China is pursuing every opportunity to supplant the United States as a world superpower. This challenge has been made possible by China’s meteoric rise over the past 50 years. One of the keys to China’s rapid rise is its widespread stealing of technology. Since the early 2000s, a successful target of this sophisticated espionage has been American academic institutions. Starting in 2018, more of these Chinese threats have been unmasked.

“China has long been engaged in a sophisticated and relentless spying campaign against the United States—from cyberespionage and stealing intellectual property from U.S. defense contractors to more subtle attempts to infiltrate research laboratories at American universities,” reported the Cipher Brief. “According to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi), Beijing is quietly at work gaining access to the trade secrets of U.S. and multinational corporations though ‘academic espionage,’ relying on scholars and researchers as spies. The scale of this effort is enormous. Universities are among the softest possible targets in terms of espionage.”

Open research and collaboration within universities is an easy target for China to access the cutting edge of vital technologies. Universities are often developing important technology for the U.S. government and have the lowest security constraints. China accesses this technology through foreign students and lucrative agreements with professors. The fbi reported that the stealing of secrets by China causes a loss of between $225 to $600 billion a year.

“The Chinese government, through its embassies and consulates in the United States, has sought to suppress free speech among visiting Chinese students, fund political action surreptitiously, influence public perception of China, and gain access to ongoing research and protected intellectual property,” wrote Harrington Shaw for the Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Some students might be Communist state actors, but many are coerced into supplying information to the Chinese government. Sometimes this can be threatening a student’s parents or family in China.

Shaw continued: “For instance, the approximately 150 chapters of Chinese Students and Scholars Associations, campus organizations for Chinese students studying abroad, have become increasingly entangled with Chinese authorities.” Around 360,000 Chinese nationals attend U.S. colleges and universities every year. The Chinese also use third party organizations, like the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, to apply pressure on students, obscuring the Communist connection.

Many professors are also being targeted by the Chinese. “In January 2020, the fbi arrested the chair of Harvard University’s chemistry and chemical biology department, Charles Lieber, with ‘one count of making a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement,’” wrote Cipher Brief. “He failed to disclose his lucrative, deliberately opaque and secretive financial arrangement with China through a program called the ‘Thousand Talents Plan.’ Under the arrangement, Lieber performed undisclosed work for the Chinese government through Wuhan University of Technology. Lieber is far from alone. In recent months, the United States has arrested numerous people in academic positions who either failed to disclose work for the Chinese government or actually engaged in straightforward espionage.” This treason being exposed in universities coincides with American academia being infiltrated by ideological Communists. China is taking advantage of this weakness.

Some examples of technology stolen by China through espionage include telecommunications tech, stealing an arm of a robot named Tappy from T-Mobile, driverless car technology, semiconductors, electronic controls for wind turbines and corn seed varieties. This technology comes back to China in the form of documents, research files or physical pieces that are then reverse-engineered.

This espionage is part of the prophesied rise of China as an enemy of the United States, and the Communist infiltration of America. In “Wake Up to the Threat From China,” Trumpet executive editor Stephen Flurry and managing editor Joel Hilliker wrote: “Mr. Armstrong’s warning focused on Communist Russia’s demoralization efforts. In the years since, many of these efforts have been carried out by Russia’s Communist ally China, which has further expanded its attacks against America’s industrial and economic power. Still, Mr. Armstrong’s warnings about the dangers of communism proved correct. He identified exactly how communism operates, and America has been victimized by its success.” This is a terrible affliction that is part of the curses we have brought upon ourselves because of rejecting God and being faithless.

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God repeatedly warned Israel against forsaking His law and looking to foreigners for prosperity, protection and guidance. Isaiah 2:6, for example, says that God “hast forsaken thy people the house of Jacob, because they be replenished from the east, and are soothsayers like the Philistines, and they please themselves in the children of strangers.” America has committed the same sin. Rather than trusting God to bless and defend them, our people have recognized and traded with Communist dictatorships and even invited Communist professors from China and other nations to teach generations of young Americans and Britons. This has corrupted our youth, sapped our economy, and fatally weakened our nation. Americans’ own naivety, greed and disloyalty have made us fatally vulnerable to sabotage by foreign nations.

This is one of the many threats facing the United States. These events play a vital role in the fulfillment of Bible prophecy, and you need to know the future of China-America relations. To learn more, please read our books Russia and China in Prophecy and America Under Attack, by Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry.