By Richard Walker
While the mainstream media is focused on a tariffs war with China, it ignores the massive cost of the shadow war China has been waging against America for decades.
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While there are no figures for the overall cost to the U.S. economy of a war aimed at intellectual theft conducted through conventional espionage and computer hacking, the scale of it can be judged from available statistics. In 2015, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) estimated it was costing $400 billion annually. That, however, was merely theft through cyberattacks.
Because China has since become a country with a massive hacking capability, one can imagine the extraordinary financial hit to the U.S. economy from all of China’s illegal activities.
The American public has been denied the true cost of this shadowy war because of underreporting and a reluctance on the part of big companies to admit that they were hacked. There has also been the inertia of Congress in addressing the sheer scale of the China threat. Congressional failure can be attributed to blind ignorance, or a conviction that doing business with China is more important than protecting our nation from theft on a scale many might say is unthinkable.
The Biden and Trump families have both done business with China. Ivanka Trump has owned factories there, and Hunter Biden sought opportunities in the private equity sphere for his Chinese partners and for himself.
According to some estimates, the loss to the U.S. economy is now $600 billion annually, and that may be a drop in the bucket since China fields a cyber force of 40,000 hackers, compared to U.S. Cyber Command, which alleges it has but 6,000 personnel. Thus, there is little reliable public data on the true scale of the war.
China is stealing not only data on tens of millions of Americans from public and private entities, it is acquiring America’s most prized military secrets. Just look at images of China’s fifth-generation fighters, and it does not take a brilliant mind to see that they are carbon copies of the U.S. F22 and the F35 Joint Strike fighters.
We know this to be true because, in 2016, a Chinese national, Su Bin, operating from Canada, appeared in a federal court where he admitted stealing, with the help of two unnamed associates, plans for the F22 and F35, as well as other aircraft. He passed the stolen data to the Chinese government. Su Bin had been targeting the United States for six years undetected. For reasons never explained by federal authorities, he got a mere five-year prison term.
The financial cost of this kind of sabotage is incalculable and could cost many lives should there ever be a shooting war with the Chinese. This theft, and so much more we know little to nothing about, is linked to the determination of China to gain a technological military advantage over the United States.
In March 2025, a window into this hacking war was provided by the Department of Justice (DOJ) when it named 12 Chinese nationals it would like to prosecute. They were part of a team of Chinese government hackers operating against U.S. systems from 2016 until 2023.
The DOJ said that these malign actors targeted religious organizations as well as technology companies, think tanks, law firms, defense contractors, local governments, health care systems, and universities, leaving behind them a wake of millions of dollars in damages. Experts in the cyber field say that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The loss of strategic military data is most frightening, and it is impossible to calculate that in monetary terms.
China has waged its espionage and cyberwar with a specific wish list directed to the theft of technical data related to satellites, fighter aircraft, and missile development by companies like Raytheon.
China’s overseas intelligence gathering is done through the Ministry of State Security, its version of the CIA, but its cyberwar against the United States is run by the People’s Liberation Army and its cyber command under the aegis of the Third Department of its General Staff.
There should never have been any secret about China’s espionage war. Just as Israel built its nuclear arsenal by stealing secrets from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at Los Alamos (and, some would say, with the help of the Israelis*), China did likewise in the 1980s, and the CIA, FBI, and Congress knew about it.
Congress’s “COX Report” in 1999 revealed what some called “dirty little secrets,” including how China had 3,000 front companies in the United States, and little was known about them. It also said that there was a pattern of systematic and successful Chinese espionage to learn America’s nuclear secret.
More recent reports by think tanks, like the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, have documented the growing ability of China to continue to target the United States as part of a plan forged by China’s President Xi Jinping after he took office in 2012.
So, while the media and political focus is on a tariffs battle with China, America is losing a more costly battle directed by China at the theft of U.S. intellectual property and military secrets.
See Michael Piper’s two-volume book Final Judgment: The Missing link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy. Softcover, 799 pages, $40 plus $5 S&H inside the U.S. from American Free Press.
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