US paranoia against China over spying

World
Europe

01:12

The US' adverse policies aren't just limited to the South China Sea and Taiwan.

America, in the recent past, has floated a theory, which says that China, through its network of spies, is trying to infiltrate US government, industries and universities to steal its technical know-how.

Here's a list of instances where, without an iota of evidence, China has been accused of spying.

This month, a Bloomberg report, citing unnamed sources, said "Chinese spy chips" have been recovered from hardware material used by Apple and Amazon.

The report was categorically rejected, both by Apple and Amazon. In June this year, the US government restricted visas for Chinese students to just one year from the earlier five.

The restrictions were exclusively placed against Chinese students studying robotics, aviation and high-tech manufacturing.

There's a clear pattern to this China-phobia. Recent reports in the US media claim that Trump's top aide Stephen Miller tried to persuade the president to end all student visas for Chinese nationals.

But, the plan was rejected over concerns of economic and diplomatic fallout.

The bias against Chinese nationals isn't a Trump creation. In 2015, a Chinese-born American professor named Xiaoxing Xi was arrested at gunpoint by the FBI and was wrongly accused of spying for China. After the FBI failed to prove its charges, the professor in 2017 sued the bureau.