Huawei Criminal Trial Begins in Brooklyn Federal Court | China in Focus

Welcome to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. Our top story. Eight years after the U.S. case began, Huawei is finally going to trial. The allegations involve Iran, bank fraud and stolen American trade secrets. Belgium taking a Chinese citizen into custody. Authorities accuse him of transferring trade secrets about semiconductor production to China. Military muscle on display. The U.S., have begun their annual drill to deter North Korea and its nuclear threat. North Korea isn't standing by. Eight years after the first charges, Chinese tech giant Huawei is finally going on trial in New York. The case centers on Iran sanctions, bank fraud and alleged theft of American trade secrets. Jury selection begins Tuesday morning in federal court in Brooklyn. The charges against Huawei are broad. Prosecutors say the company ran a years-long scheme. Prosecutors accuse Huawei of stealing trade secrets from U.S. technology companies and doing business in North Korea despite U.S. sanctions. They also allege Huawei of racketeering, bank and wire fraud, money laundering and violating U.S. sanctions on Iran. That business through a Hong Kong firm called Skycap funneled more than $100 million through the U.S. financial system. Huawei has pleaded not guilty and denies wrongdoing. The case began in 2018 and closely tied to Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou. Meng was arrested in Canada eight years ago and was released in 2021 after signing a statement admitting she misled a bank about Huawei's Iran business. A judge ruled that statement can now be used against the company at trial. The trial is expected to last about three months and it comes at a sensitive moment. Chinese leader Xi Jinping is scheduled to visit Washington and meet with President Trump on September 24th. The timing puts a spotlight on the broader U.S.-China technology competition. A Belgian Chinese man has been taken into custody on suspicion of industrial espionage. Prosecutors accuse him of transferring trade secrets about semiconductor production to China. Prosecutors say the 52-year-old man was arrested in May at the Brussels airport while trying to take a flight to Beijing. The man has dual Chinese and Belgium nationality but is not identified by name. He has been held in pre-trial detention since May. Belgian prosecutors say he used to hold a senior position at Belgium microchip maker Belgen which These chips are used in electric vehicles, aerospace and the military. The man was suspected of simultaneously acting as a director of a Chinese company that made the same kind of chips. In that position, he is suspected of illegally transferring specialized intellectual property and trade secrets abroad while relating to the production of gallium nitride chips. Chinese hackers are increasingly using AI to target American AI research. That's according to a new report from Google's threat intelligence group. Here's more. Google says China-linked hacking groups have shifted from basic AI prompts to AI agents that automate much of a cyber attack. Some campaigns wrapped up in under six hours. One group tracked since 2023 has focused on academic, medical and military research in North America. The report says it has been targeting proprietary AI work. Hackers are also breaking into unrelated companies' cloud systems to install their own AI models, dodging the oversight built into commercial platforms. A Chinese embassy spokesperson denied the allegations. This year, AI developers on both sides of the US-China divide have said their AI agents are now capable of carrying out hacking and cybersecurity work. China has promoted de-dollarization and greater use of its own currency, the yuan, while Russia appears to be more pragmatic. Use whatever currency or payment system works. The Kremlin spokesman said Tuesday that Russia does not aim for de-dollarization. He added that 90 percent of transactions between Russia and BRICS nations are conducted in national currencies. That comes after US sanctions have been imposed on Russia and other countries, limiting their ability to use the dollar for some international transactions. Major BRICS nations include India, China, Russia, South Africa, Brazil and Iran, among others. Jaguar Land Rover slashing jobs. The carmaker announced Monday that it will cut 4,000 jobs across its global workforce. It says the aim is to try to cut costs and compete with Chinese electric carmakers. Here's the story. Britain's biggest automaker said the job cuts will take place over the next two years. It says that it is targeting 2.3 billion dollars in savings to make it more competitive. It says the job cuts and savings will help the company invest 20 to 24 billion dollars over the next five years in electrification, digital technologies and other areas. Jaguar Land Rover makes the Range Rover Discovery and other luxury SUVs. It has faced pressure amid intense competition from cheaper Chinese EVs, soaring costs and the impact of President Trump's tariffs. Its sales were also hit last year when a cyber attack forced it to halt production for a month. Flexing muscles on both sides on Monday, the U.S., South Korea and Japan began their annual military drill near South Korea. North Korea is responding. The drill dubbed Freedom Edge will run until Friday. Both maritime and air forces are involved. Without any details released about what weapons are being tested, the drill aims to deter North Korea's nuclear and missile threats. The trilateral exercise comes after President Trump scaled back a major joint exercise with South Korea last month. Also on Monday, the same day the drill began, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un announced a boost to the country's nuclear capabilities. A newly commissioned destroyer. North Korea is further modernizing its navy, expanding its nuclear capable forces. Coming up, there's one place in America where Chinese nationals can enter without a visa. How the security loophole is raising alarms over Chinese influence operations and birth tourism. That and more after the break here on China In Focus. Welcome back to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. A U.S. territory in the Pacific right by Guam allows Chinese nationals visa-free entry. American Thought Leader's host Jan Jekielek spoke to Cleo Pascal about how this has become a security loophole for Chinese influence operations and birth tourism ventures. Pascal is a senior fellow at the Compass Institute. Let's dive in. Cleo Pascal, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. It's great. Great to be here. Good to see you again. Thank you. Recently, there's been a lot of discussion about birth tourism in America. There's actually one place in America where Chinese nationals can come without a visa. You are deep into understanding what's going on there. Tell me what's happening. The U.S. has 50 states and five inhabited territories. One of them is the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, which is just north of Guam. It's contiguous to Guam. In fact, Guam is the southern of the Southern Mariana Islands. This is the Northern Mariana Islands. It's an island chain. It's the newest part of the U.S. It joined the U.S. in 1976. When it joined in 1975, the year before, was the time when the Vietnamese refugee situation was at its peak. Guam had about 100,000 Vietnamese refugees on it waiting to be sent to other parts of the United States. When it joined, it said, we'd like to join. They had a referendum, but we're a little bit concerned that our population of tens of thousands might be overwhelmed. Could we please have some control over immigration and our labour laws? Because also, they had a very different economy. That initial control over immigration was designed to keep the population stable in the context of the Vietnamese refugees, but then evolved into a situation where they started letting in Russians and Chinese without visas for tourism reasons. A visa-free entry for the Russians was revoked for national security reasons, but the Chinese one wasn't. The Chinese continued to come in without a visa, creating all sorts of issues. I would just say right up front, the justification that's still used is they need the Chinese tourists, but the Korean tourists have vastly outnumbered the Chinese tourists for at least a decade, even though the Chinese tourists don't need a visa. So the tourism argument doesn't really make that much sense to me. In fact, what they're actually saying is that we want the Northern Mariana Islands to appeal to the Chinese that can't get a visa to the rest of the U.S. So their unique sales point from a tourism perspective is, you can't get a visa to Michigan? Come to CNMI, where you don't need a visa for the two weeks. Not everybody stays in CNMI when they arrive there. So this has contributed to a whole vast array of problems. I'll give you the example of one guy who's now in jail. He came in without a visa through this visa waiver thing in 2016. He overstayed his tourist visa. He set up a birth tourism industry, where at least 200 Chinese came in and gave birth to little Americans. Then he started dealing with methamphetamines. Then he illegally, through forged documents, went to Guam, where the military base is. This is a consistent problem where you have people coming in from China without a visa and then illegally going to Guam because they're not supposed to leave the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, but it's only 60 miles to Guam by boat. We've seen that happen in the hundreds, including showing up on military bases. That's what he did. Then he went to the neighbouring country of Palau and was involved in a murder and was finally extradited back to the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, where they threw him in jail for importing methamphetamines in liquid form in lava lamps. So this is a guy who started off with the visa waiver, sold meth, brought in birth tourism, was involved in a murder. None of that was caught in the US. That was only caught once he was in Palau, and then now he's in jail. But it gives an idea of not just how this is coming in and bringing in criminal activity, but it's contributing to birth tourism and it's contributing to insecurity in neighbouring countries and potentially compromising the security of US military installations in Guam. I want to dig into CNMI a little bit more, but just on the issue of Palau, what does Palau think of this waiver program and the fact that people like this have made it to Palau? A lot of the criminal activity that they're seeing in Palau comes into them through the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands and through Guam. So the US is seen as a security risk to its neighbours in the region. Palau has better border security than the US does in the same location, in the same part of the Pacific. This is also particularly relevant, I think, because the Chinese Communist Party has a for a whole suite of reasons, but especially because Palau recognizes Taiwan. Yes. So Palau is just the other side of the Philippines. So if China wants to break through the first island chain and hit the second island chain, they can squeeze the Philippines from both sides if they have ability to do so from Palau. Palau is highly strategically important, which is one of the reasons why the US is engaged in things like putting in an over-the-horizon radar installation there. But also, this is a location where a lot of Americans died. So if you know your World War II history, Palau is the Battle of Peleliu. The Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands is the Battle of Saipan and Tinian. We know from what happened just over 80 years ago that this is an area of high strategic importance if you're dealing with an aggressive Asian power that is trying to get across the Pacific. With a massively growing Navy, for example. For sake of argument, yes. But the vast majority of these people that are getting the visa waiver are not like this criminal, presumably. Presumably. But the thing that is confusing to me is this has become a major issue on the Hill. So there have been multiple congressional letters. So this visa waiver thing is strictly the Department of Homeland Security. It can be changed in a stroke of a pen. And throughout multiple administrations and multiple congresses, there have been letters, congressional letters, to Secretary Mayorkas, Secretary Noem, to ask for this loophole to be closed. And there is a persistent push to keep it open. And that's perplexing to me. I don't understand why. Because the argument that is consistently presented is it's necessary for tourism. But as I've said, that's not reflected in the numbers. Chinese do not need visas to go into Siena Mai now. And yet still, they're being outnumbered by tourists from Korea. So why not work on tourism markets from Japan? Why not work on would allow other carriers in the region to hop from one U.S. administration to another so that they can jump from, for example, Siena Mai to Hawaii, which would increase tourism from other locations. There are all these other solutions. A ferry from Guam to Siena Mai to increase tourism within the region. There are all these other answers. But those aren't the ones being pushed. It's consistently letting in Chinese without a visa. Spell out for me in the most simple terms, why do you view this as a national security threat? We are seeing a lot of focus on Taiwan for obvious reasons. But what's less discussed is if China moves on Taiwan in whatever capacity, it has to take Guam and the Mariana Islands off the risk map, put it that way. For example, the U.S. is only 1,700 miles from Taiwan. That's how far Guam is from Taiwan. How far is it from Hawaii, for example? It's an eight-hour flight from Hawaii to Guam, and it's about four hours from Guam to Taiwan. The U.S. is very close. If China's going to move on Taiwan, it has to make sure that Guam can't respond and Siena Mai can't respond. Part of that is likely going to be cyber. I think they would prefer not to kill Americans. That's the lesson learned from Pearl Harbor. Once you kill Americans, the American people very rightly want to do something about it. If they can just disable Guam and Siena Mai and the military installations there, and by time, then that may be preferable. To do that, it helps to have people in place. Volt Typhoon is already affecting their critical infrastructure. But having people on the ground in place to do other things would be very helpful. You're seeing, for example, in the Siena Mai, the woman that ran the Bureau of Motor Vehicles selling U.S. driver's licenses to Chinese, which is the first step towards a whole bunch of other things. The birth tourism issue is already coming into play. The first fentanyl case in Yap, which is in another country, but right nearby, was an ethnic Chinese guy who was born in Siena Mai. He's now an American citizen, which makes it much more difficult to prosecute. You certainly can't deport him because he's an American. You're starting to see that criminal activity overlapping with targeting of critical infrastructure and getting people in place. If I was the PLA, I would want to have already in case something was moving on Taiwan. There is clear interest from the U.S. military and obviously Guam, where there's a base, but also Siena Mai, from what I'm hearing. There's a massive rebuilding of the Northfield site, which is where Northfield on the island of Tinian was the busiest airport towards the end of World War II in the world, because that's where the B-29 bombers were taking off from to hit Japan, including ultimately the Enola Gay boxcars. That's where those flights took off from because they can range Japan. It's only a little bit over a three-hour flight from Tokyo to Tinian or Saipan today, which is good for tourism. Those fields are being rehabilitated, and the main runway in Tinian is being rehabilitated, and there are increasing exercises being done in the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands. In Guam, you're also seeing a substantial shifting of some of the resources from Japan to Guam and a building up of capabilities. Because if you're the U.S., you have Hawaii and you have Guam, that's an eight-hour flight, right? If there is a battle over Taiwan, that is really far to get supplies across the center of the Pacific, and this is what caused the problems during World War II, that distance. So the buildup in Guam is critical, and I would argue you're going to have to see the ability to manufacture as well, because you can't, ammunition and things like that, the supply chains are really, really long. To watch the full interview, visit NTD Plus and check out American Thought Leaders with Jan Jekielek. That's all for today's China In Focus. Tiffany Meyer, if you have any feedback on the show or have something you'd like to see us cover, send us an email at ChinaInFocusNTD.com. We'd love to hear from you. For on-the-clock original news coverage, visit us at NTD.com or download our NPD app. Thanks for watching. See you tomorrow.