China enlists a legion of amateurs Beijing �

SEATTLE - In its quest to bypass embargoes and obtain the latest U.S. military technology, China isn’t only relying on a cadre of carefully trained spies.

It’s also enlisting a growing army of amateurs.

Their orders come indirectly from the Chinese government and take the form of shopping lists that are laundered through companies with ties to Beijing.

The recruits who buy the weapons and system components for those companies are scientists, students and businessmen, and they appear to be motivated more by profit than ideology. As one U.S. Homeland Security official put it, the Chinese “flood the zone with buyers” - a strategy that significantly complicates U.S. efforts to stop the flow of American armaments to China.

“When you have nation-states that go outside the normal intelligence agencies and open it up to any person … it just exponentially opens the door for bad guys,” said Robert Anderson Jr, assistant director for counter-intelligence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Today, investigations into arms trafficking linked to China have swelled to at least 350 active cases - up by more than 50 percent since 2010, according to a Reuters review of confidential U.S. government records. The total number is likely higher than 350 because the count does not include many cases that began as regulatory inquiries or investigations into other crimes. U.S. officials also say their China counter-proliferation caseload is growing at a faster pace than investigations linked to any other nation.

About two-thirds of the cases prosecuted by U.S. officials since 2005 involved people of Chinese ancestry, a Reuters analysis of court records shows. That includes Chinese citizens living in China or residing legally inside the United States, and U.S. citizens with family ties to China.

China’s defense ministry says Beijing’s efforts to modernize its military are rooted in research, not thievery. “Some people always accuse China of stealing other countries’ technology when China makes progress in weaponry development,” it said in a statement to Reuters. “Such notions are baseless.”