A federal grand jury indicted Chen Gang, a distinguished professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), on two counts of wire fraud, failure to report a foreign bank account (FBAR), and making false statements on a tax return, following his arrest last Thursday (Jan. 14) in Boston. Chen was released on $1 million bail last week and is scheduled to appear in court via Zoom on January 22.
A Criminal Complaint has been filed in court following the FBI’s arrest of Chen Gang. The role of the grand jury is to determine whether the prosecution has sufficient evidence to bring a formal indictment. The grand jury is usually composed of 23 citizens, and as long as a majority of the votes are cast to bring a formal indictment (Indictment) against the suspect, the case moves to the next stage.
The MIT Chinese Students and Scholars Association made public a letter to the MIT president and vice president on its WeChat public website on the 20th. The letter states that many members of the MIT Chinese community are “shocked and horrified by this news” because they have worked with Dr. Chen Gang for many years. These members may be forced to change advisors, mentors and labs, or may need to seek new sources of funding and begin to wonder “whether MIT is still a safe place for their academic pursuits.
We fear that we will not be able to work for respected scholars because of their ties to ‘foreign adversaries’; we fear that FBI agents may one day come to search homes, labs, private emails and other property because we come from a country that is considered a threat to U.S. national security,” the letter said. country that poses a threat to U.S. national security.”
The letter also calls on MIT to provide support to affected students and faculty and to “speak out against any form of discriminatory practices against International Students and scholars.”
Prosecution Charges: Concealing Ties to Communist China in Federal Grant Application
According to the prosecution’s criminal complaint, Chen Gang, 56, who was born in China, came to the United States to study in 1989 and was a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000, was arrested and charged with concealing his cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party during his work on a U.S. government-funded nanotechnology project.
Chen Gang, a well-known professor of mechanics at MIT who was born in China and naturalized in the U.S., was arrested in Boston on the 14th and formally indicted by a grand jury on the 19th. (MIT official website picture, screenshot of the official website of the U.S. Department of Justice)
The prosecution alleges that since about 2013, Chen Gang’s research at MIT has been funded by various U.S. federal agencies with grants of more than $19 million, but he allegedly never disclosed “contracts, appointments, and awards with various Chinese entities. In fact, Chen’s research at MIT on nanotechnology is a “major project” of special interest to the Chinese Communist government in China’s 13th Five-Year National Science and Technology Innovation Plan.
Following Chen’s arrest, FBI Special Agent in Charge Joseph R. Bonavolonta issued a statement saying that Chen had been “generous at the expense of the United States” in promoting China’s science and technology since 2012, using the U.S. system to enhance China’s nanotechnology research and working with the Chinese Communist government in various capacities. He has worked with the Chinese government in various positions in exchange for financial compensation.
According to Reuters, in a statement last week, Chen’s lawyer, Robert Fisher, said Chen “loves the United States and wants to strongly refute these allegations.
On “us”
Chen just sent an email from his MIT email account in February 2016, making several suggestions about the development of science and technology in China. For example, “China has put scientific innovation in a key position …… because we have to, both in terms of historical trends and the stage we are in.” “Our economy ranks second, but we are far from second in terms of technology and talent.” After the prosecution showed the email, many Chinese in the academic community became emotional, saying that the U.S. was engaging in “text jail” and that “the Family sentiments expressed in a letter from Mr. Chen Gang have become evidence of U.S. persecution.”
Others disagreed, and a user on Zhihu’s website, “Burroughs, the Demon Hunter,” wrote an article “On ‘We'”, saying that Chen Gang’s email was “contradictory “He was so patriotic, he was saying ‘we’, and he kept saying he wanted to improve ‘our’ technological strength, so why did he want to be an American? Not to mention the fact that he also takes U.S. national research funding, a sort of half public office, and works with taxpayers’ money.”
The user concluded, “If you still want to be loyal to ‘us’ in any way, then please don’t naturalize. Don’t do public work either, or go apply for US government funding …… Private business is not a big problem, after all, even if you go to earn money for ‘us’ from people in the US, you can still be treated as a multinational corporation.”
But someone in the article’s follow-up post countered, “To describe ‘cooperation with China’ as ‘allegiance’ is to steal the concept. There can only be one allegiance, and working with China is not the same as betraying the United States.”
How can one discern what types of cooperation may pose potential risks?
Many who have studied the CCP’s united front have found that the CCP’s united front tactics are so meticulous that if red is involved in illegal behavior, the government can take counter-action, but a large swath of light red and light red is a legal gray area that is difficult to identify.
How can one identify what types of cooperation may pose potential risks? The National Association of Scholars (NAS), a nonprofit advocacy group for political conservatives in the United States, has been tracking U.S. professors, administrators, students and government researchers charged for illegal ties to China in Higher Education and Government Studies has counted 43 cases of illegal ties to the Chinese Communist Party. A summary of these cases may help identify the problem.
The NAS report, “Combating Illegal Links to China,” was last updated on Jan. 15 by David Acevedo. The following excerpts are compiled for reference.
Tensions between the U.S. and China are growing year after year. In the wake of the current U.S.-China trade war, many are warning of a “new Cold War. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party is challenged on many fronts in the world: military posturing, widespread human rights abuses, taking the World health Organization down a duplicitous path, economic sabotage of other countries, attempts to turn other countries into dependent states, and subversion of Hong Kong‘s autonomy.
The Communist Party seeks to acquire the intellectual property rights of other countries, convert university administrators and faculty into reliable affiliates, and monitor Chinese students abroad. The National Association of Scholars has been fighting this threat for years, and in 2017, our carpetbagging study on Confucius Institutes (abbreviated as CIs) within the U.S. detailed how the Communist government infiltrates U.S. higher education institutions through Confucius Institutes to enhance its image. Unfortunately, CIs are only one part of China’s soft power puzzle.
China (CCP) evades the laws of its host country with impunity, and now we know that China (CCP) is not just circumventing the law, it is orchestrating an international spy ring to steal Western science and technology.
The CCP has run over two hundred “talent recruitment programs” designed to transfer research secrets to China under the pretext of academic “cooperation”. One of these is the Thousand Talents Program (TTP), which targets researchers in STEM fields and has an estimated 7,000 members worldwide under contract. While international research collaborations are often mutually beneficial to the countries involved, the TTP operates in secrecy and without transparency. This is not collaboration at all, but rather a massive theft of intellectual capital and a threat to national security.
In recent months, several TTP “scholars” at U.S. higher education and government research labs have been exposed for transferring research back to mainland China and receiving payments from communist parties outside the purview of administrators and governments. The fact that only a few of these participants were caught is just the beginning, and there is every reason to believe that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of this duality in American academia.
This secret entanglement is dangerous for any nation, and even more so for our greatest geopolitical adversary. For the sake of higher education and the nation as a whole, it must end. American research must be in the interest of the United States. Any researcher who misconducts himself or herself should be promptly removed and, if appropriate, prosecuted.
NAS expects additional cases to surface in the coming months and years, so we have aggregated this run-down. Below, we have listed the cases so far in chronological order.
In total, there are 43 cases in academia with illegal links to the CCP.
(1) January 14, 2021, Chen Gang, MIT. (2) January 13, 2021, Meyya Meyyappan, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). (3) Aug. 28, 2020, Hai Zhou Hu, University of Virginia.
“Hu Haizhou (Hu Haizhou, 34) is charged with unauthorized access to a computer, or obtaining information from a protected computer in excess of authorization, and theft of trade secrets.”
According to court documents, on Aug. 25, 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped Hu Haizhou, a researcher in the mechanical and aerospace engineering department at the University of Virginia who also works for a university with ties to the Chinese Communist Party military. Hu was attempting to board a flight from Chicago O’Hare International Airport to Qingdao, China. A routine customs inspection revealed that Hu was allegedly carrying unauthorized “bio-inspired research simulation software code” that represented the result of years of research and development resources by members of the University of Virginia academic community.
(4) August 28, 2020, Lei Guan, University of California, Los Angeles.
Guan Lei (Guan Lei), 29, has been studying at UCLA on a J-1 nonimmigrant visa since 2018. Guan Lei refused an FBI request to inspect his computer as he prepared to board a flight back to China; earlier, he was seen throwing the damaged hard drive into a dumpster near his residence.
The FBI recovered the damaged hard drive and found that the internal hard drive “had been irreparably damaged and it appeared that all previous data on the hard drive had been intentionally and forcibly deleted.
According to the indictment, Guan Lei has been under covert investigation by the FBI on suspicion that he may have transferred sensitive U.S. software or technical data to the Chinese Communist Party’s National University of Defense Technology, while he lied about his 2018 visa application, denied his ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s military, and similarly lied to federal law enforcement officials during meetings.
(5) Cheng Zhengdong, NASA Texas A&M University, Aug. 24, 2020.
Cheng Zhengdong Cheng, 53, was hired by Texas A&M University in 2004 to lead a research team and received nearly $750,000 in NASA space research funding.
The indictment says Cheng deliberately concealed his relationship with Guangdong University of Technology and at least one Chinese state-owned enterprise, and that the NASA and Texas A&M funding Cheng received was conditioned on his not participating in or collaborating with Chinese companies or Chinese universities on their projects. The NASA research funding received by Cheng and Texas A&M University was based on his intentional provision of false information to Texas A&M University, which then deceived NASA.
In addition to the research funding, Cheng also personally benefited from his relationship with NASA and Texas A&M University; because of his partnership with NASA and Texas A&M University, he had access to important NASA resources, such as information on the International Space Station.
Cheng Zhengdong was also recruited by the Chinese Communist Party’s Thousand Talents Program. The Thousand Talents Program is a way for the Chinese Communist authorities to steal leading U.S. technology.
(6) July 23, 2020, Sun Qingyun, West Virginia University.
Sun Qingyun, 58, pleaded guilty to defrauding West Virginia University and filing false tax returns. He was a Chinese-American scholar employed by West Virginia University as an associate professor and associate director of the University’s U.S.-China Energy Center. He also served as an assistant to the West Virginia governor for China affairs and was employed by Synfuels Americas Corporation, an energy conversion technology provider based in Sterling, Va. The company is headquartered in Beijing, China.
Sun Qingyun established a consulting firm (Energy United LC) in 2005 through which he receives consulting fees from Peabody Energy Generation Holding Company, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri.
(7) Kaikai Zhao, a graduate student in machine learning and artificial intelligence at Indiana University, on July 23, 2020.
(8) Juan Tang, University of California, Davis, July 20, 2020.
(9) July 20, 2020, Chen Song, Stanford University.
(10) June 11, 2020, Xin Wang (pronounced Xin Wang), University of California, San Francisco.
All four of the above are Chinese Communist Party military academics arrested for allegedly concealing their military status and providing false visa information.
(11) Zheng Songguo, Ohio State University, July 9, 2020.
Song Guo Zheng, 57, a rheumatologist and immunologist at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, allegedly fraudulently received approximately $4.1 million in federal grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by failing to tell NIH about his partnership with a Chinese institution and information about additional grant funds provided to him by the Chinese. while lying to investigators. Zheng has a long history of association with Chinese partners in the Communist Party’s “Talent Program.
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