In early November 2020, China’s Hebei province held its annual science and technology attraction symposium, a small meeting attended by only a few dozen people, but the numbers announced were impressive. Provincial officials said the total number of foreign experts introduced in recent years has reached more than 49,000; in 2020 alone, 58 out-of-country intellectual workstations have been established in 19 countries and regions, including the United States, Russia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom; in addition, the province’s “100 foreign professionals program” from 2017 to 2020, a total of Forty foreign experts will be selected for financial support, with an annual funding of 10 million RMB.
According to the Chinese Talent Program Tracker database of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technologies (CSET), China’s national-level talent attraction program is not limited to Hebei Province. There are about 40 other overseas talent acquisition programs, while the total number of national and local programs is estimated to be nearly 300. According to a report released by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in August of this year, China has set up at least 600 overseas talent recruitment stations around the world. The “Thousand Talents Program,” which has drawn significant negative attention in the U.S. in recent years, may only be the tip of the iceberg of China’s massive overseas talent acquisition initiative.
The high-profile “Thousand Talents Program” and its subsequent concealment
From 2013 to the present, the majority of U.S. judicial cases involving Chinese talent programs have been related to the “Thousand Talents Program,” including the recent indictment of Charles M. Lieber, former head of Harvard University’s biochemistry department, and the sentencing of Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos) in September 2020. Turab Lookman, a former employee of Alamos National Laboratory, Xiao-Jiang Li, a former Emory University professor who pleaded guilty in May 2020, Dr. James Patrick Lewis, a former West Virginia University professor who pleaded guilty in March 2020, Dr. James Patrick Lewis, Coca-Cola engineer Xiaorong You, who was indicted in 2019, former Virginia Tech professor Yiheng Zhang, who was convicted in 2019, former General Electric engineer Xiaoqing Zheng, who was indicted in 2019, and former Houston Anderson Cancer Center professor Keping Xie, who was indicted in 2018.
Under pressure from the U.S. government, the term “Thousand Talents Program” has disappeared from the Chinese web, but it is actually old wine in new bottles, and talent recruitment continues to exist in many different forms. 2019, “Thousand Talents Program” affiliated innovative talent Long-term programs, short-term programs for innovators, entrepreneurship programs, young talent programs, and overseas senior talent programs are integrated into the High-end Foreign Expert Introduction Program initiated by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST). This program is currently in regular operation, and is ranked first in the “2020 National Foreign Expert Program Application Guide” released by the Ministry of Science and Technology in late 2019.
Emily Weinstein, head of CSET’s “China Talent Program Tracker” database, told VOA that China tries to hide these programs, but that doesn’t mean China has stopped recruiting talent from overseas.
It’s not surprising that the ‘Thousand Talents Program’ has disappeared from the Internet, and we’ve seen China do the same thing with other programs, such as ‘Made in China 2025’ and the military-civilian integration strategy,” she said. . But whenever there’s a word that gets a lot of attention in the U.S. or Europe, China tries to keep a low profile, either by not using that word anymore or by changing the name to something similar. So we see China deliberately downplaying these things and acting as if nothing is happening.”
Talent programs other than the “Thousand Talents Program” also suspected of intellectual property theft
The “Thousand Talents Program” is not the only talent program in China involved in intellectual property theft; in recent years, the “Hundred Talents Program” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the “Changjiang Scholars” program of the Chinese Ministry of Education, as well as some local government recruitment programs, have been implicated in the theft of U.S. intellectual property.
In August 2020, Cheng Zhengdong, a professor at Texas A&M University, was arrested. He is accused of intentionally concealing his relationship with Chinese academic and commercial institutions while conducting research for NASA. Cheng was a Distinguished Professor under the “Hundred Talents Program” at the Guangdong University of Technology, and a former “Pearl River Scholar” professor in Guangdong Province.
In February 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrest of Anming Hu, a Chinese scientist at the University of Tennessee, for allegedly concealing ties to the Beijing Institute of Technology while receiving funding from NASA. Anming Hu was selected for Beijing’s Talent Introduction Program in 2012 and 2013.
In November 2019, Monsanto agricultural scientist Xiang Haitao was charged with multiple counts of economic espionage and theft of trade secrets after he joined the “Hundred Talents Program” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
In August 2019, Tao Feng, a Chinese associate professor at the University of Kansas, was arrested on suspicion of fraud after being hired as a “Yangtze River Scholar” in China. The indictment alleges that Tao sought to benefit China in the talent program in which he participated.
In March 2015, Yang Chunlai, a former computer programmer at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), was sentenced on charges of stealing trade secrets with the intent of establishing an exchange in Zhangjiagang, China. Yang had been in contact with the director of the Zhangjiagang Free Trade Zone’s Logistics and Trade Bureau after attending a job fair in the United States organized by local officials.
Far fewer people have been arrested, prosecuted or convicted in connection with these projects than in connection with the Thousand Talents program. In response, Weinstein said there is a reason why the Thousand Talents Program has been targeted so heavily. She said, “The reason so many people have been prosecuted for the Thousand is because it’s the largest, and I don’t have a specific number, but it does exceed every other individual program. In addition, it is much broader in scope, with programs for foreigners, programs for overseas Chinese, and programs for international students. It’s a well-developed, large-scale program, and so it’s attracted a lot of attention in the U.S., and the U.S. government has found a number of cases where it’s been able to track down the people who are involved.”
But she also points out that there are a number of talent acquisition programs that have not received enough attention, and that their potential impact, and the threat they pose to U.S. intellectual property rights, is no less than that of the Thousand Talents Program, she says: “We need to take a broader and higher view of talent acquisition in China. action, rather than just digging deeper into a program. Because the Chinese government has built a system around these projects, it makes all talent projects available to them. “
Weinstein cites the Thousand Talents Program, which requires participants to submit patent information, and the Changjiang Scholars Program, which requires participants to nominate or solicit additional talent.
The U.S. Senate’s November 2019 report, “Threats to the U.S. Research Community: China’s Talent Acquisition Program,” notes that the Chinese government, in an effort to control these programs, requires participants to sign legally binding contracts. These contracts include provisions that encourage members to apply for funding from U.S. institutions, to set up “shadow labs” in China to conduct the same research as U.S. institutions, and in some cases to transfer U.S. intellectual property.
The report specifically names the “Thousand Talents Program. The report also mentions that the U.S. government does not yet have a full understanding of China’s talent recruitment networks and entities. John Brown, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, said at a related hearing that the FBI began increasing the exposure of arrests and prosecutions of scholars involved in the “Thousand Talents” program in 2018, but he did not mention other specific talent programs.
Massive Local Talent Recruitment
In addition to the famous “Thousand Talents Program” and other national-level talent programs, local governments in China are also stepping up their efforts to recruit overseas experts. At present, local-level talent acquisition programs are almost all over China, concentrated in the coastal provinces of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Guangdong, Fujian, etc. The total number of these programs may exceed 200, which is four to five times the number of national-level programs.
In addition to talent recruitment programs, China has also been setting up a large number of overseas recruitment stations, and the ASPI report shows that as of August 2020, the number of overseas recruitment stations in China has exceeded 600. The growth rate has increased significantly in the past two years, adding 115 in 2018 alone, with the US having the largest number at 146. The report also points out that the actual total number is probably much larger than 600, as the number of programs at the municipal level or below is so large that it is difficult to count them accurately. For example, Jiangsu Province alone established more than 120 overseas talent work contact stations in 2017.
This huge advantage in the number of projects and recruitment stations also allows these provinces and cities to recruit overseas experts far beyond the national level. According to data from China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, between 2008 and 2016, local governments recruited about 53,900 talents from overseas, while experts recruited through the Thousand Talents Program and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Hundred Talents Program were recruited only through the National Academy of Sciences. There are over 7,000.
In contrast to the tremendous recruiting power, these local-level talent programs and recruiting sites get a lot of attention. Due to the limitations of their individual size and visibility, they rarely appear in the U.S. media and do not necessarily attract sufficient attention from U.S. government agencies.
The U.S. Government Should Conduct a Comprehensive Review of China’s Overseas Talent Acquisition System
Weinstein said Georgetown University’s China Talent Initiative Tracker database can provide government officials and members of Congress with a reference for making decisions that go beyond the “Thousand Talents Program. I created this database to show that the Thousand Talents Program is just one of a network of hundreds of talent programs in China that are strategically supported by the Chinese government from top to bottom,” she said. It is interesting to know the details of these programs, but more importantly, the United States and its allies can use it to understand the system.”
In its 2008 “Thousand Talents Plan” guidelines (“Opinions on Implementing the Plan for the Introduction of Overseas High-Level Talents”), the CPC Central Committee’s Talent Work Coordination Group clearly emphasized the need to “establish a sound institutional mechanism for the introduction of overseas high-level talents” and to “carry out the work at the central government, relevant state departments and localities in a hierarchical and planned manner”; at the same time, “each province (autonomous region and municipality directly under the central government) should take into account the needs of economic and social development and industrial restructuring …… to introduce a number of overseas high-level talents in a targeted manner”.
Weinstein further pointed out, “We need to review China’s talent programs more comprehensively and holistically, not just focusing on the ‘Thousand Talents Program’ or the ‘Changjiang Scholars Program. When formulating policy, we need to look at the systems behind the talent acquisition programs to see what we can do to deal with such massive IP theft. In short, we should pay particular attention to the overall systems and practices.”
Already, the U.S. government has begun to take notice of Chinese talent acquisition activities beyond the Thousand Talents Program. The Senate’s “Threat to the U.S. Research Community: China’s Talent Acquisition Program” points to the need for more investigation into Chinese talent acquisition practices in the U.S., including venture capital competitions and entrepreneurial ventures, with a focus on U.S.-based entities that may be acting as recruitment platforms or agents for foreign governments.
Recent Comments