America is coming after Chinese it accuses of hacking

FOR OVER a decade, America’s justice department has been indicting Chinese government hackers. Almost all of them have remained beyond the reach of the law. The aim has been to expose and embarrass, rather than to arrest. Now that is changing. On July 3rd Italian police in Milan arrested Xu Zewei, who is alleged to have worked on behalf of the Shanghai branch of the Ministry of State Security (MSS), China’s main spy agency. America wants to extradite him for wire fraud, identity theft and hacking.

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “The Italian job”