House Democrats launch probe into NIH and FBI suspecting Chinese Americans of espionage

 

And in the letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, they noted that “the FBI has arrested and charged many Chinese-American scientists who have turned out to be innocent.”

They pointed to reports that U.S. intelligence agencies have urged American research universities to monitor students and visiting scholars from institutions affiliated with China.

The New York Times reported last November that the NIH, prompted by the FBI, sent thousands of letters to medical centers around the country asking administrators to investigate individual scientists for intellectual property theft.

Wray warned last year that China’s espionage efforts ran the gamut to collect information on American intellectual property.

“China has pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation in any way it can from a wide array of businesses, universities and organizations,” Wray said during a speech last April at the Council on Foreign Relations. “They’re doing it through Chinese intelligence services, through state-owned enterprises, through ostensibly private companies, through graduate students and researchers, through a variety of actors, all working on behalf of China.”

But some Chinese Americans have been accused of sharing information with China, only for the charges later to be dropped.

Raskin and Chu pointed to cases like one National Weather Service hydrologist who was charged with accessing data on U.S. dams to hand over to China, as well as a Temple University physics professor accused of sharing sensitive information about a superconductor device that later turned out to be concerning a different device that had been publicly available for years. In both cases, the charges were dropped but the accused scientists faced retribution at their jobs.

A Harvard University professor and two Chinese nationals were indicted late last month in separate cases for allegedly lying about their involvement with the Chinese government.

The Harvard professor, Charles Lieber, was accused of working with multiple Chinese organizations and collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars while his research group at Harvard received more than $15 million in funding from the NIH and Defense Department.

The two Chinese nationals worked as scientific and cancer researchers and were accused of intellectual property theft on behalf of the Chinese government. Yanqing Ye, who worked as a scientific researcher at Boston University, admitted that she was a lieutenant with the People’s Liberation Army. Zaosong Zheng, a cancer researcher who had been sponsored by Harvard University, allegedly tried to smuggle vials of biological material to China.