Chinese Researchers at US Universities Charged With Lying About PLA Affiliation

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People's Liberation Army soldiers on parade. (Photo by Pavel Golovkin/Pool//AFP via Getty Images)

People’s Liberation Army soldiers on parade. (Photo by Pavel Golovkin/Pool//AFP via Getty Images)

(CNSNews.com) – Four Chinese nationals face criminal charges for allegedly lying about their links to the People’s Liberation Army when applying for visas to undertake academic research in the U.S., Department of Justice officials said on Thursday.

The charges draw fresh attention to what U.S. officials say is an orchestrated campaign by Beijing to exploit U.S. academic institutions, to build the PLA into a dominant military force.

“Not all Chinese students and employees are just normal students and workers that are coming here to make a little bit of money and to garner themselves some knowledge,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a speech in California on Thursday. “Too many of them come here to steal our intellectual property and to take this back to their country.”

One of the four accused is being harbored by the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, where she sought shelter after being interviewed by the FBI last month. She has been named as Tang Juan, a biology researcher at the University of California, Davis.

The other three are all in U.S. custody. Charged with visa fraud, if convicted they face a penalty of up to 10 years’ imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

“These members of China’s People Liberation Army applied for research visas while hiding their true affiliation with the PLA,” said John C. Demers, head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

“This is another part of the Chinese Communist Party’s plan to take advantage of our open society and exploit academic institutions.”

The FBI says it has interviewed visa holders suspected of undeclared PLA affiliation in more than 25 American cities.

According to the department, the four accused Chinese nationals had all lied about ever having been in China’s armed forces, or about having been in the armed forces at the time they applied for their non-immigrant visas.

‘Have you ever served in the military?’

Tang, the researcher now holed up in the San Francisco consulate, responded “no” to the question in her visa application, “Have you ever served in the military?”

“In fact, Tang is a uniformed officer of the PLA Air Force (PLAAF),” who had been employed as a researcher at a PLA military medical university, the DOJ said.

Wang Xin, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, had said when applying for a research visa in 2018 that he had been a professor of medicine in the PLA until September 2016.

But when arrested while trying to leave the U.S. last month, he told Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials at Los Angeles International Airport that he is still an active duty member of the PLA, with a rank equivalent to major, and works in a PLA university lab.

Song Chen, a neurological researcher at Stanford University, said when applying for a U.S. visa in 2018 that she had left the PLA in 2011.

But according to the complaint she remains a member of the PLAAF, and the Beijing hospital she listed on her visa application as her employer was a front for her true employer, the PLA.

Zhao Kaikai, a graduate student studying machine learning and artificial intelligence (A.I.) at Indiana University, responded “no” in 2018 to the visa application question, “Have you ever served in the military?”

In fact, Zhao was a member of a leading PLA scientific research and education institution, and the FBI found an online photograph of Zhao wearing a PLAAF uniform.

‘Above board and beyond reproach’

The Trump administration has drawn attention in recent months to a CCP strategy dubbed Military-Civil Fusion (MCF), which it says is overseen personally by President Xi Jinping and designed to develop the PLA into a “world class military” by 1949.

The State Department says key targets of the MCF program include A.I., semiconductors, quantum computing, 5G, and nuclear and aerospace technology.

China insists the policy is benign, and “customary international practice.”

“China’s military-civilian integration policy is aimed at effectively mobilizing military and civilian resources, coordinating socioeconomic growth and national defense development, and benefiting the public with scientific and technological progress,” foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a briefing on Thursday. “This policy is above board and beyond reproach.”

Speaking before the Justice Department announced the charges against the four Chinese nationals, Wang was responding to a question about a State Department tweet regarding the MCF strategy.

“Lately the U.S. has been misrepresenting and smearing China’s military-civilian integration policy, employing moral hijack, political pressure and even threat of sanctions against Chinese and American businesses and researchers,” he said.

In a speech in Silicon Valley last January, Pompeo told U.S. tech executives that MCF was “a technical term but a very simple idea: Under Chinese law, Chinese companies and researchers must – I repeat, must – under penalty of law, share technology with the Chinese military.”

“So even if the Chinese Communist Party gives assurances about your technology being confined to peaceful uses, you should know there is enormous risk – risk to America’s national security as well.”



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