How can the country defend against this kind of sprawling effort? It involves America’s private sector as much as our government counterintelligence services. Any chief executive officer or board of directors engaged in the industries of highest interest to Beijing must first understand the threat. If you are a U.S. business seeking to enter a business relationship with a company in or from China, you must know that your data will likely be obtained and provided to the security services of the Chinese government. A short version of Beijing’s wish list of targets for theft includes aerospace, deep-sea technology, biotechnology, information technology, manufacturing, clean energy, electric battery technology, and DNA/genomics.
Expecting an American company to effectively defend against a world-class intelligence service in all these areas is unrealistic. The United States needs to come up with its own, democratic answer to China’s authoritarian, all-of-society approach. To help defend our country’s interests, chief executives and boards of directors must begin to lead our national security efforts.
To start, I recommend the creation of a panel of chief executives from the major technology companies who can advise and inform Congress, the intelligence community, and U.S. government entities on the national security challenges they face. Membership should be diverse and include financial services, telecommunications, energy, biopharmaceutical, manufacturing, aerospace, transportation, private equity and venture capital. The goal should be as much to focus attention and effort on the competition as to answer the harder problems of how to defeat every attempt by nontraditional spies. At the same time, the U.S. government must drastically increase its cooperation with American corporations, speeding the provision of actionable intelligence to U.S. corporate leaders not only about the threat they face, but also ways to limit the damage and to provide mitigation strategies.
None of this is to play down the success of the honey pot operation that Ms. Huang and her Chinese handlers apparently ran against Mr. Huang and Nvidia. In the wake of the saga, U.S. counterintelligence officials will be scrambling to figure out what Mr. Huang told Ms. Huang about his corporate strategy and long-term goals, and what he said about his conversations with President Trump, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Mr. Rubio and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
But to start defending ourselves in this global competition, we first have to understand the nature of the espionage effort China is making against us — and just how widespread it is. Economic security is national security, and it is on all of us in and out of government to find effective, democratic ways to protect our companies and our country. The costs of our continuing vulnerability are too high.
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