Oncological double agents

[LittleLebowski]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...ancer-research

The dossier on cancer researcher Xifeng Wu was thick with intrigue, if hardly the stuff of a spy thriller. It contained findings that she’d improperly shared confidential information and accepted a half-dozen advisory roles at medical institutions in China. She might have weathered those allegations, but for a larger aspersion that was far more problematic: She was branded an oncological double agent.

[LittleLebowski]

To me, this seems like overreach.

[TGS]

That's a very biased article that is gunning hard to make up the readers' mind for them.

Like, for instance, the insistence that "how much could the Chinese actually steal" because the programs run decades.

Duuuhhhh…..uhhhh…..usually espionage, whether it is economic or not, is focused on piecing together different portions to either get the big picture, or to learn about specific developments/technologies and apply such themselves. This is a typical approach by China, who generally steals the fuck out of everybody elses research and then implements such products in the market for a fraction of the R/D. Just because they're not transmitting the entire program doesn't mean what they're stealing cannot be of immense value, and its incredibly damaging to US companies. In addition, just because they're targeting cancer research doesn't mean they're specifically trying to steal cancer research information for the purposes of their own cancer research (though it's also assured).....espionage like this is aimed at stealing related or tangential technologies/processes used in various projects which are of value elsewhere, as well.

Kid terms: I'm trying to develop the best way to cook a nested egg. I have developed a super secret pan that allows me to cook food better than anyone else's pan, specifically because of its magical ability to not burn butter. A spy in my egg cooking research program at Ramsey University is stealing information. While they're a ways off from being able to duplicate 3/4 of the rest of my program and cook the best nested egg possible, the fact that they stole my patented secret pan and it's design on how to not burn butter is still of immense value as they can release that and still make a killing, whereas I spent all the R&D to develop it and now has limited value to my program.

It's not government overreach. Economic espionage is a crime. In the book Unrestricted Warfare published by the PLA Press, authored by two Chinese PLA colonels, it's also one of the specific ways that the Chinese detailed how they'd wage war with the US instead of going kinetic.