Free Republic

The Australian Home Affairs Minister, Peter Dutton, has written to the chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS), Andrew Hastie, to ask that the Committee investigate “the nature and extent to which foreign actors are interfering in Australian universities, including staff and student bodies, publicly funded research agencies and competitive research grant agencies.” Hastie last week said that Australian research was being “plundered” by the CCP. The move came after a report by an Australian think-tank into the workings of one of China’s “talent-recruitment programmes”, and an investigation by The Australian newspaper that found that dozens...

The Malaysia-born professor, who was the director of the university’s High Density Electronics Center, received funding from and worked for Chinese companies and the Thousand Talents Plan (TTP), which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses to attract research specialists working overseas. Ang allegedly asked a researcher to keep his links to the CCP’s program a secret, court papers state. “Not many people here know I am one of them but if this leaks out, my job here will be in deep troubles,” Ang wrote last June to a Xidian University researcher, who intended to visit the University of Arkansas. “After...

Professor Charles Lieber’s arrest on Jan. 28 made headlines on all the major U.S. media. After all, he was not only a Harvard professor, he was a world-class researcher in nanotechnology, working on highly sensitive research projects for the U.S. government. The FBI complaint alleges that he had been secretly participating in China’s “Thousand Talents Plan” since 2011, paid some $600,000 a year plus expenses to open and operate a lab at the Wuhan University of Technology (yes, that Wuhan). We know that China contracts with American experts in this way in order to steal their research and gain commercial...

BOSTON (AP) — A Harvard University professor has been c harged with lying about his ties to a Chinese-run recruitment program and concealing payments he received from the Chinese government for research, federal officials said Tuesday. Charles Lieber, chair of the department of chemistry and chemical biology, is accused of hiding his involvement in China’s Thousand Talents Plan, a program designed to recruit people with access to and knowledge of foreign technology and intellectual property.

Last month a professor at Harvard University was arrested for failing to disclose that he’d been receiving $50,000 per month from China. Dr. Charles Lieber had been recruited by something called the Thousand Talents Plan which pays foreign experts to share their knowledge at Chinese universities. However, professors are not allowed to accept research grants from federal agencies while also teaching in China. Lieber allegedly hid his China connections when applying for grants from the National Institutes of Health. Today, a professor in Tennessee has been charged for hiding similar connections to China: Anming Hu, an associate professor in...