WASHINGTON: The FBI wished it had taken swifter action as Beijing recruited US-based researchers to transfer intellectual property from American laboratories, a senior official at the agency said on Tuesday during Senate testimony.
“With our present-day knowledge of the threat from Chinese plans, we wish we had taken more rapid and comprehensive action in the past,” Brown told a Senate subcommittee.Despite China’s announcement in 2008 of the Thousand Talents Plan – for which China had originally hoped to recruit 2,000 people but ended up recruiting more than 7,000 by 2017 – the FBI did not respond strongly until last year, the report released on Monday by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found.
The senators also pressed officials from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy and State Department about what should be done to counter China’s efforts to steal intellectual property.