A Chinese-American woman has been sentenced to 50 months in prison for conspiring to export and cause to export several advanced US fighter jet engines, as well as a Reaper Drone—the kind that shoots Hellfire missiles.
Christmas shopping is hard when you’re buying for the Chinese Communist Party. They’re the regime that has everything—because they’ve already knocked it off.
Unfortunately for 45-year-old Wenxia Man, also known as “Wency,” she tried to buy her jet engines and Reaper Drone—missiles sold separately—from someone who turned out to be a Homeland Security agent. It’s illegal to sell US weapons to China, since the US government has had an arms embargo in place since 1989.
Moving on, according to court documents, Man worked with a man whom she called a “technology spy,” Zhang Xinsheng. And while Wency Man is in prison, he’s safely inside China. He “worked on behalf of the Chinese military to copy items obtained from other countries,” according to the official press release by the US Department of Justice.
The Chinese regime was offering 50 million dollars, a million which would go to Wency Man. And considering the maximum penalty she faced was 20 years in prison, she got off pretty easy with just over a 4 year sentence.
The Chinese regime has been rapidly building up its military. But there are major technological gaps that they haven’t figured out yet. So why not just steal and replicate the technology from countries that already have it? China has particular problems designing jet engines. They have lots of little parts that move really fast. That’s the technical explanation. And that’s why “engines accounted for 30% of all its imports, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.”
Now this is shocking. Imagine if the United States had to spend billions buying jet engines from Europe. That wouldn’t instill too much confidence in the latest multi-million dollar jet fighters the US is rolling out, like the F-35. But that’s what the Chinese military has to do.
Last November, the Chinese regime spent 2 billion dollars to buy 24 Russian Su-35 fighter jets. This is even when, supposedly, they have their own fighter jets that should be capable of matching them. But it turns out China’s air force gets a lot of packages marked “From Russia: With Love.”
One of the reasons the Chinese regime is so dependent on Russian and stolen US military tech is corruption. In this article by the Epoch Times, a manager at the Shenyang Aircraft Corp spelled it out.
Company executives embezzled 16 million dollars every year. I mean, why pay for expensive experts when you can hire temp workers from 8 different factories, none of whom have the necessary training? And since they were working on key parts to the J-8 fighter jets, Shenyang Aircraft Corp had to have repair teams on hand in case anything went wrong.
And so when Wency Man, running a struggling tech company in California with her husband, gets approached with a million dollar deal to be a Chinese spy, we really know that is the best China’s military has to offer.
So what do you think about the case of Wency Man? And what can be done to stop the Chinese regime from stealing US technology? Leave your comments below.