US-China ties are getting worse by each passing day and Communist China has sought to allegedly obtain the US intellectual property with their enormous funding to the US educational institutions. US universities received huge funding from the Chinese Government and out of 70 of which are unable to report such grants by Beijing.
Noticeably, an FOIA lawsuit has been filed in opposition to the Department of Education Section 117 by Judicial Watch. This law states that academic institutions are bound to report any grant worth more than $250,000 received from any sources to the department. Under this act of violation, the lawsuit has been charged.
PRC has been following the Military Civil Fusion strategy with the help of which certain Chinese institutions are seeking to obtain research and technology from US universities by collaborating with them. Recently this incident of stealing research came into light when the FBI contacted the University of Texas to reveal such allegations of espionage by the Houston based Chinese Consulate. China tried to seek high tech research of the Covid-19 vaccine done by the University of Texas. After this shocking uncovering, America immediately ordered China to shut its Consulate in Houston and China retaliated by ordering America to close its Chengdu situated Consulate General.
China Scholarship Council of PRC underwrites professors, scholars, and researches to go abroad and gain access to advance research and high-end technology. Either such candidates voluntarily cooperate with intelligence agencies or they are forces to do so by threatening them and their family in China. This can be easily understood by the example of researcher Juan Tang working at the University of California. Last week, the FBI arrested her for concealing the information about being a uniformed officer of the Chinese Communist Party Air Force in her J1 visa application.
PRC didn’t stop at sending such researchers to abroad however they also tried to obtain America STEM field related people by offering lucrative packages. They are just targeting scientists by using Thousand Talent Programs to sought research findings and also to replica research efforts by creating shadow laboratories.
The biggest example of the harsh and dark truth of such talent programs is Charles Lieber. He was the former chair of the Harvard Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department. He was recently hit with enormous charges against tax evasion as he concealed the matter of getting big financial back support from Beijing. As reported, he concealed the reality of getting paid $1.5 million to establish a replica lab in China, $150,000 as living expenses, and $50,000 per month from Wuhan Institute of Technology. In June 2020, federal authorities accused him of lying regarding participation in Thousand Talent programs.
China controls the staffing and educational program and cash greedy colleges give the understudies. Since 2004 the PRC has built up several “Confucius Institutes” (CIs) at schools and colleges to teach the Communist Party’s side of Chinese history and culture. In 2014 the American Association of University Professors censured this outsider educational plan control as “conflicting with standards of scholastic opportunity, shared administration, and the institutional self-governance of schools and colleges” to protect the institutions.
