An electrical engineer working on behalf of Chinese intelligence officials enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves and sought to target other potential defense industry sources, federal officials alleged in an indictment unveiled Tuesday.

Ji Chaqun, a Chinese citizen who moved to the U.S. in 2013, gave Communist intelligence handlers background information on eight individuals “for possible recruitment,” according to the Justice Department. The eight targets include at least one person from one of “the world’s top aircraft engine suppliers” for the U.S. military and private sector, according to court documents.

“It appears that Ji was tasked by [a Chinese intelligence officer] to provide him with background information on eight individuals for possible recruitment,” FBI special agent Andrew McKay alleged in the criminal complaint.

It’s just the latest Chinese espionage case to break into public view. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., was recently revealed to have fired an aide whom the FBI suspected of being recruited by the Chinese government. “He was not a mole or a spy, but someone who a foreign intelligence service thought it could recruit,” Feinstein said in August. A former FBI employee pleaded guilty in August to passing documents to a Chinese government official. And a former Apple engineer was arrested in July while trying to leave the United States for China and “charged with stealing proprietary information related to Apple’s self-driving car project,” according to the Washington Post.

The indictment comes in the wake of increasingly stark warning from U.S. officials about Chinese espionage against the United States.

“The use of nontraditional collectors, especially in the academic setting — whether its professors, scientists, students — we see in almost every field office that the FBI has around the country,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers in February. “So, one of the things we’re trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat but a whole-of-society threat on their end and I think it’s going to take a whole of-society response by us.”

The latest allegations out of Chicago are consistent with that warning. Ji studied electrical engineering before enlisting in the U.S. Army Reserves under a visa program that allows the the recruitment of “certain legal aliens whose skills are considered vital to the national interest,” DOJ explained. He moved to the United States in August of 2013 and was in touch with Chinese intelligence as early as December of that year, according to the complaint. His handlers used aliases that prevented him from knowing their true identity as spies until they gave him a mailing address, apparently for the purposes of filing expenses for reimbursement, for the Jiangsu State Security Department.

“Ji later acknowledged in a meeting with an undercover agent that he believed Intelligence Officer A was part of a ‘confidential unit’ with Intelligence Officer B, and that Intelligence Officer B told him stories about espionage,” McKay wrote.

These arrests come months after the federal officials indicted a former CIA officer for his alleged role in helping Chinese officials "unravel the agency’s spy network in that country,” as the New York Times reported. The espionage clashes are taking place in the context of broader tension between the two powers, which are competing in a variety of diplomatic and economic arenas.

“At the end of the day, the Chinese fundamentally seek to replace the United States as the leading power in the world,” Michael Collins, the CIA’s deputy assistant director for the East Asia Mission Center, said in July. “What they're waging against us is fundamentally a cold war.”