The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal America’s Secrets, David R. Shedd, Andrew Badger, Harper, 2025, pp. 368, $32.50 hardcover.
In March 2019. Tele Denmark Communications (TDC), Denmark’s leading telecom company, invited secret bids to help build that nation’s 5G network. Things didn’t go exactly as planned. TDC awarded the contract to a Danish firm but immediately afterwards the Chinese firm Huawei, which had also bid on the contract, revised its bid to a fraction lower than its Danish competitor. TDC executives suspected a mole. They stuck with the original Danish competitor, and opened an internal investigation. What followed were threats from Huawei officials, along the lines of, “Nice little country you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to its business community.”
TDC continued to investigate. It discovered that its own security director had been compromised by Huawei; its boardroom had been bugged; and that a suspicious drone had been hovering over its Copenhagen headquarters with camera focused on a company whiteboard. More and more details piled up. Huawei, of course, denied any wrongdoing.
This story is one of many presented in David R. Shedd’s and Andrew Badger’s The Great Heist, a fine summation of Chinese theft of Western commercial and military secrets by two seasoned intelligence professionals. China is not new to economic and industrial espionage, but Westerners, including Americans, have been slow to take countermeasures. Beijing is actively undermining America’s safety and prosperity. What exactly are we doing to stop this?
The National Association of Scholars has devoted more than a decade to unveiling China’s attempt to infiltrate American higher education, both to gain influence over American students and scholars, but, more importantly, to steal American intellectual property. That work has brought NAS into contact with government officials and other researchers who work on the broader expanse of Chinese espionage and illicit influence. It’s a large canvas, but higher education is a lynchpin to the whole CCP enterprise. University research labs are rich pickings, not least because of their ties to highly classified federal programs.
It is therefore something of a disappointment that Shedd and Badger have next to nothing to say about China’s subversion of American colleges and universities. Too bad—because they are excellent in covering Beijing’s off-campus sins.
Divided into eighteen chapters and a conclusion, Shedd and Badger document how Chinese intelligence operations aimed at stealing economic and industrial secrets have powered its meteoric rise over the past few decades. Far from a story of “globalization” and capitalism fueling China’s climb from poverty to the world’s second-largest economy, it was Beijing’s intelligence strategy that was responsible for its performance. Shedd and Badger describe China’s “economic miracle” as nothing more than a “mirage” (xi). The book offers descriptions of the role of industrial and economic espionage in history, effectively setting the work up to be more than a typical book about current affairs involving China. The authors’ thesis, which they amply prove, offers a counterpoint to prevailing narratives about East Asia’s economic rise. Rather than the product of normal globalization or business acumen, China’s growth is powered by stolen secrets and its intelligence apparatus.
The book opens with an account of Tesla’s entry into China, and how foreign companies wanting access to China have to be prepared to lose intellectual property in the process. Elon Musk is described as opting for the loss and making up for it by faster innovation (3). This strategy ultimately failed because China was able to extract sensitive information from Tesla employees encouraged to leave their firm and transfer proprietary knowledge when relocating to China.
The chapters that follow consist of examining the different sectors of the American economy that are vital to the country’s security and stability, and how Beijing has employed its intelligence apparatus to steal intellectual property (IP) to undermine them. With costs of Chinese IP theft amounting to about $600 billion annually, the cumulative effect of the loss can manifest on a future battlefield in American lives (23).
Chapter 1 documents the origins of Washington’s soft touch on Chinese authoritarianism, noting declassified documents from the George H.W. Bush administration that adopted an approach built on the presumption that “engagement” with China was a “strategic imperative” (15). Beijing ultimately came to an understanding that the U.S. could be “managed, exploited, and even controlled.” The rest of the book demonstrates the ease at which Beijing has done this over successive presidential administrations.
During the Clinton years, American intelligence was given orders to “just watch” China and to not recruit Chinese intelligence assets (17). Not coincidentally, China’s faux economic growth exploded under these conditions, and with its entry into the World Trade Organization, effectively ensured Beijing’s access to secrets from abroad. As Shedd and Badger demonstrate, the value proposition behind China’s inclusion in post-Cold War globalization was not consumerism, but “extraction” of trade secrets and expertise from abroad. China’s explosive GDP growth was not the triumph of capitalism, but the payoff from studying U.S. and German industrial revolutions and weaponizing state intelligence to accelerate economic catch-up.
In Chapter 3, Shedd and Badger take the reader deep into China’s intelligence, the Ministry of State Security, buried in a compound behind the Beijing Summer Palace, and how it blossomed under the premiership of Xi Jinping. In the words of Willima Evanina, the former director the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, “When Xi Jinping comes to power, everything changes. I mean, overnight, everything changes” (39). After Xi came to power in 2013, the MSS more than doubled in size.
China’s war on the American economy and society grew after Xi took the helm at the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by expanding China’s intelligence reach and orienting it around the “Kaspersky concept”: “weaponizing the openness of the capitalist system” to steer corporate espionage to Beijing’s benefit (39). It was under Xi that the CCP embedded international economic espionage into Chinese law. China’s National Intelligence Law, implemented in 2017, mandates that “all organizations and citizens shall support, assist, and cooperate with the national intelligence effort” (43). This means, contrary to the view of China doves, that every Chinese company, foreign student, and national is a walking espionage liability. The NAS has tracked and warned of China’s influence in universities for years, and Shedd and Badger confirm what we have known—China’s influence is both nefarious and dangerous.
China utilizes the “United Front Work Department” (UFWD), a part of its intelligence infrastructure that sits “at the crossroads of soft power, political influence, and covert intelligence,” to monitor dissidents and steal secrets (48). The UFWD weaponizes Chinese student organizations, diaspora networks, embassies, and even non-Chinese nationals to build support for the CCP’s objectives and the operations of the MSS.
The book recounts multiple instances of the “shadow war” between the U.S. and China that highlight the damage of Beijing’s operations to American security. The 2018 arrest in Belgium of MSS operative Xu Yanjun, who was attempting to steal advanced jet engine designs from GE Aviation, illustrates the scale of the threat: U.S. authorities estimated that the theft, had it succeeded, would have cost the company more than $50 million. Xu’s arrest highlights Beijing’s methods, including the exploitation of academic and professional openness in the West, a “whole of society approach” that uses Chinese companies and individuals to gain access to vital technologies, and the use of “incremental entrapment” to secure the assistance of sometimes unwitting academic accomplices. China uses social media recruitment, and even threats against the family of Chinese nationals to secure its interests.
Shedd and Badger describe how TikTok has been used by China to amass extensive user data, including social connections, location information, and psychological insights such as users’ obsessions and anxieties, often produced through self-promotion and click-driven digital exhibitionism. Far from innocent, China uses the app to document the “mental health issues, sexual preferences, drug and alcohol use, or money problems” of its users for purposes of intelligence targeting and blackmail. The Obama administration’s limp-wristed response to China’s espionage, which culminated in Obama requesting Xi to cease stealing U.S. secrets, and the Trump administration’s flip-flopping on the entry of Chinese students to American universities, have proven futile in stopping the threat.
The most chilling takeaway of the book comes in its second chapter, where the authors note that the U.S. and China have moved in “opposite directions for three decades in terms of income growth, job loss and creation, standard of living, and even life expectancy” as a result of China’s espionage-led growth (36). Without saying it outright, Shedd and Badger highlight how Beijing’s economic war on the U.S. is a sociopolitical one. Decreased economic security for individual Americans, fewer jobs and underemployment, and full social and political decay.
The weakest aspect of the book is found in its final two chapters, where Shedd and Badger offer fictional accounts of how Chinese economic war on the U.S. can be combatted by the government and in the business world. While interesting, these fictional accounts lack the substance of practical policy recommendations. China represents a novel strategic challenge that requires creativity, but a kind of creativity that must be grounded in historical realism rather than speculative analysis.
It is ironic that the book’s final two chapters—both fictional—are its weakest. Their very simulation underscores the work’s most unsettling and unspoken conclusion: American institutions, businesses, and policymakers lack not only a coherent strategy but the collective will to counter Beijing’s systematic erosion of American national security and living standards. China’s “whole-of-society” approach to targeting Americans’ safety and quality of life is not speculative; it is already operating with disturbing effectiveness.
Ian Oxnevad is Senior Fellow for Foreign Affairs and Security Studies at the National Association of Scholars. He is the author of Making a Killing: States, Banks and Terrorism from McGill-Queens University Press (2021), Middle East Politics for the New Millennium (2016), and After Confucius: China’s Enduring Influence in Higher Education (2022) from the National Association of Scholars. He last appeared in AQ in fall 2025 with “The Left’s Funding Network Is It’s Power,” a review of Scott Walter’s Arabella: The Dark Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America (2024).
Peter W. Wood is the Editor in Chief of Academic Questions and President of the National Association of Scholars.
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