BOSTON—A Harvard University professor pleaded not guilty on June 16 to charges that he lied to US authorities about his ties to a recruitment program run by the Chinese regime and funding he received from the Chinese government for research.
Charles Lieber, the former chair of Harvard’s chemistry and chemical biology department, pleaded not guilty to making false statements during a video conference held before a federal magistrate judge in Boston.
Marc Mukasey, his lawyer, said Lieber, 61, will fight the charges and that the “government has this wrong.”
Lieber’s case is one of the highest-profile to emerge from a U.S. Justice Department crackdown on Chinese influence within universities amid concerns about spying and intellectual property theft by the Chinese regime.
The case centers on China’s Thousand Talents Program, which U.S. authorities say the Chinese regime uses to entice overseas Chinese citizens and foreign researchers to share their knowledge with China in exchange for perks including research funding.
Prosecutors said Lieber in 2011 became a “strategic scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology in China and from 2012 to 2015 contractually participated in the Thousand Talents Program.
Under his contract, Lieber was paid up to $50,000 per month and living expenses of up to $158,000, prosecutors said. He also was awarded more than $1.5 million to establish a research lab, prosecutors said.
In exchange, Lieber agreed to organize international conferences, publish articles and apply for patents in the university’s name, prosecutors said.
During a 2018 interview with federal investigators, prosecutors said, the nanoscience specialist falsely stated he was never asked to participate in the Thousand Talents Program.
When the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which funded his research, asked Harvard whether he had failed to disclose his ties to the program, Lieber had the Ivy League school falsely claim he had not participated in it, prosecutors said.
I posted this on another thread a while back. Fits here too:
“Because they are still in the employ of China and are expected to be spies and steal technology while they are here. Get. Them. Out!”
Here is a first person testimonial. Mine. I am retired from working at a major IL University (UIC). I now live in FL, not IL, thank goodness as Gov. Pricker reigns supreme in his IL Democrat wonderland. I worked directly for the Head of the Math Dept. at UIC, located right beside the heart of the City.
We had professors of many nationalities from all over the world. The mostly all liberal professors in our Dept. loved hiring Mathematicians from other countries over hiring Mathematicians from our own Country. Chinese students and professors seeking employment in the U.S. naturally navigated to the Sciences because they could steal our intellectual property and mathematical research and ferry this information back to China. They are almost all spies for China. One professor in particular I just knew was tied into the Chinese gov’t and he was one of our more senior profs. They get permanent resident Green Cards, but seldom become actual American citizens. He was like a traveling ping pong ball between Chicago where UIC is located, and China. Reporting back to his true masters in Beijing.
As an aside, many Chinese students also choose primarily the Sciences as vocations because so many of them speak the English language so poorly. Language is less important in the Sciences where you deal with number theory, experiments, projects, etc. Chinatown in Chicago was a 10 minute spit away from the UIC campus, thus creating a huge pool of Chinese students seeking out their education at UIC.
In our Math Dept. there were large numbers of Chinese graduate students, and it was the same in all of the Science Dept’s, soft and hard. Biology, Statistics, Chemistry, Robotics, Computers, Engineering, Medicine, you name it, the Chinese were studying it, and you better believe many of them were being subsidized in their educations by money from the Chinese gov’t. The enemy within.
I might add that the Sciences were also very attractive to students from the Middle East. Lots of students from Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. Our American Universities are an unwatched and dangerous pot of foreign students who pay the hard cash that Universities love, paying full freight, and also getting grants, loans, and funding at the expense of our own American students. Asians are considered minorities, and they, foreign or otherwise, along with Blacks and Hispanics from the U.S. and any country are given preference over Whites. I know this firsthand.
Too many of our major Universities today are cesspools of liberal ideology and foreign influence from those that do not have U.S. interests in mind. These Universities need to be cleaned out and shaped up big time; I ought to know; I worked amongst the ideological enemy at a large one for many years.