China's medical technology acquisition chain exposed in U.S. court: former Philips engineer convicted, commercial secrets flows to competing Chinese companies

A federal criminal case released by the U.S. Department of Justice on August 24 puts a path for Chinese companies to acquire Western advanced technology in court: not publicly purchased, nor normally licensed, but from the competing enterprises to obtain strictly protected trade secrets.

A Chicago federal jury has ruled that a former Philips Medical Systems engineer was involved in a conspiracy to steal business secrets from Philips and plans to bring the technology to a Chinese competitor.

This makes the case politically and industrially more significant than the ordinary employee leakage case. Medical imaging equipment involves detection, imaging, algorithms, hardware control and a large amount of long-term R&D accumulation, high-end X-ray systems are also the technology assets formed by the global medical device enterprises for the long-term competition. an internal engineer can access these data, itself from the authority of the enterprise to give its work; once this authority is converted into a channel for transferring technology to competitors, the traditional business compliance system is the most difficult to prevent a vulnerability

• the internal person.

The ongoing investigation of U.S. judicial authorities into Chinese-related business secrets also shows that U.S.-China technology competition has long been around not only semiconductors and artificial intelligence.From aerospace, communications, agriculture, biotechnology to medical devices, the U.S. law enforcement department has been constantly incorporating intellectual property rights and economic espionage into national security censorship in recent years.

Beijing has long been pursuing technology through “introducing digestive absorption and re-innovation”, talent programmes, overseas R&D cooperation and industrial policies, in which a large number of activities belong to normal commercial and scientific research exchanges; but another path constantly revealed in U.S. judicial cases involves theft of business secrets, false statements, internal personnel and unauthorized technology transfer.

The two cannot be confused, nor can Chinese companies ignore where the technology originally came from because they could ultimately produce similar products.

For the Xi Jinping regime, scientific and technological autonomy has become an important part of the national strategy and political legitimacy narrative. On the one hand, Beijing continues to emphasize "autonomous innovation" and break through the Western technological blockade, and on the other hand, the U.S. judicial system continues to show cases where Chinese enterprises are targeted for the transfer of commercial secrets. Every case that passes the jury's trial and forms a verdict is forcing the outside world to re-examine the boundary between independent research and development, legal technology introduction and illegal acquisition in "China's technological rise".

The Philips case is truly worth tracking, so it’s not an engineer who ends up sitting in jail for a few years, but what role Chinese competitors play throughout the process: who puts up technical demands, who receives data, who pays remuneration, how much the relevant corporate management knows, and whether these technologies eventually get into Chinese commercial products.

Only if all these links are made public can one answer to a question more important than personal crimes: are Chinese companies the passive beneficiaries of these kinds of technology theft cases, or there are more systematic mechanisms behind some of them.