Science, Technology, Espionage, and Math – Immigration Blog

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George Fishman is a senior legal fellow at the Center.

The Peoples Republic of China under Xi Jinping believes that war with the United States is inevitable. Depending on the outcome of Russias invasion of Ukraine, the risk of armed conflict might come sooner rather than later. A Russian victory might entice the PRC to invade Taiwan, which could very well draw in U.S. troops.

The Chinese Communist Party is intently focused on modernizing its military to close the gap between U.S. and Chinese military power, embracing critical and emerging technologies to serve as assassins mace or silver bullet technologies. A RAND Corporation analyst has testified that should it succeed:

[This would] represent perhaps the most destabilizing geostrategic development of the 21st century. [S]teep advances in the [Peoples Liberation Armys] PLAs conventional capabilities ... could, for the first time in modern history, pit the United States against a militarily superior adversary.

At the same time, the number of students from the PRC at U.S. universities has skyrocketed in recent years to 317,299, representing more than one-third of all foreign students. As recently as 2008/09, they accounted for only 14.6 percent of all foreign students, in 1994/95 only 8.7 percent, and in 1984/85 only 3.0 percent.

FBI Director Christopher Wray has stated that:

[N]o country poses a broader, more severe intelligence collection threat than China. China has pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation any way it can [including] ... through graduate students and researchers. ... Nation-state actors are ... targeting academia including professors, research scientists, and graduate students [seeking] our cutting-edge research, our advanced technology, and our world-class equipment and expertise.

In 2018, the Department of Justice set up the China Initiative to deal with these threats. The Biden administration has shut it down.

Given the paucity of effective mechanisms to prevent students from the PRC once in the U.S. from engaging in espionage and otherwise bringing the fruits of our scientific research back home, it may be time to consider barring the entry of all students from the PRC, or at least those who will be studying in STEM or other fields likely to give them access to information and research of value to the PLA.

While of course not every such student will engage in deleterious activities while in the U.S. (or after they return home), a sufficiently large number will that, given the impossibility of the U.S. government conducting sufficiently in-depth background checks on each of them (as a result of a lack of resources or access to the necessary information), a blanket ban might be the only effective alternative. And, in many instances, students are only approached for intelligence-gathering purposes by the PRC after they have arrived in the U.S. or after they have returned home to China. In such cases, pre-vetting would be ineffectual.

Such a blanket ban would be advisable only for so long as the PRC seeks to undermine around the world the values we hold dear, considers America an enemy, conducts (and solicits Chinese students in the U.S. to conduct) massive amounts of espionage against us, pilfers our nations intellectual property, and prepares for future armed conflict against us. However, it is impossible to say when the PRC will cease and desist.

A staff report of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (ESRC), which was established by Congress to review the national security implications of trade and economic ties between the United States and the Peoples Republic of China (PRC),1 notes that:

National rejuvenation, or the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, is the [Chinese Communist Partys] CCPs broad goal to restore China to what its leaders perceive as its rightful position as the most powerful country in the world, a status it lost as a result of what is now called the century of humiliation beginning in the mid-19th century. This aspiration involves transforming China into a modern, wealthy, powerful country that ... excels across all aspects of its society, including military strength, cultural influence, scientific advancement, and economic prosperity.2

The latest annual report by ESRC notes that Chinas leadership is increasingly uninterested in compromise and willing to engage in destabilizing and aggressive actions in its efforts to insulate itself from perceived threats or to press perceived advantages.3 And just one year ago, the PRCs Central Military Commission (CMC) made an unprecedented public statement:

Chinas CMC Vice Chairman Xu Qiliang made a provocative statement about the likelihood of war with the United States. The top uniformed soldier in China, chairman of Chinas [CMC], stated that war with the United States is inevitable, [Maj. General Richard] Coffman [director of the Armys Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team] said. That is the first time China has made that statement publicly. [Emphasis added.]4

At around the same time, Bloomberg reported that:

China must boost military spending to prepare for a possible confrontation with the U.S., top [PRC] generals said, in an unusual acknowledgment of the risk of a clash between the worlds two largest economies. ... Vice Chairman Xu Qiliang, Chinas top uniformed officer, said the country needed to brace for a Thucydides Trap, an inevitable conflict between a rising power and an established one. [Emphasis added.]5

How is China preparing for its self-perceived future of conflict with the U.S.? Recently, the South China Morning Post reported that:

Chinasmilitary modernisationand efforts to leverage technology in warfare have so far been directed to reduce th[e] gap [in U.S. and Chinese military power]. Thus, Beijing is working to incorporate modern technology into the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). ... Chinas armed forces have started to embrace critical and emerging technologies. ... [leading] to the creation of theStrategic Support Force, a branch of the PLA dedicated to cyber warfare, electronic warfare and using other technology for military operations.

Shashoujianrefers to the Chinese strategic concept focused on creating assassins mace or silver bullet technologies that can reduce the gap between US and Chinese military power. These efforts have manifested themselves in policies, directions and plans that push for the development ofdual-use technologies [for use both in military and civilian fields].

. . .

The use of emerging technologies such as AI [artificial intelligence] and big data in the military has also been incorporated into the14th five-year plan. ... Beijing is now exploring next-generation operational concepts for intelligentised warfare[, including] attrition warfare by intelligent robotic swarms, cross-domain mobile warfare, AI-based space confrontation and cognitive control operations.

. . .

It is clear to the Chinese military apparatus that Beijing will have to rely on emerging technologies to close the gap to US military power. This is evident in thereorganisation of the PLAunder President Xi Jinping. At the heart of this effort lies the focus on critical and emerging technologies. As the world moves further into the digital age, the emphasis on dual-use applications of emerging technologies will keep growing. Thus, Beijing sees the need to develop military competency in critical and emerging technologies to gain an advantage over its adversaries. [Emphasis added.]6

Derek Grossman of the RAND Corporation has testified as to the alarming implications this holds for the U.S.:

Xis pursuit of a world-class PLA, if realized by 2050 ... will represent perhaps the most destabilizing geostrategic development of the 21st century. [S]teep advances in the PLAs conventional capabilities, along with additional boosts to power projection and offsetting technologies, could, for the first time in modern history, pit the United States against a militarily superior adversary. The impact of this development will only be magnified if Washington allows its current technological and military edge over China to decline further. [Emphasis added.]7

Grossman urges that we [e]nsure the U.S. military retains the scientific, mathematical, and technological edge in growing U.S.-China competition. Losing the edge may result in China achieving the next offset, not the United States.8 What he means by offset:

[President] Xi appears to be ... interested in leapfrogging the U.S. military by 2050 through the development of disruptive military technologies. In other words, Beijing probably plans to achieve the Third Offset strategy [a Pentagon military strategy to invest in key innovative technologies ... to gain asymmetric advantages in great power competition] before the U.S. military can do so, thereby enabling Xis world-class PLA to defeat the United States in a conventional regional conflict and to protect Chinese interests worldwide.

Xi has also prioritized the acceleration of programs to develop disruptive military technologies that offer China asymmetric advantages against the United States. These technologies are being indigenously researched and developed to advance the construction of next-generation weapon systems, with the intent of leapfrogging Washington by midcentury. ... [I]t is the component of the PRCs military strategy that Xi hopes will put the PLA over the edge in terms of becoming world-class that is, eclipsing U.S. battlefield capabilities. [Emphasis added.]9

There are many different examples of disruptive military technologies, and China is developing virtually anything that might come to mind. Retired Senior Colonel Fan Gaoyue, who served as a director and chief specialist at Chinas Academy of Military Science, noted that Beijing might be researching offsetting capabilities in aerospace, cyberspace, unmanned systems, and underwater warfare. Other areas, at a minimum, include robotics, autonomous weapons, nanotechnology, 3-D printing, big data analytics, advanced manufacturing, AI, quantum computing, biotechnology, human-machine cooperation, cloud computing, and hypersonics. Beijing seeks to leverage its growing expertise in one or more of these or other areas to develop next-generation weapon systems that will challenge U.S. military capabilities by the 2050s. Xi, along with other senior Chinese leaders, believes that the next five to ten years will be the decisive period in U.S.-China technological competition. Beijing almost certainly believes that the PLA successful intelligentization of warfare and system-of-systems construct will better position it to prevail in future armed conflicts. [Emphasis added.]10

Conflict might actually occur sooner rather than later. Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, states that:

China is either going to side with Russia and reinforce the sense that it has joined an axis of autocracy, or it is going to put significant space between Moscow and Beijing and demonstrate that it genuinely cares about preserving even a basic relationship with the rest of the world. If it turns down this opportunity, its not clear to me there will be a next time to meet and set aside differences. The ball is entirely in Beijings court.11

And German Lopez warns in the New York Times that:

China has laid claim to Taiwan since the island split off from the mainland in 1949 and has threatened to forcibly reunite the two. It views the issue as a top priority: Days after Russias invasion [of Ukraine], Chinese officials reiterated that they were committed to resolving the Taiwan question. ... [W]hat happens in Taiwan will likely be influenced by what happens in Ukraine. If Russia succeeds in overtaking Ukraine, it increases the danger for Taiwan. If Russia ultimately retreats, or suffers lasting, damaging consequences, that could be good news for the island. ... The Wests resolve could go even further in Taiwan [than regarding Ukraine], with the possibility of U.S. forces directly intervening against an invasion. Biden has said American troops will not fight in Ukraine, but the U.S. keeps a deliberately vague lineon Taiwan. [Emphasis added.]12

ESRCs 2021 annual report concludes that:

The Chinese government sees itself as competing directly with the United States for global economic leadership, a rivalry in which technological prowess will play a central role. ... Chinas economic policy blueprint issued in March 2021, emphasizes innovation and development not only for economic growth but more importantly for technological self-sufficiency, national security, and international influence.13

As the ESRC noted, for the PRC, economic dominance is as much a military as a commercial goal, because so many emerging technologies now are dual-use and because of the CCPs belief in military-civilian fusion, with which it seeks to mobilize civilian technological advances in support of Chinas military modernization and spur broader economic growth and innovation by eliminating barriers between the commercial and defense sectors.14 Thus, for the PRC, espionage and intellectual property theft of both military and civilian technology are necessary for its military.

I should note that industrial espionage between China and the West has been a two-way street. Professor Mark Button,director of the Centre for Counter Fraud Studies at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, has written that [i]n one of the most significant acts of industrial espionage ever, in the 1800s the British East India Company hired the botanist, Richard Fortune, to smuggle out of China tea cuttings, seeds, etc., which were usedto help grow a tea industry in India which eclipsed the Chinese in a few decades.15

However, the stakes involved in todays espionage are immense. And the PRC is unrivaled in the world in its efforts to abscond with American technology. This was true in 2005 when my then-boss John Hostettler stated, when chairing a hearing of the House Judiciary Committees Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims on economic and military espionage, that:16

Nationals of many nations come to the United States to engage in espionage. Our closest allies are not excluded from this list. However, all evidence indicates that certain nations are the most egregious violators. There is no nation that engages in surreptitious illegal technology acquisition for purposes of both commercial piracy and military advancement on a scale that approaches that of the Peoples Republic of China. [Emphasis added.]17

And it is even more true today. Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times that:

For the past five years ... the United States and China have been stumbling down a path of de-integration and maybe toward outright confrontation. ... [i]t is Chinas increasingly bullying leadership style at home and abroad, its heads-we-win-tails-you-lose trade policies and the changing makeup of its economy that are largely responsible for this reversal. ... [Factors including] Xis determination that China must never again be dependent on America for advanced technologies, and Beijings willingness to do whatever it takes buy, steal, copy, invent or intimidate to guarantee that, and you have a much more aggressive China. ... The level of technology theft and penetration of U.S. institutions has become intolerable. [Emphasis added.]18

In February, Matthew Olsen, assistant attorney general for National Security, stated that:

We see nations such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea becoming more aggressive and more capable in their nefarious activity than ever before. These nations seek to undermine our core democratic, economic and scientific institutions. And they employ a growing range of tactics to advance their interests and to harm the United States. Defending American institutions and values against these threats is a national security imperative.

...

[T]here is no one threat that is unique to a single adversary. At the same time, it is clear that the government of China stands apart. ... As the FBI Director publicly noted a few weeks ago, the threats from the PRC government are more brazen [and] more damaging than ever before. He is absolutely right: the PRC government threatens our security through its concerted use of espionage, theft of trade secrets, malicious cyber activity, transnational repression, and other tactics to advance its interests all to the detriment of the United States and other democratic nations and their citizens around the world. [Emphasis added.]19

John Demers, assistant attorney general, National Security Division, DOJ, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in December 2018 that:

In 2015, Chinas State Council released the Made in China 2025 Notice, a ten-year plan for targeting ten strategic advanced technology manufacturing industries for promotion and development. ... The program leverages the Chinese governments power and central role in economic planning to alter competitive dynamics in global markets and acquire technologies in these industries. To achieve the programs benchmarks, China aims to localize research and development, control segments of global supply chains, prioritize domestic production of technology, and capture global market share across these industries. In so doing so, China has committed to pursuing an innovation-driven development strategy and prioritizing breakthroughs in higher-end innovation. But that is only part of the story: Made in China 2025 is as much roadmap to theft as it is guidance to innovate.

No one begrudges a nation that generates the most innovative ideas and from them develops the best technology. But we cannot tolerate a nation that steals our firepower and the fruits of our brainpower. And this is just what China is doing to achieve its development goals[,] ... pursuing [them] through malign behaviors that exploit features of a free-market economy and an open society like ours ... using a variety of means, ranging from the facially legal to the illicit, including various forms of economic espionage, forced technology transfer, strategic acquisitions, and other, less obvious tactics to advance its economic development at our expense. [Emphasis added.]20

From 2011-2018, more than 90 percent of the Departments cases alleging economic espionage by or to benefit a state involve China, and more than two-thirds of the Departments theft of trade secrets cases have had a nexus to China.

...

In all of these cases, Chinas strategy is the same: rob, replicate, and replace. Rob the American company of its intellectual property, replicate the technology, and replace the American company in the Chinese market and, one day, the global market.21

It should be noted that not all of the PRCs activities violate federal law, even as they threaten national security. As the ESRC staff report explains:

While the transfer of information and processes associated with fundamental research conducted in the United States is legal, the Chinese government vigorously seeks to acquire such research precisely because it recognizes its strategic value, and by extension, the advantages it confers in the emerging competition with the United States.22

The Institute of International Educations (IIE) annual census of international students23 in the United States (which began in 1919), is viewed as the comprehensive information resource on international students and scholars in the United States and on U.S. students studying abroad.24 It reports that in the 2019/2020 academic year, 372,532 foreign students from the PRC were attending school in the United States on student visas, representing more than one-third (34.6 percent) of the entire foreign student population and 1.9 percent of all students at U.S. institutions of higher education. As a consequence of the Covid pandemic, in the 2020/2021 academic year the number of students from the PRC dropped to 317,299, but still represented more than one-third (34.7 percent) of all foreign students and 1.6 percent of all students.25

In the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 academic years, 39.8/39.6 percent of Chinese students were undergraduates, 36.8/37.5 percent were graduate students, and 19.2/20.6 percent were taking advantage of Optional Practical Training (largely with U.S. corporations).26 In those academic years, 17.5/17.5 percent of PRC students were studying engineering, 21.2/22.2 percent math or computer science, and 8.4/9.1 percent the physical or life sciences.27

The predominance of students from the PRC is a relatively new development. As recently as the 2008/2009 academic year, there were fewer than 100,000 students from the PRC; in 1994/1995, fewer than 34,000, and in 1984/1985, barely 10,000.28 Lest one think this is simply reflective of a growing overall population of foreign students, PRC students represented 14.6 percent of all foreign students in 2008/2009, 8.7 percent in 1994/1995, and 3.0 percent in 1984/1985.29

What has accounted for the great escalation in the number of students from the PRC? The ESRC staff report concludes that [t]his growth ... was driven by several important [visa policy] changes during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, which reflected an assumption in U.S. policy that China would gradually liberalize as the result of increased engagement.30

Unfortunately, China has most assuredly not liberalized. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the PRC has been rapidly deliberalizing. Thomas Friedman finds that the leadership strategy of President Xi Jinping ... has been to extend the control of the Communist Party into every pore of Chinese society, culture and commerce. This has reversed a trajectory of gradually opening China to the world since 1979.31 And the ESRC itself concluded in 2020 that:

Chinas view of the United States is based on the ideology of the ruling CCP, which regards the liberal democratic values championed by the United States as a fundamental impediment to its external ambitions and an existential threat to its domestic rule.

Beijings view of the United States as a dangerous and firmly committed opponent has informed nearly every facet of Chinas diplomatic strategy, economic policy, and military planning in the post Cold War era.32

Xi oversaw the publication of Document Number 9, an internal Party communique ordering heightened vigilance against seven false ideological trends, positions, and activities purportedly inspired by U.S. ideals. Proscribed beliefs included constitutional democracy, universal values, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civil society, pro-market neoliberalism, nihilistic views of the CCPs history, and the questioning [of] ... the socialist nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics. The document further described Chinas ideological situation as a complicated, intense struggle and framed the proponents of its proscribed ideals as enemies.33

The ESRC staff report found that:

Xi Jinping, has ... [made] clear that overseas Chinese students and scholars are key to his plans to transform China into an innovative and militarily formidable world power. As early as 2013, he argued publicly that Western countries leadership of the world depended on their mastery of advanced technologies and that China must adopt an asymmetrical strategy of catching up. Of particular importance were the key fields and areas in which General Secretary Xi perceived a [Western] stranglehold and in which it would be impossible for [China] to catch up [by itself] by 2050.[Emphasis added.]34

As John Hostettler stated in 2005, [m]any ... visitors [from the PRC], even when they are visiting for legitimate purposes, are tasked with obtaining whatever technological information they can.35

FBI Director Christopher Wray stated on April 26, 2019, that:

[N]o country poses a broader, more severe intelligence collection threat than China. China has pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation any way it can, from a wide array of businesses, universities, and organizations. Theyre doing this through Chinese intelligence services, through state-owned enterprises, through ostensibly private companies, through graduate students and researchers, and through a variety of actors working on behalf of China. At the FBI, we have economic espionage investigations that almost invariably lead back to China in nearly all of our 56 field offices, and they span almost every industry or sector. The activity Im talking about goes way beyond fair-market competition. Its illegal. Its a threat to our economic security. And by extension, its a threat to our national security. ... Put plainly, China seems determined to steal its way up the economic ladder, at our expense. ... Theyre strategic in their approach they actually have a formal plan, set out in five-year increments, to achieve dominance in critical areas. To get there, theyre using an expanding set of non-traditional methods both lawful and unlawful weaving together things like foreign investment and corporate acquisitions with cyber intrusions and supply chain threats.

...

Nation-state actors are also targeting academia including professors, research scientists, and graduate students. They seek our cutting-edge research, our advanced technology, and our world-class equipment and expertise. [Emphasis added.]36

It is not necessarily that students come here from the PRC intending to engage in espionage. Rather, many are inevitably pressured to do so by the PRC. Edward Ramotowski, deputy assistant secretary of State, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 6, 2018, that foreign students, often with no nefarious intent in their planof study in the United States, are later co-opted to work for their government.37 And former CIA officer Joe Augustyn states that [w]e know without a doubt that anytime a graduate student from China comes to the US, they are briefed when they go, and briefed when they come back.38

E.W. Priestap, assistant director, Counterintelligence Division, FBI, also testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2018 that:

In many cases, foreign intelligence services do not necessarily pre-task or pre-position [foreign students and scholars]. Instead, the services allow the[m] toconduct their U.S.-based academic pursuits, waiting to leverage them once they return to their home countries either during an academic break or at the end of their studies. Many of those whom they target are young, inexperienced, andimpressionable. [Emphasis added.]39

As Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) has pointed out:

In China, only the government can grant someone permission to leave the country to study or work in the United States and we have seen the Chinese governmentuse their power over their citizens to, in some cases, encourage those citizens tocommit acts of scientific or industrial espionage to the benefit of the Chinese government. [Emphasis added.]40

Warner has also stated that:

China uses all of the traditional tools of the state to exert influence [including] the aggressive deployment of espionage to steal military, and industrial secrets. But its also using more creative mechanisms that take advantage of its authoritarian model to force Chinese companies, researchers, and others to act on behalf of Chinas national interests. In 2015 and 2016, China enactednew laws requiring all Chinese citizens and companies to act in support of national security and the Chinese government. All of this has set the stage for China to aggressively deploy every lever of power in service to the state and, at the same time, exploit the openness ofoursociety to gain geopolitical and economic advantage. ... Through strategic collaboration with Western companies and universities, China is able to gain access and transfer emerging technologies. [Emphasis added.]41

What are the mechanisms that the PRC is using to transform China into an innovative and militarily formidable world power? E.W. Priestap testified in December 2018 before the Senate Judiciary Committee that:

The Chinese government ... has created comprehensive programs to identify, develop, and retain their most talented citizens. These talent recruitment and brain gain programs ... also encourage theft of intellectual property from U.S. institutions. For example, Chinas talent recruitment plans, such as the Thousand Talents Program, offer competitive salaries, state-of-the-art research facilities, and honorific titles, luring both Chinese overseas talent and foreign experts alike to bring their knowledge and experience to China, even if that means stealing proprietary information or violating export controls to do so. [Emphasis added.]42

The ESRC staff report stated that:

While many countries institute preferential policies to attract highly skilled personnel to their economies, no country in the world employs an S&T transfer system that is remotely comparable to Chinas in terms of scale, comprehensiveness, or determination to leverage its overseas nationals. Chinas S&T transfer ecosystem exploits overseas Chinese students and scholars for technology and know-how that can be commercialized or militarized in China ... directly contributing to a strategic competitors technological advances. [Emphasis added.]43

How does the PRC do it?

The PLA also actively targets returning overseas students in its recruitment efforts to ensure the technical proficiency of its personnel. [The PLA has written that] the 2.6 million overseas Chinese students and scholars studying abroad provide fertile soil for the PLAs efforts to recruit capable civilian personnel [and it] has worked to boost its recruitment of returning overseas students since at least 2013 to make up for insufficient expertise in key technical areas. [Emphasis added.]46

Many of these talent programs focus not only on foreign education and training for their talents, but also on the transfer of fundamental research.47

To take one example, the Hundred Talents Program ... offers academic appointments to overseas Chinese students and scholars aged 50 or younger who have received their doctorates and have a distinguished record of research. ... [T]he Program seeks to attract researchers who can contribute to projects furthering military-civil fusion. [Emphasis added.]48

Chinas government runs myriad programs to bring Chinese students and scholars living in the United States back to China temporarily to engage in scientific activities relevant to its economic and military modernization. One prominent program targets high-profile Chinese scholars appointed to teaching positions at prominent universities [by] recruit[ing] overseas Chinese talents who have been appointed as assistant professors or above at famous foreign universities in emerging technologies and other areas important to national development. The program provides funding, housing, and medical insurance to overseas Chinese scholars in exchange for a commitment to travel back to China over school breaks to lecture and conduct research at domestic universities for three months to a year at a time.49

When Chinese students and scholars trained at U.S. universities return to China to commercialize the ideas and technologies they developed while abroad ... this U.S.-funded research can ultimately benefit Chinese state-owned or defense enterprises that are competing with the United States. Even when overseas Chinese students and scholars do stay in the United States after graduation, Chinas transnational technology transfer organizations and talent recruitment plans provide a means to contribute to Chinas national rejuvenation by transferring technology and know-how without requiring physical return.

Because Chinas leaders have promoted a military-civil fusion strategy and dictated that those with S&T expertise serve the cause of national rejuvenation, state-affiliated institutions absorb the knowledge of overseas Chinese students and scholars and then leverage it to improve Chinas military capabilities. [Emphasis added.]50

The PRC has even been able to send its military scientists to American universities:

At least 500 Chinese military scientists have been sent to study at U.S. universities since 2007 ... an outflow coupled with efforts by PLA universities to establish cooperative arrangements with U.S. institutions. While these military scientists and engineers sometimes disclose their affiliations with the PLA, others deliberately obscure them. ... The United States July 2020 decision to close the Chinese Consulate in Houston reportedly stemmed in part from U.S. officials assessment that diplomats posted there facilitated technology transfer by Chinese postgraduate researchers in areas such as artificial intelligence and biology who had hidden their active-duty status with the PLA.

...

The recent case of Wang Xin, a PLA officer and scientist arrested in June 2020 for alleged visa fraud, illustrates how Beijing sends military personnel to U.S. universities to collect information that advances its military capabilities. According to DOJ, Wang allegedly lied about his ongoing employment as a PLA technician in order to gain admission to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 2019. Once at UCSF, Wangs PLA supervisor tasked him with observing the layout of UCSFs lab ... and bringing back information to help his military university replicate the lab in China. ... Wang had emailed research to his lab in China and had in his possession UCSF studies he was intending to share with PLA colleagues when he was apprehended. ... Wang also allegedly told his supervisor at UCSF that he had already succeeded in duplicating some of the UCSF labs research in China. [Emphasis added.]51

The report concludes that:

In effect, U.S. universities are training scientists and engineers who will work in a range of organizations antithetical to U.S. national security interests, including the PLA.52

DHS has provided other examples:

In September 2019 ... the FBI charged Chinese government official Liu Zhongsan with conspiracy to fraudulently procure U.S. research scholar visas for Chinese officials whose actual purpose was to recruit U.S. scientists for high technology development programs within China. Additionally, in December 2019, a 29-year-old graduate student in J1 status participating in an exchange visitor program at Harvard University was stopped at Boston Logan International Airport. Federal agents determined he was a high risk for possibly exporting undeclared biological material after finding 21 vials of brown liquid wrapped in a plastic bag inside a sock in his checked luggage; typed and handwritten notes indicated that [the exchange visitor] ... was knowingly gathering and collecting intellectual property ... possibly on behalf of the Chinese government.53

In November 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions launched the China Initiative to better counter economic espionage by the PRC. Assistant Attorney General John Demers testified in 2018 that:

Broadly speaking, the China Initiative aims to raise awareness of the threats we face, to focus the Departments resources in confronting them, and to improve the Departments response, particularly to newer challenges. ... Investigating and prosecuting economic espionage and other federal crimes will remain at the heart of our work. ... But ... we must broaden our approach.

But the Biden administration has already reversed course. Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen stated on February 23 that:

[The China Initiative] effectively focused attention on the multi-faceted threat from the PRC. But it has also engendered growing concerns that we must take seriously. ... We have heard concerns from the civil rights community that the China Initiative fueled a narrative of intolerance and bias. To many, that narrative suggests that the Justice Department treats people from China or of Chinese descent differently. The rise in anti-Asian hate crime and hate incidents only heightens these concerns. ... There are also increasing concerns from the academic and scientific community about the departments pursuit of certain research grant fraud cases. We have heard that these prosecutions and the public narrative they create can lead to a chilling atmosphere for scientists and scholars that damages the scientific enterprise in this country. Safeguarding the integrity and transparency of research institutions is a matter of national security. But so is ensuring that we continue to attract the best and the brightest researchers and scholars to our country from all around the world and that we all continue to honor our tradition of academic openness and collaboration.55