just, in a sense, it becomes a numbers game because you're just going to, you know, if you put out 20,000,

you're going to get a few probably of people who are, I know people who have been, you know, approached. I don't know if it was exactly someone trying to approach me that wouldn't have been very smart of them, but I've gotten, you know, sort of very beautiful looking Chinese ladies attempting contact. Yes. Work for a construction company in Shanghai and who don't post anything, but absolutely have to be your friend. Right, right, exactly, exactly. On multiple social media, in fact, not just LinkedIn.

Not just LinkedIn. Yeah. But when you think about that, I mean, Thomas Zhao was a Navy petty officer who is in prison now for, I think, three years for passing along, not classified, but restricted information to his Chinese handler, who was recruited through a stock group, through a group that watches stocks, right, for stock investment portfolios on WeChat. And he was identified and approached through that group.

And the organization, the person doing it maintained a cover that they were doing maritime research, but it can be anything. And this guy was recruited through WeChat. We've seen others recruited through Facebook. And what did he transfer through that? He actually transferred photos of his ship in the Navy, classified, you know, weapon systems, systems on shore for radar in Japan, things like that,

that he was able to pass along. So he didn't have access to classified, to real classified, just restricted information. But again, over time, he would have ultimately moved him into a position that he would have been able to pass more and more damaging information. So it's just stuff like that. And again, it cost them almost nothing. The other kind of scary part about AI is they can probably assign probabilities now to the likelihood that a particular profile is going to co-optable, for example, based on certain characteristics, based on deep analysis of the people that have already succumbed or agreed or whatever. Which is why we see things like the CIA's recent initiative to approach people online.

Right. Let's talk about that. Yes. What do you make of these recruitment videos? You talk to the old time intelligence officers, and they're extremely against it. Intelligence was done one way. But the reality is it's a great way

to approach things for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that anyone who responds at spots and assesses their potential access to information that the agency is interested in? I think most of these cases will just wind up to be the person is debriefed. You know, yeah, well, I lived near a place in China that, you know, did rockets and stuff. And a person's debriefed. We call that a strategic debriefing program, right?

And the intelligence community does that. A lot of useful information comes in through those types of programs. But I suspect that'll be the vast majority of the benefit of using that. A lot of useful information comes in through those types of programs. But I suspect that'll be the vast majority of the benefit of using that. But it's cheap, it's inexpensive, it has a broad outreach, and it really paints a very, very problematic role for China's counterintelligence service. Now they have to worry about a whole lot of people coming into the CIA. Now they have to worry about thousands of people who might have access to information in China. So it flips the stress points, as you call it. It's super interesting this way because also, the deep, deep corruption that's inherent to any communist system,

of course, it's leveraging that. It might not be as cheap for a high-value asset. The flip side is, well, actually, you mentioned this in the 2010s, what happened to all the CIA assets in communist China. Maybe you could remind us of that, because I think they tried to send a very clear message. Yeah. Well, of course, the media reports were that in 2010 or so, about a dozen, I think, or more CIA assets in China were either imprisoned or killed. And the discussion then centers around what operation security failure that happened, whether it was an individual who had access to these persons, whether it was communications or how China was able to learn about this, and then turn around and eliminate those assets inside China. China bragged about

it publicly. So today, there's a situation on the one hand, there's certainly a lot less loyalty than the Chinese Communist Party would like there to be. On the other hand, there's certainly a lot less loyalty than the Chinese Communist Party would like there to be. On the other hand, the cost of becoming an asset is probably very high if you're discovered. Oh, yeah, it certainly is. But in some cases, if you think about it, you'll have people who immigrate to the United States who come here on EB-5 visas, investment visas, or something like that. Now, they may have some insights into governance,

into facilities, into programs that China is doing, and those are great people to talk to, right? That's a great person to talk to. Are you gonna ask that person to go back to China and actively work? No, you're not. But it's a tremendous information pool to draw from. And that's what the CIA actually just put out, a tremendous information pool and a headache for China to think, oh my gosh, you know, all these people went and now are in the U.S. How do

we know what's being said? But is this the U.S. trying to build more of a sand-based collection method? That's the beauty of it. They're casting a wide net. Yeah. And we'll see what comes of it. Well, we probably won't see publicly. But they're casting a wide net,

and this wide net that they do will likely bring in a lot of useful information. And at the second point, it'll also tie up China's intelligence services, their counterintelligence services in particular. But also it'll play on this paranoia. That is such an important point that I hadn't really considered until you just mentioned it. I mean, just maybe explain that part for the benefit of our viewers. Okay. I mean, I don't know if I mentioned about the Coast Guard program.

So I was reading a little while ago to address the issue of the CCP's paranoia. For example, they had an advertisement online in the Coast Guard. They were hiring 7,000 officers that wanted people who could speak English or Japanese, cannot have studied abroad. Why? Because they're fearful that anyone who studied abroad could have been recruited, you know, and

and they don't want them in the position where they're able to report out information. And you know, it's funny because the people in China know this. So we've had cases where the Ministry of State Security was trying to recruit English speakers, and they went to Hainan Company, which is an IT company, and they actually did this through the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, right? So they do a cover and they recruit, they wanna recruit English speakers.

Well, a lot of Chinese speakers responded, you know, Chinese who spoke English responded to that recruitment effort. And when they figured out it was the Ministry of State Security said, no, I don't wanna do it because I wanna go to the West one day. I don't wanna be, there's no way. Right, I don't want to do it because I want to go to the West one day. I don't want to be flagged. Right.

I don't want to be flagged. So internally in China, people understand that. So they understand the level of paranoia and the risks associated with being part of that apparatus. So it's just part of who they are, the nature. The CCP has always been like this. And before that, the regimes in China protect the regime. That's why it's called state security, not national security. We're different. We're national security, protect the nation, not the state.

You've trained over a thousand counterintelligence officers over in your lifetime. That's quite astonishing in itself. What should people be looking for? Here's the challenge. We have a great many Chinese nationals in America. There's this weird incentive structure that wants to get them, the state wants to co-opt them. Many of them, of course, aren't interested in doing that too and don't want to discriminate against them, obviously. And in some cases, they're actually active resistors, especially in the dissident diaspora communities and so forth, or just passively doing that. As someone that's facing this threat that we've just been describing in detail, what should people be looking for? Well, I think there's a question of what people should be looking for, sort of as an individual

or company level, and I think then what is the response? Okay. Which is more important than what people should be looking for. I mean, what people should be looking for is you get through education and training. I mean, I've written books on this. I teach courses on it. That's the easy part, right? That's just a matter of education and training. The more difficult part is what do you do about it? And in our case, for the United States,

and for all Western democracies, strategy is important here. Because China is very, very strategic in its planning. It thinks out decades. It executes over years. If Trump is a problem, they'll wait Trump out. It's only another three years and X number of months, right? And they're very long-term in their thinking. The point for us is coming up with a strategy on how we're going to contend with this.

So the next big cyber event, when we see they've penetrated our critical infrastructure, that's got to result in consequences. That's got to be, okay, we're kicking your state-owned enterprises off the stock exchange. No more investment from the U.S. for them. If I may jump in for a moment, the challenge that we have, and this is whether you're looking in the Philippines and the Chinese Coast Guard hosing down people or even putting up flags on reefs or God knows what, it's always in this gray zone, incremental, and it's just short of warranting a kinetic action. I've always imagined there should be reciprocity. You do something

outrageous, something outrageous gets back to you. That's the only language they understand, as far as I can tell. However, they will always operate in this gray zone. You're like, well, is it really them? No, you're exactly correct. It's why it's called gray zone warfare. China excels at it. They even write about it in their doctrine. You know, they revitalize warring states period working groups at senior levels in the PLA and the CCP exactly to use this incremental approach, operate the gray zone. And you know, the response has to be, the beauty of this

is that we're a nation. You know, they do something and they'd say, well, we didn't do that cyber attack. And we say, we don't care. We think you did. And you know, we're kicking your state-owned enterprises off. Period. And it's our decision.

We can do whatever we want. So we don't have to, well, that's not fair, because it wasn't us who did these massive cyber attacks. We think it was you. And that's all we need to act. So this isn't going to the US court system. This isn't talking to your mom and her deciding between the two brothers who are telling the truth or not. We're a nation state. We're an independent nation state, as is Canada, as is all the nations in Europe.

You can act independently and say, you know what, that's it. My conclusion is that it's very reasonable when looking at the Chinese Communist Party to assume bad faith as the basis. But we don't like to do that in the West. We like to always assume good—and I don't like to do that either. But I think in this case, it's earned over many decades. Prove to me it's not bad faith and I'll believe you with extensive evidence. However, otherwise I should assume it's bad faith because that's what you almost always do. Or perhaps always. I have 900 cases that support your contention. Okay. But that itself is a mental construct that's difficult for us, I think, still, somehow. I think it was difficult

for us. And, you know, let's be honest, there are some other factors involved in that as well. You know, in the case of U.S. policymakers, there is not only ignorance of what the CCP, which is what we're talking about, of what the CCP is really up to. There was a lot of arrogance in our behavior. Oh, the minute they make money, they'll want to be Americans. Inside every Chinese person is a freedom-loving American dying to get out. There was that type of arrogance on our policy apparatus. And then there was greed.

And there's still greed. Companies being paid to bring their message to the state level or to the federal level, money flowing into universities from the CCP. So ignorance, arrogance, and greed put us in this situation as it is now. It might be bordering on being too late to be able to respond.

But I think that the general theme, as we started this conversation with, the general understanding is that, hey, they never had good intentions in the first place. And that's being proved out arrest after arrest after arrest. You posited a strategic response, which is, I don't know if it was reciprocity or not. The reciprocity is what's in my mind. Yeah, one of many approaches. Right. Well, so flesh that out for me.

Our alliances, I mean, had a minimum five I's, but our alliances through NATO. If an individual steals technology from the US or is found doing covert influence in Canada, the response has to be from all of us. You know, from all of us. Person steals technology? Great. We're going to do a no-fly list. No-fly is for people who do technology theft. We're going to do a list of if you're an academic and you steal research, you don't publish anywhere. You don't get visas to come to academic conferences. You don't publish in the West at all.

So that type of reciprocity, you have to ask, and I do ask policymakers, where do you see the relationship 15 years from now? What do you want it to be like? What do you want China to be like? That's the first part. I get blank stares, but that's the first part of this. Understand and crystallize for all our Western partners,

what do we want out of them? Where is this gonna be in 15 years? And what we want is ultimately a beneficial for all sides trade system. We wanna be able to work together on global issues, you know, regional and global issues, free exchange of ideas. Those are, you know, straightforward things. What we don't want is threats against our citizenry. We don't want theft of our technology and our, you know, and our trade secrets. We don't want military threats.

It's a pretty straightforward thing. You start with the positive aspects of what you want and then start designing a plan and then a strategy to get from A to B to meet those goals. And if we were really smart, we'd put metrics along the way. You know, ironclad agreements between nation-states that this is how we're going to respond and then put metrics in a way to ensure that we're getting there. My contention, and not just mine, is that this whole approach to trade since what President Trump called Liberation Day, it has to do with obviously challenging China around high tariffs, but also around bringing other countries

into closing various loopholes that allow the Chinese Communist Party to do whatever it wants in the process. Is that your view? Yeah, that is. Because what we find is just things like when you bar a Chinese company from receiving technology, they open up a subsidiary in Malaysia or something like that immediately and they route the technology through there. But also security issues, right? The US is really unhappy with, for example, the level of Chinese Communist Party penetration in Canada. And the impact on that is on intelligence sharing and so forth. I'm aware that's the case. So I

imagine, in my mind, I don't know if this is true, no one's confirmed this to me, part of this purpose that in fact, as we're filming right now, Prime Minister Carney is meeting with the president. Is this something that's on the table? I'm not 100% sure, but I would expect it would be. I don't think it is, honestly. I think that it's a working-level discussion area. I don't know about—and no one knows enough about the Trump administration's approach towards China and at what levels they see threats. Certainly, they see an economic threat threat but if we come with a good trade relationship with China is Trump gonna turn his back on everything else? I don't know. We know our agencies, the FBI and

others, are deeply concerned about the covert influence threat now so are they having those discussions with RCMP? I can tell you RCMP is concerned about it. That's the Canadian National Police. Just for the benefit of the non-Canadians watching. Yes, yeah. So in fact, one of the extraordinary events that I look forward to annually, which I spoke to last week, is the International Conference on Organized Crime and Terrorism.

And it's hosted by an organization that has Asian, international organization for Asian crime experts. Okay? So, you have, the Canadians were there in force talking about covert influence operations inside Canada, talking about use of criminal organizations to execute those covert influence operations. So this concern at a working level, we see it at a working level. The problem is sometimes getting a law to support that.

We're on untested turf in a lot of ways. Even our own, in the United States, the Foreign Agents Registration Act hasn't been updated since 1938 when we were dealing with German propaganda. It's all got to be done in the U.S. and it's got to be physical. You know, it's a little out of date. So our legal institutions have to update laws so that we're better able to affect this. Recently, laws dealing with Falun Gong are a great start in a good direction to support human rights. You're thinking about the Falun Gong Protection Act, just passing in the House yesterday, right?

Quite literally, yeah. Yeah. Actually, on this point, I wanted to ask you. We were talking offline about just how, in some ways, it might seem odd that the Chinese regime is so obsessed with the Falun Gong, with the Shen Yun dance performance, to the point where there are Chinese agents in jail because they tried to get the nonprofit status of Shen Yun evoked to people that turned out to be FBI agents. But yes, it just seems unbelievable in a way that it's that level. To us, it appears obsessive. What we're talking about is Chen, I forgot his first name, who is in jail now, who actually in jail said he was a member of the 610 office in China. And he

described it as a spy agency, told that to his cellmate, which is responsible for the eradication of Falun Gong globally. If I may for a moment, they have an agency committed to the eradication of Falun Gong globally. Yes. Isn't that in itself? I mean, I'm familiar with this agency for the last 25 years. However, isn't that astonishing just kind of from a bird's-eye view that there would be an agency for this purpose? Unlike our own intelligence agencies, the lion's share of their effort goes towards protection of the party, okay,

as opposed to the nation. So they deem Falun Gong a threat to the party because they have an ideological belief, they have a spiritual belief that they believe is a threat. They look at people who advocate for democracy. They're a threat. People advocate for Taiwan independence. They're a threat. The Uyghurs, they're a threat. Tibetans, they're a threat. You know, anyone who advocates for a position that's different from the five poisons, as we call them, anyone who advocates for a different position from the CCP is immediately considered a threat. But now they have the means and the

capability to go globally and destroy that threat. That's what we're seeing. And that fits into this rubric of the transnational repression. Right. That's exactly it. This has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Any final thought as we finish? Former Director Wray of the FBI used to say, we have one case every 12 hours that arises dealing with China. Two cases a day times 365, 730 cases a year. Some of these take months and months to resolve. So thousands of cases in the rears. And what that tells us, tells us to the FBI is that we, you can't arrest, we, whether it's the US or any of the Western nations, freedom loving nations, cannot arrest our way out of these situations.

We can't. We're failing. As it is now, we are failing. So someone's got to do something. Our political apparatus has to step up. Our governments have got to step up. And we've got to change the way we're doing things to turn ourselves towards succeeding. And that, going back to the very first question you asked, is why this becomes so critical, because it's not something that we're used to dealing with. Well, Nicholas Epstein-Meadis, such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. It's been a pleasure to be here. I appreciate it. Thank you all for joining Professor Nicholas Epstein-Meadis and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.