Aric Chen(@aricchen):On 10 May, Belgian federal police arrested a 52-year-old man at Brussels Airport as he was about to board a flight to Beijing. He held a senior research post at BelGaN in Oudenaarde, the last industrial chip plant in Belgium. He has been in pre-trial detention ever since, and the case only became public this week. The charges: espionage, unlawful disclosure of trade secrets, participation in a criminal organisation, misuse of company assets, bankruptcy offences. His lawyer says he denies all of it, and no court has ruled. The part I'd watch is the structure around him. Chinese investors took over the Oudenaarde fab and appointed their own managers. A few months later a company called Gankool appeared in Fujian, financed by a Chinese investment fund, making the same gallium nitride chips. Prosecutors say the arrested man was holding the Belgian research job and a directorship at the Chinese firm at the same time. De Standaard and RTBF name the second suspect as BelGaN's last chief executive, Alan Zhen Zhou. BelGaN went bankrupt in July 2024 and 420 people lost their jobs. It read as an ordinary commercial failure. Investigators now suspect the failure was the point, that the technology was the acquisition and the company was the wrapper. Belgium's security service has a name for the method in its annual report: copy-to-China. Take a stake in a small firm with valuable technology and a funding problem, move the know-how out, let the shell sink. It attributes that method to China. Gallium nitride goes into electric vehicles, aerospace and military systems. Zhou has not been arrested. ACI — Aric Chen

2026.09.07 16:43

On 10 May, Belgian federal police arrested a 52-year-old man at Brussels Airport as he was about to board a flight to Beijing. He held a senior research post at BelGaN in Oudenaarde, the last industrial chip plant in Belgium. He has been in pre-trial detention ever since, and the case only became public this week. The charges: espionage, unlawful disclosure of trade secrets, participation in a criminal organisation, misuse of company assets, bankruptcy offences. His lawyer says he denies all of it, and no court has ruled. The part I'd watch is the structure around him. Chinese investors took over the Oudenaarde fab and appointed their own managers. A few months later a company called Gankool appeared in Fujian, financed by a Chinese investment fund, making the same gallium nitride chips. Prosecutors say the arrested man was holding the Belgian research job and a directorship at the Chinese firm at the same time. De Standaard and RTBF name the second suspect as BelGaN's last chief executive, Alan Zhen Zhou. BelGaN went bankrupt in July 2024 and 420 people lost their jobs. It read as an ordinary commercial failure. Investigators now suspect the failure was the point, that the technology was the acquisition and the company was the wrapper. Belgium's security service has a name for the method in its annual report: copy-to-China. Take a stake in a small firm with valuable technology and a funding problem, move the know-how out, let the shell sink. It attributes that method to China. Gallium nitride goes into electric vehicles, aerospace and military systems. Zhou has not been arrested. ACI — Aric Chen | Insights

Aric Chen@aricchen

2026.07.30 04:32

🚨 The Spy Had a Résumé Canada Trusted. She now has a name and a face: Biwei Zhang, "Claire" on LinkedIn, "Catina" on Facebook — a 32-year-old systems engineer arrested at NATO's military headquarters in Belgium, accused of espionage and belonging to a criminal organization. Look at where Canada let her in first. Statistics Canada. The Canadian Space Agency. The European Space Agency. The World Trade Organization. Standards committees speaking for Canada abroad. A federal body once flagged her for applying under two names, yet the doors kept opening, all the way to SHAPE's IT department, inside the alliance's nerve center. Prosecutors won't name the "third country." They don't have to. The pattern names itself: the Chinese Communist Party, patiently threading its people through the institutions of open societies until one lands where the secrets live. She cleared every check. That's not reassurance. That's the warning. Please take a look at my previous analysis of this matter, along with the news reports I produced. ⬇️

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