Can the origin of the Wuhan virus be definitively described as natural while China continues to withhold crucial information?
Beginning with questions about a Kyoto University medical professor’s statement on an NHK special program, this article introduces a discussion between Keiko Kawasoe and Sun Shangwen concerning the killing of a Chinese researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, vaccine research, China’s Thousand Talents Plan, the arrest of Professor Charles Lieber, and a series of unresolved questions surrounding Chinese scientific recruitment programs.

June 24, 2020
Whether it arose in nature or was artificially created cannot be determined as long as China continues to conceal the information completely.
The other night, I watched an NHK special program about the coronavirus, with Professor Yamanaka serving as the principal presenter.
Among the participants, there was one Kyoto University medical scholar whose remarks concerned me.
He stated categorically that the Wuhan virus had originated in nature.
Yet whether it arose naturally or was artificially created cannot be determined as long as China continues to conceal the information completely.
This is only my personal impression, but all the other participants displayed expressions and made statements worthy of respect.
This professor alone, however, wore an unusually rigid expression.
I believe that he hardly appeared again after making that statement.
Kyoto University must have many international students from China and South Korea.
In other words, there are channels connecting Kyoto University with China and South Korea.
It would be more unreasonable to assume that China, a country in which propaganda may be said to govern everything, would make no attempt to approach prominent Kyoto University scholars.
The following is taken from a special dialogue between Keiko Kawasoe and Sun Shangwen, published in the July issue of the monthly magazine WiLL under the title “The Top-Secret Plan to Manufacture the ‘Wuhan Virus’ Exposed in the United States.”
It is essential reading not only for the Japanese people, but for people throughout the world.
What was the terrifying plan secretly devised by senior leaders of the Chinese Communist Party?
A Chinese Scholar Is Killed
Kawasoe
The war of words between the United States and China over the Wuhan virus is becoming increasingly intense.
Amid these developments, one particularly troubling news story emerged in early May.
Sun
An assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania, Bing Liu, aged thirty-seven, was shot to death in his home.
Multiple fatal gunshot wounds were reportedly found on his body.
Kawasoe
It appears that Assistant Professor Liu was killed by a Chinese man whom he knew.
Moreover, the suspect, Hao Gu, was later found dead inside a vehicle after the killing, and the initial report stated that he had taken his own life.
Sun
There may have been a sequence of killings.
Gu may have assassinated Assistant Professor Liu, after which the Chinese government may have hired another killer to eliminate Gu.
That would make it more difficult for the American authorities to investigate.
Gu’s apparent suicide may have been staged.
Kawasoe
I also wondered whether this might have been a case in which the assassin himself was killed.
Sun
That possibility cannot be completely dismissed.
According to a research paper by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine published in the international medical journal The Lancet, Assistant Professor Liu had been working on the development of a vaccine for the Wuhan virus.
Preliminary animal experiments had reportedly confirmed the successful production of sufficient antibodies, and if progress continued smoothly, clinical trials were expected to begin within several months.
Kawasoe
However, the University of Pittsburgh’s official announcement stated that it had found no evidence that Assistant Professor Liu was deeply connected with the Chinese government.
Immediately afterward, reports began to appear claiming that the killing resulted from a romantic triangle.
Sun
Chinese media criticized Assistant Professor Liu, describing the incident as a murder-suicide resulting from an extramarital affair.
He was also said to have had a child with the woman.
What is difficult to understand is how their private communications were exposed to the public and then reported by the Chinese media.
The coverage has taken on the appearance of a personal attack against Assistant Professor Liu.
Kawasoe
Attacking the person who was killed, the victim, may represent a major difference between Chinese and Japanese society.
Moreover, no one knows whether those claims are true or false.
Given the timing, however, I wondered whether Assistant Professor Liu had been a scholar working as an instrument of the Chinese government or military in a “Wuhan virus-related project.”
I also wondered whether he had been included in the Thousand Talents Plan.
The “Thousand Talents Plan” Is a “Prison Plan”
Sun
The Thousand Talents Plan is a program designed to recruit highly qualified Chinese scientists and specialists working in Western countries as scholars, researchers, and engineers.
Its purpose is to have them contribute to the development of Chinese science and technology and to China’s military expansion.
Kawasoe
Put simply, it is a recruitment program for industrial spies.
The FBI had been investigating scientists selected for the Thousand Talents Plan for approximately five years.
At a hearing of the United States House Armed Services Committee held in June 2018, the Department of Defense also warned that “the purpose of the Thousand Talents Plan is to acquire American intellectual property.”
For that reason, anti-Communist media gradually began mocking it as the “Prison Plan.”
In January of this year, Charles Lieber, chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and an internationally recognized authority on semiconductor nanowire electronics, was arrested.
He had been selected for the Foreign Experts Program, a branch of the Thousand Talents Plan intended for non-Chinese participants.
As the principal researcher of the Lieber Research Group, he had received more than fifteen million dollars in total funding from the United States National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.
When researchers receive funding from important government institutions, they must disclose all potential conflicts of interest, including financial support from foreign governments and organizations.
The stated reason for Professor Lieber’s arrest was that he had failed to make those disclosures.
As a scientist affiliated with Wuhan University of Technology, Professor Lieber had also received substantial compensation from the Chinese authorities.
Conducting the same research through universities in both the United States and China while receiving two incomes may sound like a dream.
One might wonder whether that amounted to being a “double spy.”
Sun
In an attempt to restrain the American authorities, the Chinese government made information about the Thousand Talents Plan disappear from Chinese search engines.
It concealed the information.
Kawasoe
A list of people selected for the Thousand Talents Plan was once published on its website.
On December 1, 2018, however, Shoucheng Zhang, an emeritus professor of physics at Stanford University who had been selected for the Thousand Talents Plan, reportedly died after jumping from a building.
Sun
Professor Zhang died on the same day that Huawei’s second-ranking executive, CFO Meng Wanzhou, was arrested.
Kawasoe
Soon afterward, the list disappeared from the Thousand Talents Plan website.
Now, even the term itself can no longer be found through Baidu, China’s search engine.
I had many thoughts about the reported suicide of Professor Zhang, who had been regarded as a leading future candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics.
What is known is that he was one of the early participants selected for the Thousand Talents Plan and also served as one of its public representatives.
Compared with him, there is insufficient information about the relationship between Assistant Professor Bing Liu and the Chinese authorities.
However, Liu earned his doctorate at the National University of Singapore, continued his research at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania under the distinguished computer scientist Dr. Edmund M. Clarke, and later became an assistant professor at one of the leading medical schools in the United States.
The Chinese authorities would presumably have regarded him as a valuable talent.
I found myself wondering whether he might have become entangled in some kind of struggle over interests connected with vaccine development.
To be continued.