Money from China lured American scientists; what did it get in return?
More than a decade into his career as an organic chemist, Jon Antilla found a solution to the grinding task of fundraising that, increasingly, was squeezing out his time in the laboratory.
Leaving a tenured position at the University of South Florida, he relocated to Tianjin University in China, where he was awarded a grant through a Chinese recruitment program, Thousand Talents.
He wasn’t alone: Colleagues in Tianjin’s chemistry department had given up tenured positions at the University of Californiasan Diego and Texas A&M, among other prestigious institutions, attracted by China’s readily available funding.
“We have time to think here,” Antilla said. “You can think about your research.”
As Antilla proceeded with his academic career, U.S. officials changed their view of China’s recruitment programs, which they said have been used to steal sensitive technology from American laboratories.
In 2019, the Department of Energy barred its personnel from participating in recruitment programs from a handful of countries, including China. A few months later, a Senate committee declared China’s recruitment programs a threat to U.S. interests.
Thousand Talents grantees have become a focus for law enforcement authorities in the United States, tasked by the Justice Department with rooting out scientists who are stealing research from U.S. laboratories. Antilla, like the vast majority of grantees, is not under suspicion.
Last week, federal prosecutors charged Charles Lieber, an acclaimed Harvard chemist viewed by many as a future Nobel laureate, with lying to federal authorities about his affiliation with Thousand Talents.
Andrew Lelling, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, described the program as “a very carefully designed effort by the Chinese government to fill what it views as its own strategic gaps,” including nanotechnology, Lieber’s specialty.
When Lieber entered into cooperation with Chinese partners, he “was by definition conveying sensitive information to the Chinese,” Lelling said. “The moment he works at Wuhan University of Technology and conveys it to his Chinese counterparts, that research and expertise is now at the disposal of the Chinese government because that’s how it works in China.”
Lieber was charged with one felony count of lying to federal investigators. He has not entered a plea or responded publicly to the charge. Peter Levitt, Lieber’s attorney, declined to comment for this article.
Security analysts are now scrutinizing a range of Chinese talent programs and the foreign scientists who have applied to them.
“One question would be, is this a bug, or a feature of these programs, to have a link to espionage?” said Elsa Kania, an adjunct senior fellow in the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. She said she hoped the response by the United States would be “surgical.”
“It is important to course-correct where some of these activities and behaviors are problematic, or even egregious, without causing collateral damage to this critical landscape of global research and innovation,” she said.
A spokeswoman for China’s embassy in Washington, Hong Fang, said the Thousand Talents program was similar to the recruitment programs of other countries, intended to promote international cooperation in science.
“The Chinese government firmly opposes any breach of scientific integrity and ethics,” Fang said. Violations uncovered by the U.S. government, she said, reflected the actions of individual scientists, not the Chinese government.
“It is extremely irresponsible and ill-intentioned to link individual behaviors to China’s talent plan,” she said.
When the Thousand Talents recruitment program began in 2008, aiming to entice Chinese scientists overseas to bring their research back to China, it hardly raised an eyebrow.
Many scientists were recruited to the talent programs, enticed by starting salaries that can be as much as three or four times their existing salaries. More than 10,000 joined, according to William Hannas, who was a member of the Senior Intelligence Service at the CIA.
Hannas, now lead analyst at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University, is the co-author of a forthcoming book on what he described as China’s “informal” technology transfers.
Not all talent program scientists were at universities. About 300 were government scientists, and about 600 worked for American corporations.
One-quarter were with biotech firms, according to James Mulvenon, director for intelligence integration at SOS International, a private defense contractor. He is a Chinese linguist, and the co-author, with Hannas, of the book on China’s technology transfers.
Until recently, much about the Thousand Talents program was public.
Universities mostly steered clear of investigating researchers, worried about being accused of racial profiling and threatening academic freedom, Mulvenon said.