BEIJING — A quarter of companies that are members of a leading U.S. business lobby in China have been victims of data theft, a report by the group said Friday, as ties between Beijing and Washington have become increasingly strained over the threat of cyberattacks.

Twenty-six percent of the members who responded to an annual survey said that their proprietary data or trade secrets had been compromised or stolen at their China operations, according to the report from the business lobby, the American Chamber of Commerce in China.

“This poses a substantial obstacle for business in China, especially when considered alongside the concerns over I.P.R. enforcement and de facto technology transfer requirements,” the chamber said, referring to weak enforcement of intellectual property rights.

Mandiant, a U.S. computer security company, said in February that a secretive Chinese military unit was likely behind a series of hacking attacks that targeted the United States and stole data from more than 100 companies.

That set off a war of words between Washington and Beijing.

Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, Democrat of Maryland, said last month that U.S. companies had suffered estimated losses in 2012 of more than $300 billion due to the theft of trade secrets, much of it the result of Chinese hacking.

China says the accusations lack proof and that it is also a victim of hacking attacks, more than half of which originate from the United States.

Hong Lei, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, called the survey a “completely irresponsible action.”

“We hope the relevant side doesn’t politicize financial and trade problems, does not exaggerate the so-called issue of online leaks and does more conducive things for China and the United States,” Mr. Hong told reporters Friday.

The survey by the chamber, commonly known as AmCham, was conducted among 325 members across China late last year, before the release of the Mandiant report.

Only 10 percent of companies in the survey said they would use China-based cloud computing services, with most citing security concerns. Blocked Internet searches in China had impeded business for 62 percent of respondents.

U.S. officials have pressed China to address Internet attacks and cyberspying against U.S. companies. President Barack Obama raised hacking concerns in a phone call with President Xi Jinping of China earlier in March.

A recent assessment by U.S. intelligence leaders said that for the first time, cyberattacks and cyberespionage had supplanted terrorism as the top threat.

Most companies in the AmCham survey expressed optimism about the business outlook in China, with many reporting higher profit margins for their China units. But companies gave lower expectations for future investment and cited rising labor costs as a top concern. Perceptions that China’s investment environment is stagnating are increasing, according to the survey.

Member companies “have not felt over the last four or five years that there have been commercially significant positive changes in the business environment or the investment environment,” Christian Murck, president of AmCham China, told reporters.

“When you have an economy which is making a transition to a market economy, but which is not yet there, there is a feeling that if you are not moving forward with an indicated path of future policy that you are effectively moving backward,” he said at a briefing on the survey.

The survey also cited a steep increase in concerns over the protection of intellectual property, like copyrights and trademarks, with 72 percent of respondents saying enforcement in China was ineffective or totally ineffective, an increase of 13 percentage points over last year.

Perceptions that technology transfer was increasingly a requirement for access to China’s market also jumped 10 points to 37 percent, the chamber said, with higher rates of concern reported in the aerospace, automotive, chemical in information technology sectors.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/business/global/survey-details-data-theft-concerns-for-us-firms-in-china.html?partner=rss&emc=rss