Spies, Sanctions, Cyberattacks: China and the U.S. Clash Behind the Scenes

The word from the White House went out to senior U.S. officials months before President Trump landed in Beijing on Wednesday: Avoid unnecessary confrontations with China, large or small, that could interfere with Mr. Trump’s effort at rapprochement with America’s largest military, economic and technological competitor.

It did not work out that way.

Over the past few weeks, the Treasury Department has put new sanctions on Chinese firms it said provided targeting data to Iran that enabled strikes on bases across the Middle East that did billions of dollars in damage to American facilities. The White House has accused China of stealing artificial intelligence models from U.S. tech companies. And just this week, federal prosecutors said they had charged a California mayor with illegally working for Beijing.

There have been actions against midsize oil importers in China for secretly buying up Iranian oil. The only big step that the administration delayed was final approval of a $13 billion military aid package for Taiwan, which the White House designed but will not fulfill until Mr. Trump is back. That leaves President Xi Jinping time to voice his objections.

It is not clear why there has been such a sudden deluge of China measures, other than the fact that the Trump administration has been in office for nearly a year and a half. That is enough time for the China hawks appointed by Mr. Trump, and there are plenty, to gather evidence and build a case. Sometimes, that means forcing the president to see the evidence of Chinese-led actions designed to undermine the United States or its allies, even if his first instinct is to explain what a “good relationship” he has with Mr. Xi and seemingly suggest that all might be forgiven.

Indeed, Mr. Trump struck a largely conciliatory tone Thursday, telling Mr. Xi that he is “a great leader” and that “it is an honor to be your friend.” For his part, Mr. Xi warned Mr. Trump that “conflicts” between the two superpowers could occur over the issue of Taiwan.

Some experts said it was unlikely that the Trump administration was trying to gain leverage over China during the talks this week with its flurry of tough actions, as many of them amounted to little more than accusations that Beijing readily denies. Instead, senior officials may be seizing a perceived opportunity to highlight tensions with China over Iran, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence — and remind the president that Beijing, in addition to posing the biggest geopolitical threat to the United States, has not decided to start playing nice.

Chinese companies, for example, have been discussing arms sales with Iran, plotting to send the weapons through other countries to mask the origins of the military aid, The New York Times reported this week.

But the Iran war is just the latest irritant for U.S. national security officials. Chinese hackers continue to breach U.S. government and corporate systems with little consequence. The F.B.I. recently identified what it believed were Chinese hackers inside a database it maintains on its domestic surveillance orders. That discovery was especially alarming because Beijing appeared to be building on its past success of infiltrating the bureau’s internal networks by doing so again.

“I see this as the hawkish officials pushing on areas where they think the door is the most open right ahead of the summit,” said Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and a former China adviser at the Commerce Department during the Biden administration. In many ways, Mr. Trump himself may be as much the intended audience as the Chinese, she said. “These are all areas where the president himself has placed a high degree of priority.”

In late April, amid rapidly rising fears in both Washington and Silicon Valley about the threats posed by advanced artificial intelligence breakthroughs, the White House published a memo written by Michael Kratsios, the science and technology adviser to the president, accusing China of “exploiting American expertise and innovation” by stealing proprietary A.I. technology to build its own models.

“Foreign entities principally based in China are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill frontier A.I. systems,” Mr. Kratsios wrote. Distillation is the term used to describe training smaller A.I. models off larger, more expensive ones to achieve similar capabilities.

Also last month, a U.S. cybersecurity bulletin issued with security agencies in Britain, Japan and other allied countries highlighted evolving tactics from Chinese state-sponsored hackers who rely on vast networks of compromised devices to engage in cyberespionage and target vulnerable critical infrastructure systems. The alert came after a prolonged stretch during which Chinese cyberthreats were seldom highlighted by U.S. agencies, even as China’s hackers once again breached a sensitive internal network at the F.B.I. that stores information about the bureau’s surveillance targets.

In yet another example from late March, the Federal Communications Commission issued an order to ban the import of new consumer routers manufactured overseas, citing cybersecurity risks, though it exempted existing routers. Some of the best-selling routers in the United States contain parts that originate in China, including those produced by TP-Link, the largest producer of U.S. consumer and small-business routers. Actions against TP-Link, which was established in China but now bases international sales in California, had long been discussed among U.S. officials in multiple agencies but had been on pause for many months until the F.C.C. order came down.

And just Friday, the State Department issued sanctions against several Chinese companies for providing satellite imagery to Iran that it said aided Tehran’s attacks against U.S. forces in the Middle East.

Then on Monday, federal prosecutors announced they had charged Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, Calif., with acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government. An unsealed plea deal said Ms. Wang would plead guilty to the charge.

“This plea agreement is the latest success in our determination to defend the homeland against China’s efforts to corrupt our institutions,” Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said in a statement. The timing of charges, just days before the summit, may have been coincidental, but was hard to ignore.

The surge in action around China followed months of U.S. officials in the Trump administration downplaying the rivalry, so much so that the National Defense Strategy published in January offered a softer tone about seeking “respectful relations with China.”

The guidance from the White House in the run-up to the trip to avoid unnecessary confrontations, which was described by Trump administration officials, represents standard advice ahead of a high-stakes presidential visit.

But to read through the Pentagon’s reports on China is to get a picture of the pace of the Chinese naval and nuclear buildups and the relentless pressure on both the Philippines and Taiwan. It lists simulated blockade actions against Taiwan — something that may look more attractive to the Chinese government now that the United States is blockading shipments in and out of Iran. And it describes an unyielding effort to pursue artificial intelligence and “achieve self-sufficiency in semiconductors.”

Mr. Trump did not mention the sanctions on Thursday, at least in public. But those sanctions — and mirrored efforts by China against the United States and its companies — may do more to define the relationship over the next few years than pronouncements of impending partnerships that are likely to be cited by Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi.