The FBI arrested Chen Gang, a prominent MIT nanotechnology expert, last month, accusing him of concealing close ties to Chinese Communist Party science and technology institutions for profit when applying for federal research grants. Chen Gang is a Chinese-born Chinese American.
Mr. Chen, who has refused to plead guilty, is not the only prominent scholar to be arrested and charged for failing to disclose ties to Chinese research institutions. At least half a dozen U.S. academics have been arrested in the past year or so, including Charles Lieber, head of Harvard University’s chemistry department, who is accused of concealing his involvement in a Communist Party state-sponsored program to recruit top scientists and engineers from around the world to work in China.
The indictments illustrate the growing vigilance of the U.S. against Chinese Communist Party technology theft, one of its key efforts to supplant the U.S. as a military power in Asia and a world leader in science and technology.
Under the China Initiative, a task force on operations launched by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice in 2018, the FBI and U.S. prosecutors have conducted hundreds of investigations across the United States and arrested dozens of individuals for technology theft, visa fraud, cyber espionage and other illegal activities in the United States.
These prosecutions by the U.S. Department of Justice reveal “the diversity of Chinese Communist infiltration,” as John C. Demers, Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the Department of Justice, described it in a telephone interview, and one of the more threatening forms of infiltration sponsored by the Chinese government, namely Sending senior Communist researchers to the United States while concealing their true identities.
Chinese Communist Party Sends Military Personnel to Study in the United States While Concealing Their Identities
Last July, the FBI arrested four Chinese nationals posing as ordinary graduate students who were actually officers in the Communist Party’s military. One of them, Wang Xin, worked at a medical laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco, funded by the National Institutes of health. Wang Xin later admitted that he was a major in the Chinese Communist military and was employed by a Communist military laboratory, and he was eventually deported.
Another arrested Chinese national, Kai Kai Zhao, studied machine learning and artificial intelligence at Indiana University’s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering.
What happened after the arrest of these four men further exposed the CCP’s covert infiltration activities in the United States. An estimated 1,000 Chinese researchers from graduate schools at U.S. universities have fled the United States and returned to China. It is apparent to U.S. officials that this is because these Chinese researchers concealed their ties to the Chinese Communist Party military and feared arrest.
Still, the 1,000 researchers represent only a small fraction of the 360,000 Chinese students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities, many of whom, perhaps the vast majority, are engaged in unquestionably normal activities.
U.S. taxpayers are subsidizing the Education of many graduate students studying in China who are working in laboratories and research institutions across the United States. At MIT alone, there are between 700 and 800 graduate students studying in China under typical circumstances, in addition to more than a hundred exchange and visiting scholars. These advanced graduate students in technical fields pay for their studies through remuneration for work in their labs, a standard procedure at most major universities, and these salaries are usually paid for by grants from federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Energy, and the National Institutes of Health.
“There is no mystery as to who pays for research at top research institutions.” One senior professor, who asked not to be named, said in a phone interview, “It comes from funding within the United States, not from abroad.”
“If you have 360,000 undergraduates, that’s not a big threat.” If they’re all graduate students and you look at the field of study they’re in, the more cutting-edge the field, the greater the potential threat,” DeMers said. The CCP wants access to the top 5 percent of cutting-edge scientific research, and only the top researchers can do that.”
CCP Believes Breakthrough in Science and Technology Impossible Without Access to Advanced Foreign Technology
Many scholars and experts on China say this investment in Chinese-American students has helped the United States. For example, MIT President L. Rafael Reif has argued in speeches and articles that international exchange is of inestimable value to the United States, and that a significant number of highly talented Chinese students choose to stay in the United States, where they contribute to the advancement of American science and technology.
Reif cited a study showing that about 80 percent of Chinese who earn doctorates in the United States remain in the country 10 years after receiving their degrees. Reiff and many others argue that even though some of them maintain ties with Chinese colleagues and research institutions, the key to scientific hegemony is not to impede the progress of others, but to increase America’s own investment in research, development and talent.
Attracting foreign students to the United States can contribute to the brain drain of competing countries. The CCP, in part to prevent this from happening, has rapidly expanded its own graduate education programs. between 2000 and 2016, the number of people earning PhDs in various fields within China increased from about 10,000 to 34,000. The CCP now awards more PhDs in the natural sciences and engineering than the United States.
Still, a major part of China’s modernization process relies on acquiring technology from the scientifically advanced West, whether through legal and transparent means or through espionage and other illegal acts.
“China [the Chinese Communist Party] and its leadership remain convinced that their technological breakout will not succeed without acquiring significant amounts of technology from the United States.” Matt Pottinger, a former deputy national security adviser in the Trump Administration, said in the Zoom interview, “You hear that they’ve had a technological breakout and don’t need our [technology] anymore, and there are areas where that’s true, but they still don’t believe that they can achieve and maintain a technological lead without access to a lot of U.S. research. “
Booming: Some Chinese students come to the U.S. to steal technology
The Trump administration has taken what some former officials have suggested is a “targeted approach” to deal with Chinese students who are sent to the United States but are controlled by the Chinese Communist government. Last year, for example, it revoked visas for those affiliated with the Chinese Communist military, as well as those who came to the U.S. on Communist government scholarships, which require them to share whatever they learn with the Communist government.
An estimated 2,000 Chinese students have been deported or banned from coming to the U.S., not including the 1,000 who fled on their own, a figure that represents less than 1 percent of Chinese students in the U.S. Nonetheless, banning them, as Bo Ming put it, serves as “a warning that we have evidence that these people are there basically to steal technology “
“In some cases, we found that the people applying to get grants for U.S. government projects were primarily American, but most of the work behind the scenes was done by Chinese.” Booming said, “This indication shows how superficial the screening process is for DoD contracts, and sometimes that program is working on really sensitive technology.”
“Picking flowers in foreign countries, making honey in China”
Military modernization is one of the Chinese Communist Party’s main strategic goals, which includes defending its claim to the highly disputed South China Sea and attempting to defeat the United States if war breaks out in the Pacific.
The CCP military has built its own network of technical and technological university connections, which are also built to acquire technology from other countries. An in-depth study of the activities of the Chinese Communist military reveals the scale and global breadth of this technology theft effort. Alex Joske, a China expert at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, found that as of 2018, the CCP military had sponsored more than 2,500 military scientists and engineers “to study as students or visiting scholars in technologically advanced countries such as Australia.”
“This cooperation …… is often inadvertently supported by taxpayer funds.” Josk writes, citing examples of universities in Australia and the United Kingdom that still operate under the Western concept of “appeasement policies” and deliberately develop technical cooperation with Communist Chinese military institutions. “Almost all of the Communist military scientists sent to the West were Communist Party members who returned Home on Time.” Josk concluded.
Josk noted that there is a saying in CCP military publications that “pick flowers in foreign countries and make honey in China” and that most of these visiting scholars sent out are affiliated with China’s National University of Defense Technology, which is the main institution driving CCP development in areas such as hypersonic missiles, cryptography, cyber warfare and space weapons, but they also may be affiliated with other CCP military institutions, such as the Northwest Institute of Nuclear Technology or the Chinese People’s Armed Police Engineering University.
In some of the cases Josk found, CCP officers working abroad claimed to be affiliated with “civilian institutions,” presumably to avoid drawing attention to themselves in visa applications. At least five scientists from the military’s Rocket Force Engineering University went abroad as visiting scholars, naming their alma mater the Xi’an Research Institute, an institution that Josk said “exists only on paper.
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