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China has repeatedly insisted Washington has exaggerated the
problem for political reasons, and asked for a response to the
FBI's comments, a Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said on
Wednesday that "Cold War mentalities" should be discarded.
The admission by John Brown, assistant director of the
Counterintelligence Division at the FBI, backed up a Senate
subcommittee report that found federal agencies had responded
too slowly as China recruited the researchers, leaving U.S.
taxpayers unwittingly funding the rise of China's economy and
military.
"With our present-day knowledge of the threat from Chinese
plans, we wish we had taken more rapid and comprehensive action
in the past," Brown told a Senate subcommittee. "The time to
make up for that is now."
Despite China's announcement in 2008 of the Thousand Talents
Plan - for which China had originally hoped to recruit 2,000
people but ended up recruiting more than 7,000 by 2017 - the FBI
did not respond strongly until last year, the report released on
Monday by the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
found.
Washington has confronted Beijing over what it believes are some
illicit methods to rapidly acquire technological advances, one
of many conflicts in the trade war between the two countries.
China's foreign ministry spokesman said U.S. accusations that
China was stealing intellectual property were groundless.
Strengthening cooperation and communication in science and
technology benefits both countries as well as humanity, Geng
told a regular briefing in Beijing.
The U.S. senators also pressed officials from the National
Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the
Department of Energy and State Department about what should be
done to counter China's efforts to steal intellectual property.
"I hope very much that this is one of the first steps we take in
developing a real national strategy in combating this because
clearly China has a strategy, and we need one of our own,"
Senator Maggie Hassan said.
Senators Rob Portman, the Republican subcommittee chairman, and
Tom Carper, its top Democrat, said on Monday they would use the
report to write legislation to end "this abuse" of U.S.
research, intelligence property and taxpayer money.
(Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis in Washington; Editing by Mary
Milliken, Matthew Lewis and Simon Cameron-Moore)
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