The United States is engaging in a broader range of espionage against China, including Chinese companies, to address the country’s status as both a military and an economic threat, the deputy C.I.A. director, Michael Ellis, said on Tuesday.
During a rare public speaking appearance, Mr. Ellis said the nature of intelligence collection by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies had evolved considerably since they were created during the Cold War to spy on the Soviet Union.
Unlike past geopolitical rivals, China “poses a fundamentally different kind of threat to us because the competition is economic,” Mr. Ellis said at a cybersecurity conference in Washington.
Western officials say that under Communist Party rule, China does not have an independent business community akin to the United States or much of Europe. Mr. Ellis said that makes Chinese companies a legitimate target for espionage in areas like artificial intelligence, semiconductors and biotechnology.
The C.I.A. has needed to broaden its spying mandate because valuable intelligence about those technologies is “not found in the same places that political or military foreign intelligence is found,” Mr. Ellis said. Such information, he added, is “resident in the private sector — or in which China has to come as close as you might describe as a private sector.”
Mr. Ellis’s remarks are a subtle departure from a precedent established by previous administrations, which generally sought to draw a line between espionage that the United States considers permissible, such as intelligence gathering conducted for the purposes of national defense and foreign policy, and spying that is economically motivated.
