A strange trend is sweeping across China. Outside Chengdu, an urban park next to a golf course and luxury villa now sports a sign "Return to Agricultural Use." In the southeastern province of Fujian, a farmer described having his daffodil fields bulldozed. Reportedly, it’s all part of a new directive from the Chinese Communist Party to reclaim arable land, roll back reforestation initiatives, and rapidly increase grain production to achieve "food security."
But as China clears vast tracts of land in service of what some have called a "New Great Leap Forward," what may be going into the ground is stolen American technology. Not fiberoptic cable and semiconductors, but something just as important: high-tech seeds.
Back in 2011, a field manager at a farm in Iowa spotted an unfamiliar man digging in one of his fields. When he confronted the stranger, the man claimed to be from a university and hurriedly excused himself. The field happened to be planted with special seeds from DuPont Pioneer, and the manager passed along the unnerving incident to the company which informed the FBI. The investigation uncovered a Chinese seed smuggling ring and the man digging in the field, Mo Hailong, was charged by the Department of Justice and sentenced in federal court for conspiracy to steal trade secrets.
But that was just the beginning. Since then, the FBI has investigated many such cases, and the DOJ has secured additional convictions, including one just last year when Xiang Haitao, a PRC national, pled guilty to conspiracy to commit economic espionage and was sentenced to more than two years in prison.
What did he steal? The central algorithm to a software platform being developed by his employer, a Monsanto subsidiary, for farmers to visualize and analyze field data. Xiang took copies of the algorithm on a one-way flight back to China, where he later worked for the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Soil Science.
In case you’re wondering, this wasn’t just freelancing. Economic espionage charges require evidence that the activities were intended to benefit a foreign government or foreign agent--in this case, the CCP and the companies that operate at its behest.
THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY IS REWRITING THE BIBLE
Why is the Chinese Communist Party after our seeds and agricultural technology? One answer is that Beijing is simply after all of our intellectual property. The FBI has estimated that China steals between $225-600 billion of American intellectual property and trade secrets every year. That is around $4,000 stolen per American family of four.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has stated that the FBI opens a new China-related case every 10 hours and former National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander called cybercrime "the greatest transfer of wealth in human history." The CCP has a phrase for this kind of practice: "picking flowers in foreign lands to make honey in China," or, in the cases above, very literally stealing seeds from U.S. farms to make grain in China.
The second answer is that China is food insecure. The PRC is the largest importer of corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, and dairy products in the world.
Some observers connect Xi Jinping’s newfound obsession with food security with his increasing aggression towards Taiwan, speculating that if the CCP precipitates conflict in the Strait, global seaborne trade will be disrupted and therefore securing grain supplies will be essential. In true "Field of Dreams" fashion, we built agricultural technology and prowess here in America, and the CCP has come to steal it.
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Our farms are more than just places to grow food. They are research laboratories, homes, schools, and strategic national resources. We must protect all our technology, whether it’s in a Silicon Valley research lab or an Iowa cornfield.
Yet our current tools are insufficient to protect this technology. The U.S. technological ecosystem is a bucket with massive holes in the bottom that we continue to pour billions and billions of R&D dollars into every year. We could plug the holes with export controls, enhanced investment screening, and outbound capital restrictions. But we choose not to.
It's as though a burglar has robbed your home dozens of times before, told you that he’s coming back tonight, and you still leave your front door unlocked and your valuables lying around in plain sight.
Who is harmed when the CCP steals American technology? It’s not the CEOs, it’s not the lobbyists. It’s our service members who are put in danger when the CCP weaponizes stolen technology. It’s our farmers. It’s ordinary Americans.
Our country is filled with invisible factories and invisible farms— those that would have been built or planted here if we’d protected American technology. There are invisible paychecks — those that our workers and farmers would have gotten if we weren’t sending $600 billion to our foremost global adversary every year in stolen IP and trade secrets.
Just like the farmer in the Iowa field, we are being robbed every day, in plain sight, by the Chinese Communist Party.
