Federal agencies responded too slowly as Beijing recruited U.S.-based researchers to transfer intellectual property from American laboratories, leaving U.S. taxpayers unwittingly funding the rise of China's economy and military, U.S. Senate investigators said on Monday.
The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released the 105-page report saying China started in the late 1990s to exchange salaries, research funding, laboratory space and other incentives for information from U.S. university laboratories and other research institutions, much of it publicly funded.
As China spent 20 years recruiting researchers with access to advanced science and technology, U.S. agencies failed to adequately respond. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example, did not respond strongly until mid-2018, the report said.