China has built a state-driven campaign to harvest American data and weaponise it as a strategic asset that could prove critical in a conflict with the US, including over Taiwan, a key advisory committee to the US Congress heard.Experts told the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission on Thursday that Washington was falling short in countering Beijing’s data-collection drive, one that could have far-reaching implications for American society and the economy, as well as US wartime strategy.

“China is not merely stealing data. It is doing so to build an AI-enabled intelligence and targeting architecture for economic competition, political coercion and wartime advantage,” said Joseph Lin, chief executive officer of Twenty, a cyber warfare company.

“The United States is still treating this challenge far too defensively … [China] treats data as a strategic resource. It treats commercial networks as intelligence collection platforms, civilian logistic systems as potential military targets, and persistent cyber access as a form of pre-conflict positioning.”

Nigel Cory, director with Crowell Global Advisors, testified that China spent over a decade building a “coordinated state industry response to what it sees as the foundational input of the digital and AI economy – data”. According to him, China viewed data as a factor of production, seen as on equal footing with land, labour, capital and technology.

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Lin said China has assembled an ecosystem enabling “industrial-scale cyber operations” drawing on not just its military but also contractors, hacker-for-hire firms, access brokers and commercial technology firms, giving Beijing “reach, deniability and surge capacity.”