Hacking won’t scare U.S. companies out of China
The Department of Justice announced today that five Chinese military officers have been indicted for allegedly hacking trade secrets from U.S companies.
It’s the first time that the U.S. has charged specific foreign officials with cyber espionage, but as Marketplace’s China correspondent Rob Schmitz tells us, it’s actually sort of old news.
“A little more than a year ago we learned that the People’s Liberation Army hacked into dozens of U.S. companies, stealing reams of intellectual property,” says Schmitz. “But this news and its implications were cut short: Right after it was discovered, Edward Snowden released what amounted to a nuclear bomb on the U.S. intelligence community by exposing the NSA’s spying operation.”
Schmitz says China probably wants the trade secrets to help build up its infrastructure. The hacking allegedly took place three or four years ago, when China had just announced plans to build dozens of nuclear power plants across the country.
“Of course the United States has a lot of experience building nuclear power plants. So it could be reasonably assumed that China was cutting and copying the U.S.”
Schmitz says hacking is a growing problem for U.S. companies, but that doesn’t mean they’ll abandon their operations in China.
“The companies that were hacked last year were too scared to complain about having their technology stolen by the Chinese, because they were afraid of upsetting one of their most important global markets. Unless U.S. companies stand up for themselves and start publicly complaining about this, I think the hacking will go on for quite a while.”
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