Of course, this much has been suspected since the initial indictment (from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/us/mit-scientist-charges.... )
> There were two counts of wire fraud related to disclosure. In 2017, prosecutors said, when applying for a $2.7 million grant from the Energy Department, Dr. Chen had failed to disclose five affiliations — he served as a “review expert” for China’s National Science Foundation and a “fourth overseas expert consultant” to the Chinese government, for instance. Then, in a progress report in 2019, he failed to list those and three new Chinese affiliations, including one that pledged to pay him $355,715, the indictment says.
> A third and fourth charge were more straightforward: Dr. Chen had failed in 2018 tax filings, the indictment says, to declare a Chinese bank account containing more than $10,000, as required by law.
> [the prosecutor] acknowledged that Dr. Chen was not accused of passing any sensitive information to China
Serving as a review expert? A consultant? Not reporting a Chinese bank account in his taxes? The prosecutor went so far as to paint him as loyal to China based on these! From the above article:
> At a news conference that morning, [the prosecutor] said he believed that Dr. Chen, 56, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen two decades ago, had remained loyal to the country of his birth.
> “The allegations of the complaint imply that this was not just about greed, but about loyalty to China,” he said.
This was a case of guilt by association. Dr Chen did nothing wrong but by god, he’s a Chinese immigrant with a Chinese bank account, and scientific colleagues who are Chinese, so he must be a Chinese spy
I think what happens is more funding comes from the private sector. It's just where the money and momentum are. MIT feels more "industry" oriented every term. That old spirit of intellectual tinkering for its own sake seems to be fading away.
A naturalized US citizen doing research with federal funding, especially from DoD and DARPA, has no business participating in conversations with PRC officials while using "we" and "our" to refer to China and its ambitions in the technology sectors for which they have received federal funding.
The complete obfuscation of the facts by NYT is farcical.
https://www.wwlp.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2021/01/Che...
Charges can only exist on the basis of legal technicality. That’s how law works.
What you are describing is guilt by association with China. It is not illegal to work to promote scientific collaboration with China. It is not illegal to participate in advancing Chinese scientific interests. Some people might consider these things immoral. Some people might not.
Clearly the prosecutor felt as you do, that because Dr Chen’s work involved advancing Chinese scientific interests, he must be some kind of spy or traitor. If you remove the preconception of guilt by association with China, you might realize it’s possible to want to do science, even science funded by a foreign country and advancing that countries interests, and not automatically be some kind of traitor or spy.
Don't be coy, you know exactly what I mean. If you get away with, for example, sexual crimes like Cosby due to legal technicalities, it doesn't mean you aren't guilty or weren't malicious.
The NYT piece tries to pretend that Chen was not doing anything at all worth scrutinizing. He clearly was, just in a way different than the initial charges cover - mandatory disclosure.
>What you are describing is guilt by association with China
No, what I'm describing is secretive collaboration with an adversarial government on research funded by the US federal government for the express purpose of advancing the interests of that adversarial government, which is exactly what happened. Read the quotes from his communications in the criminal complaint.
Like I said, time will tell if further charges are brought.
Perhaps it should be.
The goal of the FBI (and the goal that you appear to be advocating here and later in this thread) is to criminalize normal, open scientific exchange between American and Chinese scientists. They hoped that by going after one of the most high-profile ethnically Chinese scientists in the US, they could make an example that would scare everyone else away from normal scientific collaboration with Chinese scientists.
> A naturalized US citizen doing research with federal funding, especially from DoD and DARPA, has no business participating in conversations with PRC officials while using "we" and "our" to refer to China and its ambitions
First of all, anyone can express themselves however they want, and even if we believe what the FBI wrote in the complaint, there's no evidence of espionage or other wrongdoing here.
Second of all, it came out that the FBI had truncated and fundamentally misrepresented this email. This email contains Prof. Chen's notes on a talk he saw by a Chinese scientist. The "we" and "our" in the email are part of Prof. Chen's paraphrase of what the Chinese scientist said.
The US already went through one paranoid period in the 1950s in which it targeted scientists based on their ethnicity and perceived political views. One of the people the US government went after was the co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Qian Xuesen. They stripped him of his security clearance, which effectively ended his scientific career in the US. When he tried to leave the US, they arrested him and held him for years. When he was released, he went to the People's Republic of China and founded their rocketry program. The US' persecution of Qian Xuesen was not only immoral, but stupid. Not much has been learned in the last 70 years, it seems.
There is no such thing. The disparity in open, original research output of US vs China is massive, and virtually all research done "in collaboration" with Chinese scientists is for malicious purposes of the CCP.
I 100% have no problem plainly stating that US (or any really) researchers should not collaborate with Chinese researchers that have familial, geographic, financial, or political ties to mainland China. The CCP's tactics for espionage and IP theft are too pervasive and far reaching to risk it. Chinese researchers should not be allowed to participate in scientific research in foreign host countries if they intend to ever return to mainland China for any reason.
People have no problem conceptualizing why it would have been a bad idea to have Nazi scientists, even before WWII broke out, collaborating on military endeavors elsewhere, but it's all of the sudden some insane logical and ethical leap to state the same thing about a nation whose government is just as evil.
There are plenty of good natured and good intentioned Chinese scientists with genuine desires to pursue scientific inquiry for science's sake in positions where their family is held in China with a gun to their head, forcing the scientist abroad to make dubious ethical decisions any one of us would make for the sake of our family. It sucks, but it's reality. The extent the CCP will go to in order to lie, cheat, steal, genocide, and con their way to the top is limitless. They have no problem threatening and harming their own citizens.
>First of all, anyone can express themselves however they want, and even if we believe what the FBI wrote in the complaint, there's no evidence of espionage or other wrongdoing here.
No, you literally can't when working with DoD or DARPA funding. We'll see regarding wrongdoing different from violating mandatory disclosure laws.
>Second of all, it came out that the FBI had truncated and fundamentally misrepresented this email. This email contains Prof. Chen's notes on a talk he saw by a Chinese scientist. The "we" and "our" in the email are part of Prof. Chen's paraphrase of what the Chinese scientist said.
Did you just make this up? I'd love to see the complete logs if they're available.
>Qian Xuesen
It is highly likely this was his plan all along. He explicitly stated in a deposition his allegiance was to communist China and that he would not alter this based on pressure from the US if armed conflict broke out between the two nations. He also repeatedly stated in various ways to various people that his loyalties were to his homeland.
