Most Americans have heard about Chinese spies targeting our military or hacking private companies. But there’s another front in this quiet war, one that’s gone largely unreported—and it may be the most dangerous of all: China’s long game to infiltrate and manipulate the United States Federal Reserve.
A 2022 Senate investigation offered a rare glimpse into this operation, but even that barely scratches the surface. What’s playing out behind closed doors isn’t just a few bureaucratic missteps or naïve collaborations—it’s a full-blown economic espionage campaign.
This is warfare without bullets.
The Fed: A Prime Target for Chinese Espionage
The Federal Reserve is the engine of the U.S. economy. Its decisions move markets, shape global capital flows, and set the tone for the world’s monetary system. Infiltrating the Fed doesn’t just give China intelligence – it gives them influence.
Over at least a decade, the CCP has targeted Fed employees through a mix of coercion, recruitment offers, unauthorized data access, and propaganda partnerships, mostly hidden behind Chinese academic institutions and think tanks.
According to this damning Senate report, the Fed’s own counterintelligence team identified a group of 13 employees across eight regional banks—internally referred to as the “P-Network”—who exhibited serious red flags linked to the Chinese government.
This pattern could be replicated at scale.
Hard Evidence of Espionage and Infiltration
Here are some documented examples that received little attention from the mainstream media:
1. Detained and Surveilled in China (Individual A)
• In 2019, a Fed employee was detained four separate times by Chinese authorities during a visit to Shanghai. He was threatened, told his family would be harmed, and coerced into handing over sensitive U.S. economic data. Chinese agents accessed his Fed laptop, phones, and internal contact lists. He was ordered to “tell a good story about China” back in the U.S. This employee returned to his post with full access to confidential monetary policy data.
2. Secret Data Transfers to Chinese Institutions (Individual B)
• Another employee sent modeling code and restricted Fed data to a university linked to China’s central bank (PBOC). He proposed deeper collaboration between his Reserve Bank and Chinese state institutions while maintaining access to Class II FOMC data, which includes sensitive internal forecasts and deliberations.
3. Coordination with Chinese Propaganda Outlets (Individual C)
• Another Fed employee took a paid visiting professorship in China funded by the CCP and subsequently acted as a liaison with Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese government’s propaganda arm. He even helped Chinese journalists and officials gain access to Fed contacts, often bypassing formal Fed communication channels.
4. Suspicious Talent Recruitment Programs (Individual D)
• Another Fed employee attempted to transfer large U.S. data sets to Chinese institutions. He was found to have joined the Thousand Talents Program, China’s premier foreign recruitment tool for stealing scientific and economic research. This affiliation was never disclosed and the employee continued working at the Fed.
A Named Case: John Harold Rogers
The Justice Department indicted John Harold Rogers, a former senior adviser in the Federal Reserve’s Division of International Finance, for allegedly passing sensitive U.S. economic data to agents tied to the Chinese government .
Rogers served at the Fed from 2010 to 2021, holding access to confidential materials related to FOMC deliberations, economic forecasts, and tariff policy analysis .
He allegedly began working with Chinese co‑conspirators posing as university students starting around 2013, and intensified the misconduct after 2018, using personal email and printed documents to transfer restricted Fed data .
In 2023, Rogers is accused of receiving approximately $450,000 from a Chinese university while teaching and meeting with these supposed “students” in China, including hotel rooms where he shared Fed trade secrets.
Hellbound and Down 