Originally published on July 27, 2020.
Drawing on an article by Rui Sasaki, then deputy editorial writer of the Sankei Shimbun, published in the monthly magazine Hanada under the title “Xi Jinping’s Hunt for Brains: The Thousand Talents Plan,” this chapter examines China’s talent recruitment programs, the Charles Lieber case at Harvard University, a series of U.S. investigations involving university researchers, China’s military-civil fusion strategy, Made in China 2025, and the intensifying U.S.-China competition over research, technology, intellectual property, and advanced scientific talent.

2020-07-27
This chapter was originally published on July 27, 2020.
It introduces an article by Rui Sasaki published in the monthly magazine Hanada under the title “Xi Jinping’s Hunt for Brains: The Thousand Talents Plan.”
The central subject is China’s Thousand Talents Plan and its relationship with universities and research institutions in the United States, federally funded research, advanced technology, intellectual property, and national security.
The chapter discusses the arrest of Harvard professor Charles Lieber and a series of other investigations involving researchers in the United States as evidence of growing American scrutiny of Chinese talent recruitment programs.
It further examines the Thousand Talents Plan, China’s military-civil fusion strategy, and Made in China 2025 as interconnected elements in the competition over science, technology, research talent, and national power.
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2020-07-27
It has received almost no coverage in Japan, but this is a major development showing that U.S. investigative authorities had begun intensifying enforcement related to the Thousand Talents Plan.
The following is from an article by Rui Sasaki, deputy editorial writer of the Sankei Shimbun, published in the monthly magazine Hanada under the title “Xi Jinping’s Hunt for Brains: The Thousand Talents Plan.”
It is essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.
The Japanese people will, I believe, be astonished by the extent to which reporting by newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun and television media such as NHK has come under Chinese influence.
The same problem may apply to media organizations throughout the world.
Harvard Professor Arrested
The mysterious-sounding expression “Thousand Talents Plan” has once again attracted attention in both Japan and the United States.
The immediate trigger was the arrest of a prominent scientist, a Harvard University professor who had ties to a university in Wuhan, China.
In January of that year, the U.S. Department of Justice arrested him after alleging violations of U.S. law connected with his relationship with China.
Wuhan was, of course, the city where the outbreak of the novel coronavirus was first identified.
What relationship, if any, did this professor have to the coronavirus crisis?
Before discussing that issue in detail, it is necessary first to explain briefly what the Thousand Talents Plan was.
The Thousand Talents Plan was a national project designed to attract roughly one thousand world-class researchers, including Nobel Prize laureates, to China with exceptionally favorable treatment.
In other words, it was a means of rapidly acquiring intellectual property, particularly advanced technology, from the United States and other countries.
Its origins date to the 1990s, when the Chinese government, eager to acquire advanced technologies, began actively encouraging Chinese researchers who had studied abroad to return home as a matter of national policy.
Such returnees came to be called “sea turtles,” a play on similar-sounding Chinese expressions for returning from overseas and for a sea turtle.
After the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China also began recruiting non-Chinese foreign researchers, particularly from the United States, as part of the Thousand Talents Plan.
Programs directed at foreign experts were developed alongside many other recruitment schemes, and nearly 200 such programs were said to exist.
The Chinese Communist Party-backed plan, however, began encountering serious difficulties around 2018.
Chinese researchers were arrested by U.S. authorities, while universities and research institutions dismissed others.
After that, the name “Thousand Talents Plan” largely disappeared from public discussion and from official Chinese documents.
The Xi Jinping administration was believed to have directed party and government bodies to remove the term in response to mounting pressure from the United States.
Yet the plan itself had merely gone underground, and the continuing participation of researchers suggested that recruitment activity might even have accelerated.
The growing concern of the U.S. Congress and Department of Justice, which regarded such programs as potential threats to national security, was evidence of that alarm.
A Million Dollars in Compensation
Against this background, the arrest of the Harvard professor mentioned above sent shock waves through people concerned with the Thousand Talents Plan in both Japan and the United States.
On January 28, the U.S. Department of Justice moved against Charles Lieber, then chair of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and a world authority on nanotechnology, alleging that he had made false statements to the U.S. government concerning his participation in the Thousand Talents Plan.
Nanotechnology is the technology of controlling matter at the extremely small scale of molecules and atoms.
It is a field in which not only China but countries throughout the world are competing intensely.
According to the U.S. authorities, Lieber participated in the Thousand Talents Plan and was entitled to substantial compensation, including a monthly salary and living expenses, in connection with Wuhan University of Technology.
In return, he was expected to carry out activities that included publishing papers under the university’s name.
Lieber’s Harvard research had also received more than $15 million in funding from U.S. federal agencies, including the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.
The issue concerned his failure to disclose relevant foreign relationships and support and his false statements to federal authorities.
Harvard described the allegations as extremely serious and placed him on indefinite administrative leave while cooperating with the investigation.
Deep Connections with Wuhan
Lieber was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, completed doctoral studies at Stanford University, and later became chair of Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.
He co-authored hundreds of scientific papers.
His case attracted particular public attention because of his ties to Wuhan University of Technology and because his arrest came at approximately the same time as the lockdown of Wuhan during the emerging coronavirus crisis.
That coincidence also fueled public speculation concerning possible links between his case and the coronavirus outbreak.
Rumors appeared suggesting that Lieber might somehow have been involved in providing the virus to China.
The fact-checking site Snopes, however, rejected claims connecting the investigation of Lieber with the coronavirus, stating that there was no evidence supporting such a relationship.
The criminal case concerned his disclosures, financial matters, foreign affiliations, and statements to U.S. authorities, not evidence that he had created or transferred the coronavirus.
PLA Officer Presented as a “Student”
Other China-related university cases were also emerging around Boston.
A Chinese national conducting robotics research at Boston University was accused of concealing her position as an officer in the People’s Liberation Army when applying for a U.S. visa and presenting herself as a student.
Another Chinese researcher who had conducted cancer research at Harvard was accused after attempting to board a flight to China while carrying 21 vials of biological research material hidden in a sock and of making false statements to federal authorities.
Federal prosecutors described these cases as part of a much broader effort by China to obtain American technology and noted that Boston, with its concentration of universities and research institutions, presented an attractive target.
Cases associated with the Thousand Talents Plan continued.
In May, U.S. authorities arrested a Chinese-American professor at the University of Arkansas over allegations involving false statements concerning foreign funding.
The university suspended the professor and cooperated with the FBI investigation.
Another Chinese-American scholar at Emory University was also prosecuted over undisclosed foreign income connected with Chinese talent programs.
These individual investigations may have appeared scattered.
Yet, although they received little attention in Japan, they represented an important indication that U.S. authorities were intensifying scrutiny and enforcement concerning the Thousand Talents Plan.
Taken together, the cases revealed the depth of American concern about China as the two countries competed in advanced technology and academic research.
Stealing the Brain Along with the Technology
China has set the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic in 2049 as a major national milestone and seeks to become a manufacturing power capable of attaining global leadership in advanced technology.
As argued above, the Thousand Talents Plan was presented as a means of acquiring not merely intellectual property but the scientists and researchers who possessed the knowledge itself.
In March 2016, China’s 13th Five-Year Plan called for deeper military-civil fusion.
Policies subsequently announced under the military-civil fusion strategy emphasized gaining an advantageous position in science, technology, economics, and military affairs.
In January 2017, Xi Jinping became head of the Central Commission for Integrated Military and Civilian Development as China sought to accelerate military modernization.
Under this approach, civilian and military technology were not regarded as wholly separate spheres.
China consequently focused increasingly on new strategic domains alongside traditional land, sea, and air warfare: space, cyberspace, fifth-generation mobile communications, and artificial intelligence.
Acquiring highly trained researchers with doctoral-level expertise in innovative technologies became a national priority.
Made in China 2025 emerged several years after the Thousand Talents Plan.
The argument advanced here is that the recruitment of scientific talent and the industrial strategy were interconnected.
Chinese authorities had already cited talent recruitment as contributing to technological advances in fields ranging from nuclear technology and human spaceflight to deep-sea submersibles and satellite navigation.
The United States was becoming increasingly concerned about both policies.
Behind the visible U.S.-China trade conflict, therefore, lay an intense struggle over information, technology, research, and intellectual property.
Establishing “Shadow Laboratories” in China
Evidence of this concern had already emerged inside the United States.
In November 2019, two months before Lieber’s arrest, a bipartisan U.S. Senate investigation issued a report on the threat posed by Chinese talent recruitment plans.
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations spent eight months reviewing the response of seven federal bodies, including the FBI, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy, State Department, Department of Commerce, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The report argued that Chinese talent recruitment programs were allowing U.S. government-funded research and private-sector technologies to contribute to China’s economic and military development while American countermeasures had lagged behind.
It described China’s ambition to become a world leader in science and technology and traced talent recruitment policies back to the late 1990s.
To be continued.