Thousand Talents

A professor and researcher at MIT was arrested and charged with grant fraud on Thursday. Professor Gang Chen allegedly failed to disclose his work for Communist China to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday published a year-end review of the “China Initiative,” a program launched in 2018 to detect and counter “national security threats posed by the policies and practices of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government.”

Los Alamos National Laboratory Researcher Turab Lookman was sentenced to probation this month over his failure to disclose ties to the Chinese government. Lookman was a researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a joint project between Texas A&M University and the University of California system, but participated in China’s “Thousand Talents” program, a scheme to steal research from universities and government-funded programs in the West.

Federal authorities allege that Texas A&M Professor Zhengdong Cheng lied to his employers about his relationship with the communist Chinese government. Cheng, who has also served as a NASA researcher, was reportedly found to have undisclosed ties to a Chinese university.

Former Google CEO and Clinton lackey Eric Schmidt argued recently that Chinese students provide a vital benefit to the United States’ National Security interests. The Chinese government has come under scrutiny over the past year for using Chinese researchers at American universities to steal taxpayer-funded research.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced that it dismissed or lost to resignations 54 of its scientists amid the ongoing Trump administration probe to weed out suspected Chinese spies from universities and laboratories across the United States.

The Justice Department announced on Tuesday that Dr. Charles Lieber, formerly chair of the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department at Harvard University, has been indicted on two counts of making false statements to federal investigators about his ties to China’s Thousand Talents Program (TTP). TTP has come under heavy scrutiny as a recruiting mechanism for Chinese intellectual property theft and espionage.

Former Harvard Professor Charles Lieber was indicted by a grand jury on Tuesday over allegations that he maintained an undisclosed financial relationship with the Chinese government by taking a position as a “Strategic Scientist” at the Wuhan University of Technology. The scheme is part of China’s “Thousand Talents” program, which sees to pay western academics to hand over research funded by the government of their home countries.

Students at the University of Florida refused to say that China poses a threat to the United States in a recent video interview. Most of the students also admitted they had never heard of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which occured on June 4, 1989.

President Donald Trump is barring some Chinese scientists from U.S. university laboratories after years of science spying directed by China’s government.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday that President Donald Trump will “take on” the threat of espionage activities by Chinese students and researchers with ties to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and its intelligence apparatus.

A professor at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine was arrested on Wednesday over his alleged financial ties to the Chinese government. The FBI alleges that professor Qing Wang was providing research funded with taxpayer money to the Chinese communist government.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Breitbart News that the United States considers efforts by the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing to build influence around the world and here in the United States to be a “risk” to the nation’s national security.

The FBI announced on Thursday that it has arrested Dr. Qing Wang, a longtime employee of the famed Cleveland Clinic, on charges of fraud for accepting grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) without disclosing that he was simultaneously working for a Chinese university. 

A former professor at Emory University and participant in communist China’s “Thousand Talents” has pled guilty to filing a false tax return after the DOJ alleged he hid more than $500,000 in payments from China.

University of Arkansas Professor Simon Ang was arrested on Monday on charges that he failed to disclose a financial relationship with the Chinese government. The arrest following the January arrest of a chemistry professor at Harvard University for failing to disclose similar ties to the Chinese government.

A U.S. Education Department investigation has initially revealed $1.3 billion in unreported donations to U.S. universities from foreign countries such as China, Russia, and Qatar.

Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, announced over the weekend it has fired two Chinese-American faculty members, a married couple named Li Xiaojiang and Li Shihua, for failing to “fully disclose foreign sources of research funding and the extent of their work for research institutions and universities in China.”

China’s state-run Global Times lamented the “hysterical” state of U.S. scientific cooperation with China on Monday, dismissing concerns that China has systematically stolen intellectual property from America and claiming that “science belongs to all human beings.”