The Great Heist

A definitive, headline-making exposé of how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has carried out the largest-scale theft of intellectual property, technology, and data in history—reshaping the global balance of power and redrawing the geopolitical map for decades to come. The Great Heist exposes China's unprecedented state-orchestrated espionage campaign to strip the United States and its allies of their economic, technological, and military edge. Through a coordinated “whole-of-society” strategy, the Chinese Communist Party has dramatically expanded its covert operations to acquire America’s most valuable innovations—stealing defense secrets and proprietary technology from companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Google, T-Mobile, and Tesla. By exploiting both human and cyber vulnerabilities, China has quietly looted the crown jewels of Western technology, saving itself trillions in R&D costs since the 1990s—with an ongoing brazenness fueled by decades of Western inaction. Drawing on exclusive investigations and interviews with intelligence officers, corporate security teams, senior policymakers, and espionage victims, David R. Shedd and Andrew Badger reveal how industrial theft has fueled China’s meteoric rise from Third World backwater to global superpower—and present a bold strategic playbook to turn the tide in the greatest economic contest of our time.