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In March, a Chinese man entered a Marine Corps base in Twentynine Palms, California. He was believed to have crossed into the United States illegally and was released by DHS pending a decision on his asylum claim. He claimed to have gotten lost.
But it's not so easy to stumble upon what the Marine Times called its “vast combat training facility located in the remote California desert.” Although he was detained, he investigated the security of our largest Marine base. According to the Wall Street Journal, there have been around 100 such “innocent” incidents in recent years.
These are probably amateurs who carry out specific espionage work for China. China's 2017 National Intelligence Law requires “all organizations and citizens to support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence efforts.”
Hundreds of migrants, predominantly from Venezuela, cross the Rio Grande into the United States from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, on December 5, 2023. (David Peinado/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Earlier this year, the Heritage Foundation Monitoring Project filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the Department of Defense to see how many bases had been subject to such surveillance. To date, they have only received information from Pearl Harbor, but responses from that base alone showed multiple intrusions by Chinese nationals in recent years.
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China has many potential amateur spies to choose from. Its Belt and Road Initiative construction projects in Africa and Asia are known for bringing in workers from China rather than hiring locals. Chinese investment in the US Northern Mariana Islands brought problems ranging from “human trafficking to birth tourism, labor abuse, money laundering and public corruption,” according to the Commonwealth governor.
Soon, these same evils could reach the continental United States. Hiring thousands of Chinese citizens to work in sensitive industries or locations in the United States raises a problem that political analyst John Hulsman calls espionage “hidden in plain sight.”
So far this year, 27,000 Chinese citizens have been detained at the southern border, and most of them will be released after they express a “credible fear” of persecution. If they apply for asylum, they can obtain work authorization within six months, after which Chinese-owned companies can legally hire them.
You couldn't invent a cheaper, faster, less scrutinized foreign work visa program if you tried.
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Two recent Wall Street Journal articles highlight the concerns.
First up is the Hotel Rössli in Unterbach, Switzerland. It overlooks an air base where the Swiss want to keep the F-35 planes purchased from the US. The hotel was bought by Chinese investors, the Wang family, although they had no idea how to run an inn, they closed the restaurant and passed most of his time. long ago in China. It is not speculation to suggest that China might be interested in acquiring access to a property just 100 meters from where the next-generation F-35s will be stored.
Second, there is a risk from Chinese-owned companies servicing our undersea cables. The first undersea cables were laid in the 1860s, and even today, almost all Internet traffic flows over undersea fiber optics. The cables are vulnerable, as the United States demonstrated by secretly tapping Soviet cables during the Cold War.
China may now be using the same playbook against us. SB Submarine Systems, a Chinese company, reportedly turned off Automatic Identification System (AIS) tracking devices on several ships servicing undersea cables for days at a time.
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Deliberately turning off AIS is almost always an indicator of nefarious activity (usually sanctions evasion) and was “unusual for commercial cable ships and lacked a clear explanation,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
The cables that carry Internet traffic are important to the national economy and present convenient targets for sabotage in times of conflict. Even if they are not yet physically touching the cables, the fact that Chinese-owned vessels and crews are servicing US undersea cables means Beijing knows the location of critical infrastructure.
And by owning land near cable landing sites, Chinese companies can access the cables before they reach the sea floor.
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A May 9 hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee highlighted how Chinese nationals are exploiting our porous southern border to illegally enter the United States. They are not screened for criminal records in their country, nor for ties to the Chinese military or intelligence services. This allows our main adversary a constant supply of potential spy assets.
With their families still at home, many Chinese living illegally in the United States are subject to pressure from the long arm of the Chinese government even if they are not active agents.
One step to improve security would be to require Chinese people to go through the United States Refugee Admissions Program, in which applicants remain abroad until they are accepted as refugees.
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Another would be to require the Treasury's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to review any company that hires Chinese parolees or asylum seekers on national security grounds.
The administration should take these measures quickly. Otherwise, China's strategy of spying in plain sight will slowly create the potential to sow chaos under Beijing's command when the time comes.
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