China has pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation in any way it can from a wide array of businesses, universities, and organizations. They're doing it through Chinese intelligence services, through state-owned enterprises, through ostensibly private companies, through graduate students and researchers, through a variety of actors all working on behalf of China. At the FBI we have economic espionage investigations that almost invariably lead back to China in nearly all of our fifty-six field offices, and they span just about every industry or sector.
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They're strategic in their approach. They actually have a formal plan set out in five-year increments to achieve dominance in critical areas. And to get there they're using an expanding set of nontraditional methods, both lawful and unlawful, so weaving together things like foreign investment and corporate acquisitions, together with cyber intrusions and supply chain threats. The Chinese government is taking the long view. That's probably an understatement. They've made the long view an art form. They're calculating. They're focused. They're patient and persistent.
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But even with all of that, we can't tackle all these threats on our own. We've got to figure out more and more ways to work together, particularly with all of you in the private sector. We need to focus even more on a whole-of-society approach because in many ways we confront whole-of-society threats. It is very clear to me that the next few years will be very much defined by what kind of progress we can make with private-public partnerships.