WASHINGTON – On July 23, Juan Tang was interning the Chinese consulate in San Francisco when federal agents arrived at the door with an arrest warrant for the 37-year-old cancer researcher.
Police had already confiscated Tang’s passport and revoked her visa in an interview in June, making sure she may not leave the country, but may not be arrested on foreign diplomatic property.
Tang, a researcher at the University of California-Davis, became hysterical when consular officials told him about the arrest warrant. Believing she needed medical help, her diplomatic hosts took her to the hospital, according to court documents. Federal law enforcement officials followed him closely, in a position to arrest Tang as soon as he was released.
Tang is now in Sacramento County Jail, charged with visa fraud. Tang said when applying for a visa that she had served in the Chinese army, when in fact “she is a uniformed officer” in the People’s Liberation Army, the Ministry of Justice said in issuing fees against her.
The opposite fees for Tang are part of a broader initiative through the management of President Donald Trump that points to allegations of Chinese government espionage and intellectual property theft at U.S. universities and study labs. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other Trump officials have given a new prominence to repression in recent weeks, delivering obscene speeches that portray China as a risk to American democracy and a risk to America’s national security.
Critics say the Trump administration’s rhetoric is incendiary and that its movements have created a hostile climate for Asian academics running and leying in the United States, based on cutting-edge clinical developments. Some say the competitive momentum will be counterproductive, chasing talented academics and scientists who care about being identified by their ethnicity at a time when the United States desperately wants clinical and medical advances to combat a devastating pandemic.
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“We only face racial hostilities, and many of them have intensified because of COVID-19,” said Yangyang Cheng, a Chinese physicist who works for Cornell University.
Now, he said, “let’s see parallels between my local country and mine followed in its rhetoric toward science and scientists: how the state claims ownership of the scientists themselves, as well as the paintings they produce. And this is deeply troubling. Array”.
Chinese scientists running or in the United States are torn apart by their place, he wrote in an essay last spring: “In their home country, where an authoritarian government strengthens its control over society, aided by surveillance and censorship technology? A country whose president actively rejects them, where they are portrayed as spies? “
The new thing about Chinese espionage is a component of a broader Policy against White House China as Trump seeks re-election. Tensions between the United States and China have increased dramatically in recent months amid the coronavirus pandemic, murky industry talks and Beijing’s resolve to limit freedoms in Hong Kong.
Trump’s management has explained the policy in terms of assisting the United States in its clinical and technological research, adding those similar to the pandemic. The president also used racist language to communicate about COVID-19, as he seeks to blame China for the spread of the virus.
Trump management officials say the crackdown on Chinese espionage is an attack on all Chinese who paint or examine États-Unis.Au place, they say, is directed against the Chinese government and its ruling Communist Party leaders.
“It’s not about the Chinese people, and in fact it’s not Americans of Chinese origin,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a July 7 speech to the Hudson Conservative Institute’s expert group. More than 100,000 Chinese academics and researchers come to the United States the year, he noted. “Our society is greater for its contributions.”
However, Wray painted an image of the threat.
“We’ve reached the point where the FBI is opening a new case of counterintelligence similar to China every 10 hours. Of the FBI’s nearly 5,000 counterintelligence instances that are taking place in the country lately, almost a portion are similar to China,” he said. Said. “And right now, China is working to undermine U.S. health care organizations, pharmaceutical corporations, and educational establishments. They are conducting important studies on COVID-19”.
Pompeo launched an even wider network, suggesting that China had sent “propagandists” to each and every corner of American society and that America’s decades-long commitment to China had created a “Frankenstein.”
“We have opened our arms to Chinese citizens, to see the Chinese Communist Party exploit our free and open society. China has sent propagandists to our press conferences, schoolhouses, high schools, schools and even in our PTA meetings,” Pompeo said in July 23 Words at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library.
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There is no doubt that the Chinese government encourages and recruits others to borrow U.S. intellectual assets and interact with other corrupt behaviors, said Margaret Lewis, law professor at Seton Hall University and an expert in China. But the Trump administration’s set of factors is “problematic,” Lewis said, as he removes ties to China and puts them under scrutiny.
Pompeo and others exacerbated the challenge by presenting it as an ideological war between American democracy and Chinese communism, he said. Chinese experts have warned of a new “red fear” echoing Cold War rhetoric about the Soviet Union and casting a cloud of suspicion about all Chinese-born Americans, such as Chinese foreign citizens living in the United States.
In addition to the Justice Department’s demands, the Trump administration also canceled visas for some Chinese graduate academics and took steps to cancel the Fulbright exchange program in China and Hong Kong.
Some Congressional Republicans are pushing for a complete visa for Chinese graduate and graduate academics wishing to enter the United States.
“We have fueled China’s innovation drought with American ingenuity and taxpayers’ money for too long,” Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republicans for Tennessee, said as he delivered the Republican bill. “It’s time to save the business from American studies opposed to economic (Chinese Communist Party) espionage.”
President Barack Obama’s administration also saw China as a major risk in terms of theft and espionage of intellectual assets.
From 1997 to 2009, 17% of those accused of the Economic Espionage Act were of Chinese origin, according to an investigation through Andrew Kim, a Texas-based litigator and guest academic at South Texas College of Law. After 2009, the percentage of Chinese espionage charged tripled to 52%, he found.
The Trump administration has stepped up investigations and prosecutions in such cases, launching an official unit to investigate Chinese economic espionage with John Demers, head of the Justice Department’s national security division in charge.
Today, the Justice Department says approximately 80% of all economic espionage prosecutions filed by federal prosecutors come with allegations of conduct that would benefit the Chinese state. And there is “at least one link” with China in about 60% of all industrial secret theft cases, according to the Justice Department.
A Justice Department spokesman responded to an email requesting more information on statistics.
The Justice Department’s initiative yields “coverage of criminal suspicions” in relation to China, said Lewis, a professor at Seton Hall.
“The U.S. criminal justice formula does not allow guilt by association,” however, that’s what the Justice Department did, he wrote in a legal investigation of the China Decomposition Initiative. And it takes “a scary turn” with repeated rhetoric that frames asset theft and the espionage of intellectuals as a component of a broader communist threat.
Many cases of the China Department of Justice Initiative involve allegations of misrepresentation, non-disclosure of the source of income or visa fraud, Chinese experts point out, not espionage or intellectual property theft, which are harder to prove.
This “includes a much wider diversity of potential defendants than more overtly destructive crimes, such as stealing a competitor’s robotic technology,” Lewis writes in his analysis. Instead of “excessive” prosecutions, he says, universities can simply resolve these disruptions by strengthening their reporting requirements, expanding transparency, and expanding auditing to protect against potential conflicts.
In his analysis, Kim concluded that 21% of Chinese and 22% of all Asian defendants charged under the Economic Espionage Act were never convicted of espionage or any other felony. It tested a random pattern of EEA instances from 1997 to 2015. In about a fifth of those instances, he said, the defendant was acquitted, pleaded guilty to making false statements, or prosecutors dropped all charges.
“In other words, up to one in five Asian-born Americans accused of being spies can be innocent,” Kim writes. “The same can be said of 11% of defendants with Western names.”
When prosecutors announced honors opposed to Tang, California’s cancer researcher, the Justice Department said she was one of four Chinese citizens accused of lying about her visa programs for her association with the Chinese military.
“Today’s announcement shows how much the Chinese government has tried to infiltrate and exploit American benevolence,” John Brown, head of the FBI’s national security arm, said in a statement on July 23. “In interviews with members of the People’s Liberation Army of China in more than 25 U.S. cities, the FBI discovered a concerted effort to hide its true partnership in order to gain advantages for the United States and the American people.”
But Tang’s attorney, Malcolm Segal, said the case is weak and appears to be uncovered in photographs that federal agents discovered online.
“The basis of the government statement appears to be a published photo of Dr. Tang taken at a Chinese hospital where civilians and the army workers’ corps wear uniforms, with other badges to distinguish members of the military,” Segal told THE USA TODAY in an email. Array “They misunderstood or misunderstood the photographs and their professional career”.
He said Tang spoke little or no English and was being held in the county jail, while COVID-19 whether he wrevoced at those institutions. She said she was on the case temporarily so that she could meet with her circle of relatives in China “after what turned out to be a very brief stay in the United States for clinical examination purposes only.”
Tang’s first attorney, a public defender, said Tang fled to the San Francisco consulate after the agents took his passport because he needed the government of his home.
Justice Department officials in Washington and California refused to discuss Tang’s case with USA TODAY. But a move that opposes his bail release indicates that the FBI discovered online a photo of Tang dressed in an Air Force uniform with the “Civil Executive” badge.
In an accompanying article, the FBI said, Tang was indexed as an associate researcher at the Air Force Military Medical University, Molecular Medicine Translation Center. “Members of the civilian (air force) executive are considered active duty soldiers,” the movement states.
When federal officials questioned Tang in June, she denied being in the military, investigators said they discovered more evidence when they searched their residence. They say he also lied about his delight with chemical or biological agents.
“Tang worked clandestinely in the United States, supposedly with several (if not more) of his colleagues,” the prosecutor’s movement says. “The defendants in such cases function in the United States with the wisdom and wisdom of their government. Tang has already demonstrated operational sophistication by removing documents from its electronic devices and continually making false statements to the FBI.”
The opinion on Tang’s application for bail rejected at a hearing held on 31 July via Zoom.
Tang’s case is one of at least 50 brought by the Department of Justice since the China Initiative was introduced in 2018. It is accused of diversity from economic espionage to cable fraud and corruption.
One of the most prominent cases became kind in January, when prosecutors accused Charles Lieber, then chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, of mendacity for his participation in China’s thousand skills plan and for failing to report on the situation of a Chinese university. source of income on their tax returns. Beijing created the Thousand Talent program in 2008 to inspire American scientists to share their wisdom and studies with China, in exchange for wages, research investments, and other incentives.
Prosecutors said Lieber was paid $50,000 a month through Wuhan University of Technology and maintenance expenses of up to $158,000 through the Thousand Talents program. And he’s got $1.5 million more to set up a study lab at the Chinese university, according to the Department of Justice.
Lieber’s lawyer, Marc Mukasey, categorically denied the accusations and that the fees were political.
“The accusation is completely false. We will not allow Professor Lieber to be used as a component of anyone’s political agenda,” Mukasey said in an email statement. “The concept in which Professor Lieber became involved in paintings with China is ridiculous. There is no patriotic scientist more talented, selfless, committed and committed in this country than Charlie Lieber. He’s innocent and his call will be erased.
China has not hidden its skills recruitment program, and Beijing is not the only one seeking to attract the most sensitive scientists, or monetary incentives and other benefits such as lures.
Federal prosecutors identified this by pronouncing the fees opposed to Lieber.
“All the Thousand Talents program does is inspire others who are studying in the United States to come to China and do the same studies by providing them with money. And that’s not illegal under the law,” said Andrew Lelling, district attorney. Massachusetts.
The fact is lieber hid the cash and his relationships with Chinese entities, Lelling said.
Congressional lawmakers sounded the alarm about the program.
According to an investigation of the program through a Senate commission.
“They locate promising studies and scholars, systematically select them, and then move them to China,” Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, said at a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. “It’s military, it’s economic, it’s health, that’s all.”
Portman said he needs American scholars to gain advantages from foreign cooperation, “but we don’t need these U.S. taxpayer-funded studies to be stolen.”
Others say there’s a big difference between sharing clinical wisdom and stealing it.
Xiaoxing Xi, a Professor at Temple University and a U.S. citizen who wrongly accused through the FBI of allegedly offering a susceptible generation to China, said the United States now considers any collaboration with China to be a crime, whatever its prospective price and contradicts the nature of the clinic. Research.
In 2015, federal agents knocked on Xi’s door and waved their weapons as they woke up his wife and two daughters and handcuffed him. Four months later, the Justice Department eliminated the fees after allegedly learning that he had been wrongly accused of sharing delicate superconducting technology; had not shared any sensitive information, but was engaged in a general educational collaboration.
“It left us a very deep scar, only psychologically and physically (but) Array … from a professional point of view,” he said.
Xi and others say that foreign clinical collaboration is encouraged, not to be perceived as a threat, because it promotes the exchange of ideas.
“If you say that, then you suppress American innovation, and that precisely harms American competitiveness,” Xi said.
He said the current climate reminds him of the “red fear” of the 1950s, when other people lost their jobs, or worse, because they were painted as communists.
Cheng says U.S. technique It is not advisable in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, as scientists around the world struggle to find an effective vaccine and treatment.
“COVID’s nationalist technique is certainly destructive and, in fact, stupid,” Cheng said. He said a festival among individual scientists can be a smart motivation.
But “in terms of public health, in terms of biomedical research, the effects are a public good,” he said. “It does not belong to any individual state and will somehow be a weapon as a geopolitical tool.”
The pandemic triggered a spontaneous reaction from many world leaders, and in the United States, the crisis has raised fears that China or a foreign government is seeking to borrow vaccine research.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice accused two Chinese hackers of attacking the computer networks of corporations known for expanding potential vaccines and coronavirus remedies. Prosecutors said the hackers allegedly stole data for themselves, as well as data they knew would be attractive and useful to the Chinese government. The U.S. and its allies have also accused Russian government-backed hackers of seeking to borrow data from pharmaceutical researchers and corporations rushing to locate a COVID-19 vaccine.
Contribution: Kevin Johnson and Kim Hjelmgaard
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