A Chinese official accused some US lawmakers of being “cynophobic” on Wednesday after a US Senate committee released a report alleging that China has targeted the US Federal Reserve in an attempt to undermine US monetary policy for nearly a year decade. “The so-called report you mentioned is political disinformation fabricated by a handful of Senate Republicans and is completely baseless,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a news conference on Wednesday. “It appears that some US politicians may be suffering from a ‘cineophobia’ or persecutory delusion and exhibiting quite severe symptoms.” Zhao’s comments come after Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee released a report detailing how China tried to target Federal Reserve officials in an effort to gain access to non-public information about US monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Board building on Constitution Avenue is pictured in Washington on March 19, 2019. (Reuters/Leah Millis/Reuters) One employee attempted to “transfer a large amount of data from the Federal Reserve to an external website,” while another employee provided “modeling code” to a Chinese university affiliated with China’s central bank, according to the report. Chinese officials went so far as to arrest another Federal Reserve employee during a trip to Shanghai, even threatening his family “unless the individual provided them with financial information and assistance,” the report said. US INVESTIGATING HUAWEI OVER CONCERN EQUIPMENT NEAR MILITARY BASES MAY SEND DATA TO CHINA: REPORT Zhao noted that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell disputed some of the claims in the report. Chinese President Xi Jinping is balancing the ties China’s state-owned banks and other financial players have developed with big private sector players, expanding his push to curb capitalist forces in the economy. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein/AP Newsroom) “We would be concerned with any supporting allegation of wrongdoing, regardless of the source,” Powell wrote in a letter to Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, the top Republican on the Homeland Security Committee. “Instead, we are deeply troubled by what we believe to be the report’s unfair, unsubstantiated and unverified insinuations about specific individual staff members.” GET THE FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE The report was released ahead of a phone call between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping scheduled for Thursday. A White House official said the two leaders would discuss “everything from tensions over Taiwan to the war in Ukraine, as well as how to better manage competition between our two nations, certainly in the economic area.”
