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In March, a Chinese man wandered into a Marine Corps base in Twentynine Palms, California, after he was believed to have entered the U.S. illegally and had been released by the Department of Homeland Security awaiting a decision on his asylum application. He claimed to have gone missing.
But it’s not so easy to stumble into what the Marine Times called “a sprawling combat training facility in the remote California desert.” He was arrested while investigating security at the largest Marine Corps base. The Wall Street Journal reports that there have been about 100 such “innocent” incidents in recent years.
These are likely amateurs conducting one-off espionage missions for China. China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law stipulates that “all organizations and nationals must support, assist, and cooperate with the state’s intelligence work.”
On December 5, 2023, hundreds of migrants, mostly from Venezuela, cross the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, heading to the United States. (David Peinado/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Earlier this year, the Heritage Foundation Oversight Project filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Department of Defense to determine how many bases were under surveillance. To date, the project has only received information from Pearl Harbor, but the base’s response alone revealed multiple incursions by Chinese personnel over the past few years.
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China has a huge pool of potential amateur spies. China’s Belt and Road projects in Africa and Asia are notorious for importing workers from China rather than hiring locals. Chinese investment in the Northern Mariana Islands has brought problems ranging from “human trafficking to birth tourism, labor abuse, money laundering and official corruption,” the governor said.
The same harm could soon be felt on U.S. soil: The employment of thousands of Chinese in sensitive U.S. industries and regions opens up problems for what political analyst John Hulsman calls “covert and overt” espionage.
So far this year, 27,000 Chinese have been apprehended at the southern border, most of whom have been released after expressing a “credible fear” of persecution. If they apply for asylum, they can get work permits within six months and then be legally employed by Chinese companies.
Even if we tried, we couldn’t invent a cheaper, faster or less vigilant work visa system for foreigners.
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Two recent articles in the Wall Street Journal highlight the concerns.
First, there’s the Hotel Roessli in Unterbach, Switzerland, which overlooks an airbase where Switzerland wants to store the F-35 fighter jets it bought from the US. The hotel was bought by Chinese investors, the Wang family, who have no idea how to run an inn, closed the restaurant, and spend most of their time in China. It’s no guesswork to assume that China might be interested in acquiring the land just 100 yards from where the state-of-the-art F-35s will be stored.
Second, there is the risk from Chinese-owned companies that service our undersea cables. The first undersea cables were laid in the 1860s, and even today, nearly all Internet traffic travels over undersea fiber optics. Cables are vulnerable, as the U.S.’s covert tapping of Soviet cables during the Cold War demonstrated.
China may now be using the same tactic against us: Chinese company SB Submarine Systems reportedly shut down the Automatic Identification System (AIS) locating devices of several vessels working on undersea cables for several days.
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Deliberately turning off AIS is almost always a sign of illicit activity (usually sanctions evasion) and was “unusual for a commercial cable ship and came with no clear explanation,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
The cables that carry internet traffic are vital to national economies and easy targets for sabotage in times of conflict. Even if they have not yet physically touched the cables, the fact that Chinese-owned ships and crews are servicing U.S. undersea cables means Beijing knows the location of that critical infrastructure.
Chinese companies would also own land near the cable’s landing site, giving them access to the cable before it reaches the ocean floor.
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A May 9 House Homeland Security Committee hearing highlighted the use of loopholes at the southern border by Chinese nationals to illegally enter the U.S. without investigation into their criminal records or ties to the Chinese military or intelligence services in their home countries, providing a steady supply of potential espionage assets to major adversaries.
Many Chinese who are in the United States illegally still have family members in their home countries and are subject to the long arm of the Chinese government’s pressure, even if they are not active operatives.
A first step to improving safety would be to require Chinese nationals to go through the U.S. refugee admissions program, in which applicants remain overseas until they are accepted as refugees.
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Another proposal would require the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to review companies that hire Chinese nationals on parole or who are asylum seekers, citing national security concerns.
The Administration should take these steps quickly, or China’s overt espionage strategy will slowly create the potential for it to wreak havoc at Beijing’s command when the opportunity is ripe.
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