By David Shepardson and Doina Chiacu
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on Friday she still plans to visit China later this year despite the reported Chinese hacking of her department’s emails.
Raimondo was among a group of senior U.S. officials whose emails were hacked earlier this year by a group Microsoft said was based in China, according to a person briefed on the matter.
“I do plan to travel later this year (to China). We’re planning the trip now, which doesn’t mean that we excuse any kind of hacking or infringement on our security,” Raimondo told CNBC. “We need to be ferocious in the way we protect American national security but also deescalate tension where we can and look for ways that we can work together.”
Raimondo added she wants to raise “really serious concerns about the way they are targeting U.S. tech companies, about the way they don’t respect intellectual property but also try to find lanes of commerce where we can do commerce.”
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen met with senior officials in China earlier this month in talks she described as “direct” and “productive.”
Raimondo in May said the United States “won’t tolerate” China’s effective ban on purchases of Micron Technology memory chips and is working closely with allies to address such “economic coercion.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken told China’s top diplomat Wang Yi in a meeting in Jakarta this month that any action that targets the U.S. government, U.S. companies or American citizens “is of deep concern to us, and that we will take appropriate action to hold those responsible accountable,” a senior State Department official said at the time.
Raimondo said on Friday the full extent of the hacking is still unclear. She declined to confirm her account was hacked, but told CNBC “obviously there’s been a hack at the Department of Commerce, which is very significant, very complex.”
China’s embassy in Washington said in an earlier statement that identifying the source of cyber attacks was complex and warned against “groundless speculations and allegations.”
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu and David Shepardson; Editing by Sharon Singleton and Andrea Ricci)
