Standing in front of symbolically bright red curtains, Elon Musk clasped hands with a Chinese government official in Shanghai.
The world’s richest man had just pulled off what seemed an economic coup and the boldest move of his career. His firm Tesla would become the first foreign car maker in history to operate in China.
However, no one – not even the financial markets – knew exactly what that handshake would set in motion.
For, within months of that photo-op in 2018, one of Musk’s top Chinese engineers quietly walked out the door of Tesla’s Silicon Valley HQ – taking with him one of the vaunted ‘crown jewels’ of Musk’s empire: the ‘source code’ that allows Tesla vehicles to drive automatically.
The information had been simply uploaded to a cloud account and synced to personal devices. The billion-dollar technology – promoted as the future of electric vehicles, the product of years of extensive research and development – would now be accessible with a simple log-in.
A critical technology for the future of electric vehicles and a closely guarded secret had been stolen in seconds.
Soon, one question began to haunt the Tesla offices and the FBI: Had Elon Musk inadvertently handed the keys of his company to the Chinese Communist Party?
Business deals such as this with the West don’t happen without approval from the top in a country with a ‘China First’ policy.
Indeed, the man who engineered it was Li Qiang, then Shanghai’s powerful Communist Party secretary, who, five years later was named premier of China, the second most powerful man in the country after president Xi Jinping.
One Tesla insider recalls there had already been ‘regular’ conversations with the FBI about the proposed link-up. The FBI warned: ‘If you don’t want your intellectual property stolen, don’t open a factory in China.’
Yet Musk didn’t seem to want to listen. Colleagues say his attitude was ‘we’re not skipping the biggest car market in the world because of espionage fears’.
Also, with a swagger, he reckoned: ‘We’re more innovative. We’ll move faster than the Chinese. By the time they catch up, we’ll be ten steps ahead.’
Today, Tesla has been outstripped as the world’s biggest seller of EVs (electric vehicles), after announcing a week ago that its 2025 sales were significantly short of that of its rival BYD – a Chinese manufacturer.
Musk was not alone in such hubris. For years, many Western corporate leaders had been guided by such an approach toward the Chinese regime.
Significantly, Tom Zhu, head of Tesla China, had said: ‘If we’re putting stuff in China, we have to be essentially okay with the Chinese getting it.’
After the FBI was called in by bosses, Tesla’s treacherous Chinese engineer confessed to uploading company software but denied transferring it to his new employer in China. However, if it was smuggled into China, it seems unfathomable to anyone familiar with the tactics of the Chinese Communist Party that it was not used for illicit purposes.
This massive security breach is just one of countless examples of The Great Heist – the theft of hundreds of billions of pounds’ worth of critical data, intellectual property and technology – that has been a driving force behind China’s rapid industrial and military expansion.
The Chinese Communist Party’s unrelenting pursuit of stolen information from the West has propelled the country’s economic and military might to heights previously unimaginable. Yet the West continues to underestimate the scale of this threat.
The truth is that China’s supposed ‘economic miracle’ is a mirage – one built not on ingenuity but on grand larceny.
It’s imperative now that we all understand the depth and breadth of this predatory behaviour.
This is not just a story about protecting sensitive information, it’s about safeguarding the future of our freedoms, our way of life – our very existence, even, on the global stage.
As former intelligence officers, we have spoken to numerous people who have spent their careers tracking, confronting and exposing the scale of China’s Great Heist against America, including counter-intelligence and security chiefs, former defence department staff and espionage experts.
Silicon Valley may have once harboured hopes about the power of the internet and technology to unite the world and usher in an era of peace.
However, such assumptions have proven to be disastrously wrong as the prospect of a direct war between great powers becomes ever more likely.
Along with Elon Musk, another leading Western figure who has, albeit unwittingly, allowed Beijing to transform espionage into industrial strategy is Bill Clinton. In 2000, as US President, he made the single most consequential economic and strategic gamble of the 21st century: permanent, normal trade relations with the People’s Republic of China.
It was framed as diplomacy, as engagement with a potential trading partner, even a future ally. Yet, in hindsight, it was the moment the malevolent virus entered the global trade system and became the launching pad for The Great Heist. Joint US/China ventures became Trojan horses, and state-sponsored espionage was scaled up with impunity.
Washington had opened the gates to a foreign power with interests antithetical to its own.
Beijing’s goal was never subtle: to accelerate China’s economic rise, modernise its military, and challenge the US for technological and geopolitical supremacy.
US government estimates now put the annual cost of intellectual property theft to the American economy at between $225billion and $600billion, almost all of it by China. That sum almost matches the nearly $800billion the US spends on defence each year.
These thefts include everything from counterfeit consumer goods to pirated software to the more insidious theft of trade secrets.
Chinese spies have also been caught at the highest levels of the Washington administration – from America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to top secret military projects, even the CIA itself.
American universities have been flooded with hundreds of thousands of Chinese students who have helped steal cutting-edge research, scientific innovations and technical know-how – all the while fully aware of the leverage Beijing’s intelligence services can use on their family and friends back home.
The speed at which this has happened is breathtaking.
Ajit Khubani, boss of the TV marketing firm Telebrands, says: ‘I started going to China in 1986, when they couldn’t manufacture a fork. They were an agrarian society. They couldn’t manufacture anything.’
How things have changed.
Quickly, piracy thrived as factories that once struggled with basic manufacturing processes replicated complex consumer product development with astonishing precision – often from nothing more than photographs.
Intellectual property was stolen without mercy.
A landmark moment came in 2015 when president Xi launched Made in China 2025, an aggressive all-encompassing industrial development strategy to ensure the Communist Party’s grip on power would never be challenged.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which analyses scientific and research innovation, has concluded that China now leads in 37 of the 44 fields of emerging critical technologies.
That is above an 80 per cent success rate for achieving global leadership in many of the key technologies of the 21st century. Bolstered by stolen US and Western technologies, the Chinese military has embarked on an unparalleled modernisation programme. The People’s Liberation Army began transforming itself into a cutting-edge force infused with foreign innovations, including stolen weapons designs and classified knowledge, all aimed at preparing for a potential future confrontation with the US, which had long been identified as its primary adversary.
For decades, NASA led the world in hypersonic research. In 2021, however, the People’s Liberation Army conducted a test that left US military and aerospace experts in shock: it launched a hypersonic missile with nuclear capability on a ‘glide vehicle’ able to glide and manoeuvre at unprecedented speeds.
Travelling at low altitude at five times the speed of sound, the missile went around the globe and landed almost on-target.
The low trajectory and ability to alter course mid-flight suggest it could hit US assets at indefensible speeds.
The Liberation Army doesn’t need to land troops on US soil to cripple America’s defences in the event of war; it only needs to hit hard, first and with precision.
Chinese military planners no doubt consider the possibility of such a strike could be enough to deter America from helping Taiwan in any conflict between the island nation and China.
The baffled sentiment of observers of China’s sudden hypersonic advance was captured in a now-infamous comment by a Pentagon official who said: ‘We have no idea how they did this.’
The answer, though, was simple. Indeed, what happened on a humid afternoon in the streets of Manila, the capital of the Philippines, in January last year is just one piece of a global mosaic of espionage at the heart of The Great Heist.
Inside a Toyota car that was idling on a quiet street were a Chinese national and a Filipino, posing as surveyors.
On the dashboard: a mounted tablet, connected to a satellite-based navigation system. In the back seat: a high-powered imaging drone and a custom-built data relay antenna.
The duo were mapping a sensitive US military base in meticulous detail. However, Philippine security forces were watching and arrested them.
Days later, five more Chinese nationals were detained on an island just miles from key American facilities.
Each arrest unravelled another layer of a chilling reality: the targets of the motley surveillance crews were airstrips, fuel depots, radar towers and ammunition storage sites – everything that would need to be hit first in the event of war between China and the US.
The Chinese spy ring in the Philippines was drawing up a kill list, a system of first-strike capability, powered by espionage and precision technology.
All part of the Beijing regime’s plan to make one of the most dangerous weapons on Earth – China’s hypersonic missile force – even deadlier and more accurate.
Of course, China is not new to espionage. It’s been perfecting the art for more than 2,500 years through countless wars among competing kingdoms and with foreign ‘barbarians’.
As early as about 500BC, Sun Tzu, the military philosopher, said: ‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.’
And it was Chairman Mao’s spymaster, Kang Sheng, who institutionalised the ‘thousand grains of sand’ doctrine: gathering intelligence through a vast web of informal, often unwitting, sources so broadly dispersed that counter-intelligence services must struggle to detect it.
Another global giant impacted by The Great Heist is Apple.
To an authoritarian regime, data collection is an obsession. Stolen data directly contributes to the Chinese Communist Party’s strategic collection objectives.
In 2021, the Beijing government forced Apple, a firm that prides itself on protecting data, to transfer the data of all its Chinese users to state-owned servers in the capital of China’s Guizhou province.
It is a national data centre and the place where, according to The New York Times: ‘Chinese state employees physically manage the computers’.
Also, Apple abandoned the encryption technology it used elsewhere because the Chinese government would not allow it. For its part, Apple said it had never compromised its users’ security data.
However, given that Apple makes nearly every component of its products in China and that the Chinese market accounts for about 20 per cent of its sales, Apple CEO Tim Cook evidently had little room to manoeuvre.
The story is even more chilling with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Zhu Songchun, founder of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, said, in 2021: ‘Artificial general intelligence is the strategic high ground of international scientific and technological competition in the next ten to 20 years, and its influence is equivalent to the atomic bomb in the field of information technology.’
Step forward Linwei ‘Leon’ Ding, 37, an engineer who worked for Google in California and used an Apple program to download hundreds of files containing the tech giant’s AI trade secrets.
According to an indictment after his arrest, this was part of a secret plan to use his top-level access to create new opportunities in his native China with the sensitive information he pilfered.
As yet, Ding’s case has not come to trial but he faces 14 counts, including economic espionage and trade secret theft, and a possible 15 years in jail plus a $5million fine per count.
The price for stealing America’s trade secrets – on paper at least – appears severe. Even so, how does a $5million fine compare to the potentially exponential advantage, and opportunity costs, of allowing your greatest geopolitical rival to obtain critical information about one of the world’s most important technologies?
The hard truth is that China has waged an industrial espionage campaign of unprecedented scale that has hollowed out Western technological edge in a zero-sum contest for power.
This is not merely a story of espionage as we know it but that of an existential struggle over the DNA of military and economic might. And it will never be won with bureaucratic half measures.
Safeguarding our future requires mobilisation across government, industry and academia.
It demands an urgent mindset shift: to regard today’s battle front lines as running through corporate boardrooms, academic labs, courtrooms, energy grids, start-up firms and cloud storage infrastructure.
A recent report called AI 2027, written with help from dozens of experts, paints a dystopian picture of the next decade: China’s rise in superhuman AI will be seismic, exceeding even the impact of the Industrial Revolution.
But unlike past revolutions, the report predicts this breakthrough will not be led solely by innovation. It will be driven by theft.
Adapted from The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign To Steal America’s Secrets, by David R. Shedd & Andrew Badger (HarperCollins, £25), published on Thursday.
To order a copy for £22.50 (Free UK p&p on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call: 020 3176 2937.
