A Five-Year Pattern of Aggression

Ten Ways China Has Threatened the United States

I have spent over 33 years in uniform and in service to this country, including as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and as National Security Advisor to the President of the United States. I have seen the intelligence, read the assessments, sat across the table from our adversaries, and I will tell you plainly what I believe to be true.

The Chinese Communist Party is the single greatest external threat to the United States of America.

That is not a political statement. It is not an opinion offered for effect. It is the operational reality I lived as Director of DIA, and it is the conclusion confirmed by every serious threat assessment produced by the United States Intelligence Community in the years since.

What has changed in the last five years is not the nature of the threat. What has changed is its speed, its scale, and its sheer brazenness.

It is a war fought under the doctrine the People’s Liberation Army itself codified in 1999 as Unrestricted Warfare, a strategy that treats every domain of national life as a legitimate battlefield. The Chinese Communist Party fights on every front except the conventional battlefield, and they do so because they understand fifth-generation warfare better than most of the officials in Washington, D.C.

They target the American mind through information operations, academic infiltration, and the algorithmic capture of our young people on platforms owned by entities legally obligated to cooperate with Chinese intelligence services under the 2017 National Intelligence Law. They target the American supply chain through deliberate dependencies in pharmaceuticals, rare earth minerals, semiconductors, and the industrial base that sustains our military. They target the American family through the deliberate export of fentanyl precursors that have contributed to the deaths of more than three hundred thousand Americans since 2020. They target the institutional core of this Republic through cyber intrusions into our power grid, our water systems, our ports, and our telecommunications networks, including the Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon campaigns that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has publicly attributed to the People’s Republic of China.

What follows is a record of ten specific, documented actions taken by the Chinese Communist Party against the United States since 2020. Each is drawn from a named federal indictment, an agency advisory, or an official threat assessment of the United States Government. They span espionage, cyber warfare, economic coercion, transnational repression, narcotics trafficking, biological risk, and the corruption of American institutions at the federal, state, and local levels.

1. The Fentanyl Precursor Indictments

On October 3, 2023, the Department of Justice unsealed eight indictments against China-based chemical manufacturing companies and their employees for the production and distribution of fentanyl precursors. The lead case named Hubei Amarvel Biotech Co., Ltd., along with executives Qingzhou Wang, Yiyi Chen, and a third defendant operating under the alias “Er Yang.” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram stated at the time that Chinese chemical companies are the source of the fentanyl crisis killing Americans. The Centers for Disease Control reported more than 107,000 overdose deaths in 2023, the overwhelming majority driven by synthetic opioids that begin as precursor chemicals shipped from Chinese laboratories to the cartels. In November 2024, DOJ followed with additional charges against Hubei Aoks Bio-Tech Co., a company that admitted in its own marketing that fentanyl precursors were most popular in Mexico and that the profit on sales was “worth the risk.” This is industrial-scale chemical warfare against the American people, run by companies that the Chinese Communist Party permits to operate.

2. The Volt Typhoon Advisory

On February 7, 2024, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the National Security Agency, and the FBI jointly released advisory AA24-038A, formally attributing a multi-year campaign to Chinese state-sponsored actors known as Volt Typhoon to pre-position offensive cyber capabilities inside American critical infrastructure. The advisory confirmed that Volt Typhoon had compromised IT networks in the communications, energy, transportation, and water and wastewater sectors across the continental United States and in our Pacific territory, Guam. CISA Director Jen Easterly stated that Volt Typhoon intrusions had been “found and eradicated” across multiple sectors, and that what had been found to date was “likely the tip of the iceberg.” The agencies assessed with high confidence that this activity is not espionage. It is battlefield preparation. Beijing is positioning to disrupt our power, our water, and our communications at a moment of their choosing, most likely as part of a move against Taiwan. Volt Typhoon actors have maintained access inside some American networks for at least five years.

3. The Salt Typhoon Telecom Penetration

In October 2024, U.S. officials confirmed that a separate Chinese state-sponsored group designated Salt Typhoon had penetrated at least nine American telecommunications carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Lumen, Charter Communications, Consolidated Communications, and Windstream. The hackers accessed call detail records, metadata, and the contents of certain communications. Most disturbingly, they compromised the systems telecom carriers maintain under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, the very portals through which American law enforcement conducts court-ordered wiretaps. On January 17, 2025, the Department of the Treasury sanctioned Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology Co., Ltd., citing the company’s direct role in the campaign and its links to China’s Ministry of State Security. Between August 2023 and August 2025, AIDE recorded more than 72 million China-origin attack attempts against decoy systems emulating telecommunications networks. Within this broader dataset, AIDE identified patterns consistent with Salt Typhoon’s tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs)—providing an empirical view of the campaign’s operational tempo and corroborating indicators described in public advisories by CISA, the FBI, and industry partners. By August 2025, the FBI confirmed Salt Typhoon had compromised more than 200 companies across 80 countries. Senator Mark Warner called it the worst telecom hack in our Nation’s history. Read those two sentences again. A foreign communist power obtained a map of which Chinese agents American law enforcement had identified for surveillance, and they did it by walking through the front door of our own legally mandated wiretap system.

4. The PRC Surveillance Balloon That Crossed the Continental United States

On January 28, 2023, a Chinese high-altitude surveillance platform entered American airspace over Alaska. It transited Canada and re-entered the continental United States on January 31, drifting eastward over Montana, where it loitered above Malmstrom Air Force Base and the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile fields. The Department of Defense allowed the platform to complete its traverse of the American heartland before shooting it down on February 4, 2023, off the coast of South Carolina. Pentagon press secretary Brigadier General Pat Ryder later acknowledged the balloon was equipped to collect intelligence signals. Beijing initially denied the platform’s purpose, then changed its story. A hostile foreign power flew a collection asset across the sovereign airspace of the American Republic, lingered over our strategic nuclear deterrent, and the political leadership in Washington watched it happen on cable news with the rest of the country. The intelligence value to Beijing was enormous. The sovereignty signal to every adversary on earth was unmistakable.

5. The Manhattan Secret Police Station Indictment

On April 17, 2023, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York unsealed an indictment charging Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping with conspiring to act as illegal agents of the People’s Republic of China. The two operated an unauthorized outpost of the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau on the fourth floor of a building in Manhattan’s Chinatown, established in 2020 under the cover of a community nonprofit. The station served as a forward base for the CCP’s “Operation Fox Hunt” and the harassment of Chinese dissidents living under the protection of our Constitution. Chen Jinping pleaded guilty in December 2024. The Spain-based human rights organization Safeguard Defenders documented more than 100 such Chinese police outposts across more than 50 countries in their September 2022 report “110 Overseas.” DOJ simultaneously charged 34 officers of China’s Ministry of Public Security with running a parallel troll farm targeting dissidents on American soil. A foreign communist power set up its own internal security apparatus inside an American city, conducted coercive operations against people living under our Bill of Rights, and operated for years before serious enforcement action began. That is an act of sovereignty violation.

6. The Fufeng Group Land Purchase Near Grand Forks Air Force Base

In November 2021, the Chinese agribusiness conglomerate Fufeng Group purchased approximately 370 acres of farmland in Grand Forks, North Dakota, twelve miles from Grand Forks Air Force Base, the home of sensitive U.S. drone and space communications operations. On January 27, 2023, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Andrew Hunter wrote to Senators John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer stating that the project presented “a significant threat to national security with both near- and long-term risks of significant impacts to our operations in the area.” On February 6, 2023, the Grand Forks City Council voted 5-0 to kill the project. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States declared that it lacked jurisdiction over the purchase, which by itself reveals the failure of the existing review framework. Our foreign investment regime was never designed to catch a strategic adversary buying farmland next to a runway. According to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Chinese investors held more than 380,000 acres of American agricultural land as of December 2021, with documented holdings near MacDill Air Force Base in Florida and Camp Pendleton in California. Every acre of American soil under CCP-linked ownership near a sensitive installation is a potential collection platform.

7. The 2025 DIA Threat Assessment on the PLA Navy

The 2025 Defense Intelligence Agency Threat Assessment, submitted to the House Armed Services Committee, confirmed that the People’s Liberation Army Navy now fields approximately 395 battle force ships, the largest navy in the world by ship count, projected to grow to 435 by 2030. The United States Navy stands at roughly 292 ships, with current plans to maintain approximately 290 through the end of the decade. The same assessment documented Beijing’s expanded nuclear arsenal, advanced hypersonic missile capability, the modernization of its submarine force, and the militarization of artificial islands across the South China Sea. China is building a Navy designed to defeat ours in the Western Pacific and to make any defense of Taiwan operationally suicidal. Shipbuilding is sovereignty, and we are losing that race in real time.

8. The Testimony on Chinese Hacking and IP Theft

On January 31, 2024, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party that China’s hacking program is larger than that of every other major nation combined. Director Wray stated that the FBI is opening a new Chinese counterintelligence investigation roughly every 12 hours and that it currently runs more than 2,000 active CCP-related investigations across nearly every field office in the country. The estimated annual cost of CCP intellectual property theft to the American economy ranges from $200 billion to more than $600 billion, according to the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property and successive FBI estimates. That is research funded by American taxpayers, innovation built by American workers, and trade secrets developed by American companies, transferred wholesale to the strategic adversary that intends to use them against us. Every stolen blueprint shortens China’s path to military parity.

9. The GAO Report on Confucius Institute Rebranding

In October 2023, the Government Accountability Office published a report GAO-24-106166 confirming that the majority of Confucius Institutes that had been closed at American universities, due to bipartisan national security concerns and the requirements of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, had reopened under new names with substantially the same Chinese funding, the same Chinese-supplied instructors, and the same CCP-aligned content. Of 118 Confucius Institutes that had operated in the United States, 104 had closed publicly, but at least 28 of the universities involved maintained similar partnerships with Chinese government-affiliated entities under different branding. The CCP spends approximately $10 billion per year on its United Front influence activities globally, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Our universities have become open collection environments for Chinese intelligence services, and our federal research grants have funded Chinese military modernization through joint programs and unmonitored personnel transfers.

10. The Chinese Export Ban on Gallium, Germanium, and Antimony

On December 3, 2024, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce announced an outright ban on exports to the United States of gallium, germanium, antimony, and certain superhard materials, all of which are critical inputs for American semiconductors, infrared optics, night vision, armor-piercing ammunition, and missile guidance systems. The ban was Beijing’s direct retaliation against American export controls on advanced chips, and it was the first time in modern history that China explicitly weaponized its supply chain dominance against the United States by name. According to the United States Geological Survey, China produces roughly 98 percent of the world’s gallium and approximately 60 percent of its germanium. The Pentagon estimated in 2024 that China’s earlier export restrictions on these minerals had already cost American industry billions of dollars and exposed catastrophic gaps in our defense supply chains. A Nation that cannot make its own weapons is not a sovereign Nation. President Trump understands this. His national security tariffs on steel and aluminum, and his renewed push to onshore critical minerals processing, are direct responses to exactly this kind of economic coercion.

The Pattern Before Us

Taken together, these ten items form a single picture. The Chinese Communist Party is working to hollow out the American Republic from within while simultaneously building the military capability to confront it from without. The evidence is documented across the federal record. Fentanyl precursors traced to Chinese chemical manufacturers and confirmed in federal indictments.

Persistent access to American power grids, water systems, and telecommunications networks attributed by CISA to state-sponsored actors operating under Beijing’s direction. A high-altitude surveillance platform flown across the American heartland in full view of the world. An unregistered police station operated by the Ministry of Public Security on American soil in Manhattan. Foreign acquisition of farmland adjacent to nuclear missile fields, drone testing ranges, and strategic military installations. A naval shipbuilding program now producing platforms at a rate the Office of Naval Intelligence has documented as exceeding our own by a margin of more than two hundred to one. Intellectual property theft, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has testified to under oath as the largest transfer of wealth in human history. Influence operations inside American universities that were rebranded after public scrutiny and permitted to continue. And a strategic chokehold on the rare earth elements and processed minerals upon which the American defense industrial base depends.

This is the operational definition of unrestricted warfare. It is the doctrine that Colonel Qiao Liang and Colonel Wang Xiangsui of the People’s Liberation Army published in 1999, and it is the doctrine the Chinese Communist Party has executed against the United States with patience and precision for more than two decades. We were warned. We chose to believe that economic engagement would moderate the regime. It did not. It capitalized them. It modernized their military. It deepened their confidence that the long arc of this century belongs to them.

I do not believe that to be true. But I will tell you honestly that the reversal of this trajectory will not come from Washington alone. The institutional class that permitted this strategic erosion is not the institutional class that will reverse it. Renewal in the American tradition has never begun in the capital. It has always begun in the country. It has always begun with the citizen.

Ask your state legislator what is being done to restrict Chinese Communist Party-linked acquisitions of American agricultural land, particularly land adjacent to military installations. Ask your member of Congress why Confucius Institute partnerships have been permitted to reconstitute under new names inside American universities. Ask your governor what your state’s exposure is to Chinese-controlled supply chains in energy, water, pharmaceuticals, and critical infrastructure. Where an American-made alternative exists, choose it. Where transparency is lacking, demand it. Pray for this Nation and pray for the men and women who still wear the uniform in her defense.

The Chinese Communist Party is operating on the assumption that the American people are too distracted, too divided, and too comfortable to recognize what is being done to them, and too fatigued to respond. That is a miscalculation. It is the same miscalculation every adversary of this Republic has made, and every adversary of this Republic has lost.

The American spirit has not been extinguished. It has been underestimated.

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