The German secret service warned on Monday against China’s attempts to appropriate economic and scientific knowledge in Germany.
“We have to be attentive to the migration of knowledge” from Germany, the president of the German foreign intelligence services (BND), Bruno Kahl, told deputies of the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament.
China “tries through cyberattacks to appropriate the scientific and economic knowledge of Germany to reach in 2049”, the year of the centenary of the seizure of power by the communists, its goal of being the first world power, added Kahl.
“There is a lot of trust and naivety in science that is not appropriate,” he further warned.
Distrust
The same mistrust towards Beijing by the president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (internal intelligence), Thomas Haldenwang, also questioned by German deputies.
He again warned of the dangers that the control of important technical infrastructures by Chinese companies could represent.
We must not come to a situation where the Chinese state can “influence politics in Germany through these infrastructures,” he said.
The dependence of the German economy on China is increasingly worrying Berlin, which is calling on large companies to diversify their partnerships.
However, the latter are obviously not ready to say goodbye to this gigantic market: last Thursday, the automobile giant Volkswagen announced an investment of 2.4 billion euros in a partnership between its software arm Cariad and the Chinese Horizon Robotics, specialized in artificial intelligence, to develop autonomous driving in China.
Source: BFM TV
