Chinese nationals have reportedly accessed US military bases and sensitive sites on as many as 100 occasions in recent years.
According to a report by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), US officials have described these incidents as potential espionage threats, raising significant concerns about national security.
These covert infiltrations have seen Chinese nationals posing as tourists, utilizing a variety of tactics to gain unauthorized access to military installations across the United States.
This report comes as the US and China have been trying to ease tensions which have escalated in recent months.
The incidents range from Chinese individuals crossing into a US missile range in New Mexico to scuba divers navigating murky waters near a US government rocket launch site in Florida, all with the aim of gathering sensitive information.
The WSJ report suggests that these incidents have predominantly occurred in rural areas where tourism is scarce, a fact that has only intensified suspicions.
In response to these alarming developments, the US Department of Defense, FBI, and other relevant agencies conducted a review last year in an effort to mitigate such incidents.
While the WSJ report sheds light on the infiltration tactics, it also reveals that when confronted by security personnel, these Chinese nationals tend to deliver a rehearsed script, claiming to be lost tourists.
This calculated approach has further raised suspicions surrounding their true intentions.
In one such incident highlighted in the WSJ report, a group of Chinese citizens claimed to be staying at a Holiday Inn located near Fort Wainwright, Alaska.
This immediately raised red flags, as the area rarely attracts tourists. Fort Wainwright is home to the US Army’s 11th Airborne Division.
The Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, responded to these allegations with a defiant stance, dismissing them as “purely ill-intentioned fabrications.”
Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Embassy, urged US officials to abandon their “Cold War mentality”, cease making groundless accusations, and focus on fostering mutual trust and friendship between the two nations.
This report comes at a time when Washington and Beijing are cautiously working to ease tensions that escalated following the incident involving a suspected Chinese high-altitude spy balloon crossing into US airspace.
The US military intercepted and downed the balloon off the East Coast in February, leading to heightened tensions between the two superpowers.
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