[Free Press] You know what the Chinese government does really well? Spy.
Last year, a human rights group reported that the Chinese government had set up 100 secret "police stations"—seven of them in the U.S.—to spy on Chinese nationals. At the recently concluded G20 summit in New Delhi, the Chinese delegation refused to put some strangely shaped luggage through the hotel scanner. A hotel employee later reported that he saw "suspicious equipment" in one of the open suitcases. And just a few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese nationals, posing as tourists, have made some 100 attempts to gain access to U.S. military bases in recent years—including into a missile range in New Mexico. Chinese scuba divers have also been spotted swimming near a rocket launch site in Florida. Military investigators call them "gate-crashers."
There is a second kind of spying that relies on technology instead of people. Earlier this year, a Chinese surveillance balloon was sighted traveling across the United States. Huawei, the giant Chinese telecommunications company that has close ties to the military, has long been suspected of creating a "backdoor" in its routers and other equipment, allowing it to scoop up information from U.S. users that can be sent back to China. In 2020, the U.S. Justice Department charged Huawei with conspiracy to steal trade secrets. (Huawei has denied that its equipment has been used to spy on the West.) And of course there’s TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company, and which many U.S. officials are convinced is used to collect data on Americans.
Now comes the latest threat—a technology, soon to be ubiquitous, called LIDAR.
LIDAR stands for Light Detection and Ranging, and it’s essentially a system of complex sensors that can, for instance, serve as the "eyes" for a self-driving vehicle. Indeed, even cars that are only semiautonomous have a LIDAR system to guide them. That is the primary way LIDAR is used today, but it is hardly its only application. It’s also a mapping technology, an aid to the growing number of "smart cities," a tool for robotics, farming, meteorology, you name it.
As recently as 2018, most LIDAR systems sold in the U.S. were made by American companies. Today? The leading manufacturer is a company called Hesai. And though it has a Silicon Valley office, it is not a Silicon Valley company. It is a Chinese company that is now listed on the U.S. stock exchange. 
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