Chapter 08 Infiltrate the United States as the Enemy (3)

In January 2018, Charles Lieber, head of Harvard University’s chemistry department and 2 Chinese-American academicians were charged by U.S. justice with stealing U.S. technology for China and passing sensitive information to China. Lieber, who works at Wuhan University of Technology and is considered a favorite for the Nobel Prize, was charged with felony lying to federal investigators.

In 2019 the U.S. Department of Energy ordered a ban on Department personnel from participating in China’s talent acquisition program. That same year the U.S. Senate Committee declared that heavy Chinese recruitment posed a threat to U.S. interests. The Department of Justice instructed law enforcement to pay close attention to remove scientists stealing research from U.S. laboratories.

In 2018 federal prosecutors indicted Xiaorong You, a researcher working for Coca-Cola in Atlanta, who was accused of transferring $120 million worth of trade secrets, transferring company documents to her cloud computer and taking photos of lab equipment, which earned her a “Thousand Talents Program” bonus, but she refused to plead guilty.

Boston University researcher Ye Qing (yanqing ye), who was charged in 2018 with working for the Chinese government during her studies and research and concealing her identity as a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army when she applied for admission, had fled back to China.

But defining whether the law was broken was no easy task. The U.S. has a tradition of academic exchange and openness, most universities have lax rules on off-campus employment and income and the government has no rules prohibiting employees from joining the ranks of Chinese talent, said Peter Zeidenberg, a lawyer representing 24 Chinese-American scientists under investigation, adding that “in most cases, prosecutors did not charge technology transfer issues instead, prosecutors focused on the scientists’ concealment of funding. The key is that the Chinese Communist Party has been willing to throw money around. Illegal, you say? Not necessarily, you say unethical? Of course it is. You call it espionage? Hard to define. Would you say illegal? Likely yes.”

In 2019, there was more than one accidental fall of a scientist involved in the “Thousand Talents Project” in California. Did someone push him to fall to his death? Or was it an accidental misstep? No follow-up reports came leaving only room for speculation.

The Chinese Communist Party has blocked information internally and invested billions of dollars each year in foreign propaganda. In addition to using mainland loudspeakers to broadcast outward, it has been infiltrating and bribing overseas Chinese media, greatly influencing the public opinion of tens of millions of ethnic Chinese overseas.

Stanford University’s Hoover Institution published a 213-page investigative report: ” Chinese Influence & American Interests; Promoting Constructive Vigilance”, on 29.11.2018 warning that the Chinese Communist Party is fully infiltrating and manipulating the U.S. government, universities, think tanks, coal ministries, businesses and the diaspora. The report, which took 1.5 years to be completed, was co-authored by 32 scholars in China. The 22-page report on the CCP’s control of Chinese language media in the United States found that the CCP had strengthened the English-language bases of state-owned media in the United States, bought out large numbers of once-independent Chinese language media, and infiltrated emerging Chinese language websites and media.

The Hoover Report categorizes CCP control of Chinese language media in the United States into three categories: first, expanding the size of CCP state-owned media in the United States, second, controlling newspapers, television or websites through wholly owned or majority ownership, and third, influencing the independence of media outlets through their business interests in mainland China.