A top US intelligence official on Wednesday said Beijing is more of a threat to American national security than Moscow, BBC reported.
Director of the National Counter intelligence and Security Center, Bill Evanina, said the threat from Russia compared to that from China has receded.
Referring to China’s allegation that the US adopts misleading statements and steps, Evanina said Beijing’s economic success is based on its invasion of commercial secrets, the price of which has been paid by the American public.
Evanina said that “If one looks at the past year from July to now, the Department of Justice has indicted 20 Chinese individuals or businesses engaging in economic espionage and these are just the ones we know about,”he added.
He said this is not the first time Washington has termed China a threat.
At the start of this 2018, the American Secretary of Defense James Mattis had announced that threats from countries like China and Russia were on the rise.
He added that these countries were trying to make the world more compatible with their dictatorial governments.
In February, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in one of its reports said that now China instead of Russia has become the country by which the US determines its military needs.