Yet another Chinese national is being charged with attempting to steal U.S. military technology, the Department of Justice announced Monday. The news comes as national security concerns are mounting over China’s dominance of the world’s rare earth minerals market, which a new report says could have a detrimental effect on the battery needs of U.S. defense technology.

The Justice Department announced Monday that 59-year-old Chenguang Gong, a U.S.-China dual citizen, has plead guilty to attempting to steal “trade secret technologies developed for use by the U.S. government to detect nuclear missile launches, track ballistic and hypersonic missiles, and to allow U.S. fighter planes to detect and evade heat-seeking missiles.” Gong worked for a Los Angeles-area research and development company where he downloaded over 1,800 sensitive company files from his work laptop onto three personal storage devices over a month-long period in 2023, which were later found at his temporary residence in Thousand Oaks.

In addition, it was discovered that over an eight-year period, Gong had applied to China’s “Talent Programs” on multiple occasions, a program that attempts to recruit potential espionage agents into stealing technology and intellectual property for the communist regime. Gong pled guilty to one count of theft of trade secrets and faces up to 10 years in prison.

The news came two months after two other foreign nationals, including a Chinese national, were also charged with attempting to smuggle military equipment and technology, including “missiles, air defense radar, drones, and cryptographic devices with associated crypto ignition keys,” out of the U.S. and into China. Additionally, two other Chinese nationals were charged last month with attempting to smuggle a highly toxic fungus into the U.S., which could have been used as a bioterror weapon.

The incidents highlight the growing national security threat that Xi Jinping’s communist regime continues to become to the U.S., especially in light of a new report revealing that Beijing controls over 80% of the world’s raw materials that are needed to produce batteries, which are critical for defense technology.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ (FDD) report noted that batteries, which require minerals like lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel, copper, and manganese to produce, have become essential to power everything from drones, autonomous submersibles, and portable radios to emerging technologies like laser-powered energy weapons. Furthermore, as noted by Fox News, “Both lithium and graphite are essential for modern nuclear weapons. Cobalt alloys are used in jet engines, naval turbines, electronics connectors, and sensors capable of withstanding extreme temperatures, vibration, and radiation-making.”

The report goes on to detail how China has leveraged immense amounts of money in other countries to dominate the mineral market. “Over the past two decades, at least 26 state-backed banks have pumped roughly $57?billion into mining and processing projects in Africa, Latin America, and beyond,” Fox News summarized. “These investments, often structured through joint ventures and special-purpose vehicles, gave Chinese firms controlling stakes in mineral mining.”

Beijing has also tightened internal restrictions on the domestic production of minerals in order to curb its exports, as well as placed extensive bans on exports to the U.S. in order to leverage a geopolitical advantage, the report notes. The FDD also found that the communist regime engages in non-market manipulations, including “price manipulation, subsidies, export dumping, intellectual property theft, knowledge transfers, monopolies, and aggressive vertical integration. The impact goes beyond immediate financial losses for affected companies, disrupting the incentive structure of a competitive market.”

As the Trump administration continues to hold trade talks with China, the FDD recommends that the U.S. “must develop new, more resilient, and diversified global supply lines that are independent of China’s coercive economic practices. Such action can help unleash a wave of cooperation among free-market nations that will lift up both established allies and emerging market partners and turn the tide against China’s parasitic economic model.”

Experts like author Gordon Chang, who serves as a distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, say that drastic action by the U.S. to combat China’s domination of the global mineral market is long overdue.

“The story here is not China’s predatory and criminal practices that led to its monopolies and near-monopolies in these minerals,” he told The Washington Stand. “After all, for more than a decade we have known what the Chinese have been doing. It’s not like they have been hiding their actions. The story here is American obliviousness. We are in this vulnerable situation because we absolutely failed to do anything about what we were seeing over a long period.”

“President Trump should be using his authority, including authority in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, to jumpstart production,” Chang continued. “And while he’s at it, he should do something about our critical pharmaceutical vulnerability.”

“We are at risk because we chose to be,” Chang underscored. “We can also choose to do something about it.”