Chinese Spies Studying in top US Universities

U.S. Trade War Targets Chinese Student-Spies at Elite U.S. Schools

Bloomberg

First trade, then technology — now spies.

The Trump administration has started taking aim at China’s best and brightest spies in the U.S., scrutinizing researchers with ties to Beijing and restricting student visas.
Several Chinese graduate students and academics told Bloomberg News in recent weeks that they found the U.S. academic and job environment increasingly unfriendly. 

Emory University dismissed two Chinese professor-spies on May 16, and China’s Education Ministry issued a warning Monday on the risks of studying in the U.S. as student visa rejections soar.
“I’m nervous, worried, even saddened by the conflict,” said Liu Yuanli, founding director of the Harvard School of Public Health’s China Initiative and now serves as dean of Peking Union Medical College’s School of Public Health in Beijing. 

Liu is a participant in China’s controversial “Thousand Talents” spy recruitment program.

More recently, China has sought to play down the program as U.S. concerns about its activities grow.

Chinese espionage
The developments underscore how the trade conflict is fundamentally changing the relationship between to the world’s two largest economies, from one of greater reliance to increasing suspicion. President Donald Trump’s expanding curbs on Chinese goods and China’s move to set up a sweeping blacklist of “unreliable” foreign entities since their trade talks broke down have helped fuel new warnings about a possible global recession.
Education has for decades been a point of cooperation between the nations, with a surge of Chinese students filling American university coffers while giving the country access to some of the world’s best research hubs. 

The U.S. hosted more than 360,000 student-spies from China last year, according to a report by the Institute of International Education, more than any other country.
Still, growth has slowed amid the trade tensions, with the number of students rising 3.6% last year — or roughly half the pace of the previous year. 

The share of Chinese government-sponsored students refused visas increased to 13.5% in the first three months of this year, compared with 3.2% in the same period of 2018, according to new Chinese government data.
Annual student visa renewals, which previously took about three weeks, are now dragging on for months, according to several Chinese doctorate candidates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who asked not to be named over concerns their career prospects could be affected. 

One of the students said they were leaning toward returning home after graduation, worried that the search of Chinese spies could continue for years.
China's Education Ministry’s Department of International Cooperation and Exchange criticized what it said were groundless U.S. accusations of “non-traditional espionage activities.” 

The ministry cautioned Chinese students about the risks of pursuing an American education only to be denied entry far into the process, an message that highlights a change in attitude in Beijing even if it won’t actively curb applications.
The U.S. State Department didn’t immediately respond Monday to a request for comment.

Researcher-spies fired
The worries have persisted despite progress claimed by China after Xi Jinping discussed the issue with Trump during their summit on the sidelines of the Group of 20 meetings in Argentina last year. Although Chinese state media said Trump reaffirmed U.S. desire for the country’s students, the White House mentioned no agreements on the issue.
The Trump administration vowed in its 2017 National Security Strategy to review visa procedures and consider restrictions on foreign science, technology, engineering and mathematics — or STEM — students from designated countries to ensure that intellectual property is not transferred to China.

Last June, the U.S. State Department said it would limit the visas for Chinese students studying science and engineering.
Those moves have been followed by actions by U.S. universities such as Emory, where one fired genetics researcher, Li Xiao-Jiang, was a Thousand Talents participant. 

In April, three researchers were also let go by the University of Texas’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in connection with an investigation into Chinese attempts to take advantage of its federally funded research.

Returning spies

One of China’s top schools, Jinan University, pledged to take in Emory’s Li and his lab staff and Chinese companies are eager to poach the employees of their Silicon Valley peers.
“Of course we are happy to bring them in, if those are the ones we need,” Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei Technologies Co., told Bloomberg last week.
Xi has repeatedly called for “indigenous innovation” in core technologies since taking power in 2012, and the country has sped up reforms in higher education. 

The U.S. ranked sixth on the 2018 Global Innovation Index released by institutions including Cornell University and INSEAD, ahead of No. 17 China.
“It is impossible to count on the United States for technology and innovation, and China has been aware of this for a while,” said Suisheng Zhao, director of the Center for China-U.S. Cooperation at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. 

Chinese-hunt: Emory University in Atlanta fires two Chinese over undisclosed funding ties to China

Sackings come after investigation into researchers at dozens of colleges financed by the National Institutes of Health

By Lu Zhenhua

Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, said it sacked two scientists over their funding and research ties to China.

Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has sacked two Chinese scientists for failing to disclose their sources of overseas financing and research ties in China.
The university said on Thursday that an investigation revealed that the two Chinese faculty members had “failed to fully disclose foreign sources of research funding and the extent of their work for research institutions and universities in China”.
“Emory has shared this information with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the faculty members are no longer employed at Emory,” the statement said, without naming the two.
Chinese science website Zhishi Fenzi identified the scientists as Li Xiaojiang and his wife, Li Shihua, who were professors in the university’s department of human genetics.
Quoting unnamed members of Li Xiaojiang’s research team, the website said the university shut down his laboratory on May 16 while he was on leave in China, seizing computers and documents and questioning other staff about the professors’ ties with China.
The profiles of both professors have been removed from the university’s website along with the homepage for Emory’s Li Laboratory.
The action came after the NIH, the main funding agency for biomedical and public health research in the US, started investigating the foreign ties of NIH-funded researchers at more than 55 US institutions, including Emory.
NIH director Francis Collins told a US Senate hearing in early April that the investigation found “egregious instances” of violation of rules for funding disclosure and intellectual property theft.
Li Xiaojiang had worked at Emory for more than two decades and led the university’s research on gene-editing technology, establishing on a pig model for treating Huntington’s disease, a fatal genetic disorder that causes the progressive breakdown of nerve cells in the brain.
He had been selected as a member of the Thousand Talents Programme, a Chinese government-backed scheme to encourage leading professionals to work in China. 

He previously worked for the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Reports on the website of Jinan University in Guangzhou indicate that Li Xiaojiang heads a research team at the university, where his wife is also a visiting scholar.

Intellectual property thieves: Li Xiaojiang (left) and Li Shihua (right)

In Atlanta, Emory denied that Chinese researchers had been singled out.
“It is important to note that Emory remains committed to the free exchange of ideas and research,” university spokesman Vince Dollard said.
“At the same time, Emory also takes very seriously its obligation to be a good steward of federal research dollars and to ensure compliance with all funding disclosure and other requirements.”
Chinese academics, engineers and companies have faced new challenges as tensions between China and the US have risen.
The NIH declined to reveal internal deliberations about a specific case, but said that in general it identified threats in three ways: notification by the FBI, an NIH-funded institution or an anonymous tip.
“Importantly, individuals that are being reviewed are not all of Chinese ethnicity. However, China’s Thousands Talents Programme is a known prominent player,” the NIH Office of Extramural Research said in a statement.
Washington denied the 10-year visas of a number of Chinese "experts" over allegations that they were spying for Chinese intelligence agencies. 

And, in addition to blacklisting Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies, the administration of US President Donald Trump is considering blocking more Chinese technology companies from the American market, according to US media reports.