Export News Archive - 2019

Policymakers have singled out the higher education system as a critical area of vulnerability in American society. Christopher Wray memorably stated before the Senate Judiciary Committee that China now poses a “whole of society” threat to the United States. Reports on the trove of federal investigations into the Chinese theft of research from American medical schools is the latest confirmation of how pervasive the risk is. Yet there is a fundamental disconnect between the way policymakers in Washington and university administrators across the country think and write about Chinese students in the United States. The proliferation of cultural education programs funded by the Chinese government along with other national security concerns have put policymakers on defense. American government policies and messaging have rightly focused on rooting out malign foreign influences on campuses and developing more targeted student visa screening processes to guard against espionage.

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Five academics from New York’s University at Buffalo were ordered to leave Russia after authorities there determined they had violated their tourist visas by giving a lecture, the university said Thursday.

The two School of Management faculty members, two staffers and one alumna arrived back in the United States on Thursday following what was to have been a routine visit to the Moscow Polytechnic University.

Instead, the delegation was detained for several hours Dec. 9 in what the University at Buffalo said was an apparent misunderstanding between the travelers and the Russian institution.

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A Florida senator sent a letter to the presidents of public universities in his state, asking them to turn over details of how they safeguard their intellectual properties from communist China. In the Dec. 3 letter (pdf), Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) warned Florida’s institutions against “countries that are actively trying to exploit your hard work and take credit for your successes.” The “most obvious threat,” according to Scott, is communist China. “The growing influence of communist China presents a clear and present danger to the stability of world markets, to the security of the United States and our allies, and to the quest for freedom and democracy around the globe,” wrote Scott. “We know communist China is stealing our technology and trying to compete with us on the global stage. We should all be greatly concerned about what is happening in communist China as they continue to take steps to try to ‘win’ the great power conflict of the 21st century.”

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A report argues that a foreign power is seeking to sway schools and colleges; give money to companies and universities in order to influence them and get access to American know-how and research; send students and researchers to U.S. institutions to pick up knowledge; and in general to influence the American public. Which country is this bad actor? China? Russia? No, the subject of this report is Japan. All of this is argued in Buying the American Mind: Japan’s Quest for U.S. Ideas in Science, Economic Policy and the Schools (Washington, D.C.: Center for Public Integrity, 1991). This report is indicative of the drumbeat of Japan bashing that was taking place during the 1980s and 1990s, when Japan’s economy was booming and its technology was innovative and world-class. 

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When Xu Yanjun travelled to Belgium in April 2018, he wasn’t there as a tourist but as an officer of China’s Ministry of State Security. Xu had been lured to Belgium by US authorities who then extradited him and are now prosecuting him on charges of economic espionage. This was a remarkable case for a number of reasons. It was the first-ever arrest of a Chinese intelligence officer—and not simply an agent or asset—by the United States. And the indictment mentioned Xu’s accomplice, a senior executive at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. This man worked with Xu to lure American jet engine experts to China, and then recruit them.

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Quantum technology has the potential to alter the face of both cyber and kinetic warfare, with advances like ultra-secure communications, radar that can spot “stealth” aircraft, and new navigation systems. China, the United States, and other countries are pouring billions into their quantum efforts. In the West, there are worries that China will pull ahead. Now a new report from an American intelligence startup called Strider alleges that China is getting its lead in quantum by “exploit[ing] Western government research funding to train Chinese quantum scientists at Western research institutes.” At the center of this strategy is Jian-Wei Pan, a man known in Beijing as the country’s “father of quantum,” according to the report, viewed by MIT Technology Review.

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Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, John C. Demers, the Assistant Attorney General for National Security, John Brown, Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) Counterintelligence Division, and William F. Sweeney Jr., the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Field Office of the FBI, announced today the unsealing of a criminal complaint charging VIRGIL GRIFFITH, a United States citizen, with violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”) by traveling to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (“DPRK” or “North Korea”) in order deliver a presentation and technical advice on using cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to evade sanctions.  GRIFFITH was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport yesterday and will be presented in federal court in Los Angeles on Monday, December 2.

U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman stated:  “As alleged, Virgil Griffith provided highly technical information to North Korea, knowing that this information could be used to help North Korea launder money and evade sanctions.  In allegedly doing so, Griffith jeopardized the sanctions that both Congress and the president have enacted to place maximum pressure on North Korea’s dangerous regime.”

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The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is building links between China’s civilian universities, military and security agencies. Those efforts, carried out under a policy of leveraging the civilian sector to maximize military power (known as ‘military–civil fusion’), have accelerated in the past decade. Research for the China Defense Universities Tracker has determined that greater numbers of Chinese universities are engaged in defense research, training defense scientists, collaborating with the military and cooperating with defense industry conglomerates and are involved in classified research.

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Click here to veiw the online tracker. 

In “The Scholars,” the classic 18th century Chinese novel on the lives and misadventures of Ming Dynasty literati, there is an episode that departs unnervingly from the book’s satirical, moralizing tone. One day the Nanjing scholar Chuang reluctantly obeys a summons to consult with the emperor in Beijing. On the way to Beijing he meets a fellow scholar, Lu, who excitedly tells him of a banned book he has just purchased, written by a scholar unjustly executed 160 years before. Chuang praises Lu for his “respect for learning”, but warns his new friend to avoid “forbidden books.” Nevertheless, he invites Lu to stay with him when he returns to Nanjing.

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The university administrators who have long advocated for a standard grant application process across the U.S. government say it would save time and money. Today, an influential Senate panel offered another reason: to prevent the fruits of government-funded research from falling into the wrong hands. How to deal with China’s transformation into a technological superpower is a front-burner issue for national policymakers. A new report by the intelligence panel of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs says federal research agencies have been tardy in responding to China’s aggressive moves, which are exemplified by its decadelong effort to recruit world-class scientists working in U.S. labs.

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The United States government has failed to stop China from stealing intellectual property from American universities and lacks a comprehensive strategy for dealing with the threat, a congressional report concluded Monday. The report says the FBI should be more effective and consistent in warning colleges and universities about the threat of Chinese economic and industrial espionage. It also says agencies that award research grants or provide visas for scientists don’t do enough to monitor or track the recipients, and says universities themselves must do a better job identifying foreign funding sources and conflicts of interest among scientists on their campuses.

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"The American university system is justifiably the envy of the world," said Chris Fall, director of the Energy Department's office of science. "I could talk all day about great things we’re doing with you, and I would prefer that. But we're here to talk about science security and about threats to our system of labs."

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Harvard has formed two new oversight committees in response to National Institutes of Health inquiries into potential “academic espionage” by faculty members at American universities, Dean of Science Christopher W. Stubbs announced at the Faculty’s monthly meeting Tuesday. One committee is tasked with reviewing sensitive research projects, and the other is examining Faculty of Arts and Sciences policies to ensure the school complies with guidelines set forth by federal funding agencies. Stubbs said the new committees were prompted by FBI and NIH investigations into scientists across the country who are allegedly stealing biomedical research from universities and funnelling that research to foreign governments.

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Technology offers plenty of business benefits, from driving productivity to transforming operations to optimizing workflows. But it also has a downside: It opens up companies to cyberattacks -- a threat that, in most cases, companies are not equipped to handle. Small and midsize businesses are particularly at risk of a cyberattack, says Cynthia James, CEO and principal consultant at Cyberus Security. "The biggest problem is that 80 percent of CEOs are non-technical," she says. "As a result, they haven't learned to manage a risk that, right now, is bigger than any other financial or legal risk."

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The scientist at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston was hardly discreet. “Here is the bones and meet of what you want,” he wrote in a misspelled email to researchers in China. Attached was a confidential research proposal, according to administrators at the center. The scientist had access to the document only because he had been asked to review it for the National Institutes of Health — and the center had examined his email because federal officials had asked them to investigate him.

The N.I.H. and the F.B.I. have begun a vast effort to root out scientists who they say are stealing biomedical research for other countries from institutions across the United States. Almost all of the incidents they uncovered and that are under investigation involve scientists of Chinese descent, including naturalized American citizens, allegedly stealing for China.

Seventy-one institutions, including many of the most prestigious medical schools in the United States, are now investigating 180 individual cases involving potential theft of intellectual property. The cases began after the N.I.H., prompted by information provided by the F.B.I., sent 18,000 letters last year urging administrators who oversee government grants to be vigilant.

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Intelligence agencies have warned universities in the United Kingdom to put national interests ahead of their own commercial interest in recruiting students from China. They are also pressing university leaders to ensure research and funding partnerships do not compromise academic freedom or make campuses vulnerable to espionage or theft, according to a report in The Times. The UK’s domestic security service, MI5, and its electronic intelligence headquarters, GCHQ, say the recruitment to UK universities of students from China, particularly postgraduates, is raising the risk of China stealing research and intellectual property from universities and of university computer systems being compromised.

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In China there is a saying, “Picking flowers in the US to make honey in China.” The US DoD tech protection task force has another saying, “China is stealing our stuff!” “China and the others are stealing our stuff, and it is causing the erosion of the lethality of the joint force,” said Air Force Maj. Gen. Thomas E. Murphy, who is the director of the Protecting Critical Technology Task Force of the Department of Defense (DoD).

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On October 26, 2019, China enacted a landmark Encryption Law, which will take effect on January 1, 2020. The Encryption Law significantly reshapes the regulatory landscape for commercial encryption, including foreign-made commercial encryption products, but leaves many questions to be answered in future implementing regulations.  In this blog post, we provide a few highlights of the new Encryption Law as enacted.

Import and Export Control Requirements

The Encryption Law establishes an import licensing and export control framework that governs (i) the import of commercial encryption that “may impact national security or the public interest” and “provide an encryption protection function,” and (ii) the export of commercial encryption that “may impact national security or the public interest” or is required by China’s international obligations.  These requirements will not apply to commercial encryption used in “products for consumption by the general population.”  The Encryption Law does not define this term, leaving unclear how this important exemption would work in practice. The list of commercial encryption in scope of this framework will be published by the Ministry of Commerce in conjunction with the SCA and the General Administration of Customs at an unspecified later date (Article 28).

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The loss of technology to strategic competitors has a direct effect on the joint force's lethality, the director of the Defense Department's Protecting Critical Technology Task Force said. And while those technology transfers -- some legal and some not quite -- are almost always unwanted, they've certainly been enabled by a lack of U.S. attention on stopping them, Air Force Maj. Gen. Thomas E. Murphy said during an Association of the U.S. Army forum on Russia and China.

''We are in a competition,'' Murphy said. ''China and the others are stealing our stuff, and it is causing the erosion of the lethality of the joint force.''

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China’s foreign ministry said on Thursday after reports that the United States Department of the Interior had grounded its fleet of Chinese-made drones that it hoped Washington would “stop abusing the concept of national security” and provide a non-discriminatory atmosphere for Chinese companies.

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In an official blog posting dated October 28, Tom Burt, the corporate vice-president of customer security and trust at Microsoft, warned how an alleged Russian state-sponsored espionage group had been tracked attacking sporting organizations ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The advanced persistent threat (APT) hacking group that Microsoft calls Strontium, but is perhaps better known as APT28 or Fancy Bear, has been seen targeting anti-doping authorities and sporting organizations around the world, Burt revealed.

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MI5 and GCHQ have warned universities that their research and computer systems could be at risk from Beijing spies hidden among Chinese students on campus. The agencies fear that relying on Chinese money from students, especially postgraduates who pay up to £50,000 a year in fees, has made certain universities particularly at risk. Roughly 500 Chinese military scientists have had stints at UK universities over the past ten years, including some who worked on jet aircraft, supercomputers, missiles and a thin film that could be used to disguise tanks.

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Brian Harker froze when he opened the emailed photo from his sales representative. The image, he said, showed Harker’s Grip-Tite sockets for sale on the shelves of a Tractor Supply store, something Harker had never authorized. There was only one way Harker could fathom that his product was for sale at Tractor Supply without his knowledge: A Chinese company had gone around him. Harker is an American tool inventor based in South Bend, Ind. In 2013, he signed a deal with Chinese manufacturing giant Hangzhou GreatStar Industrial to make tools based on his designs, but GreatStar was not allowed to sell the products without Harker’s permission.

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MI5 and GCHQ have warned universities to put national security before commercial interest as fears grow over state theft of research and intellectual property from campuses. The agencies are concerned that a reliance on Chinese money and students, particularly postgraduates paying up to £50,000 a year in fees, makes some universities particularly vulnerable. They are also urging chancellors to ensure that research and funding partnerships with Beijing do not compromise academic freedom or make campuses an “easy route for a hostile nation”.

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The US trade war is meant in part to punish China for allowing intellectual property theft, but the Trump administration might not be convinced it goes far enough. Washington Post sources claim that White House advisor Peter Navarro is exploring a presidential executive order that would put Chinese companies on the Commerce Department's entity list if they frequently violate American copyrights and patents. A Chinese firm that routinely copies device designs or software features could find itself blacklisted in the US even if it didn't pose a national security threat.

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Wesleyan University has decided not to pursue an invitation to explore opening a college in China, the president of the private liberal arts school said Thursday. President Michael Roth said that he met potential partners in the venture on a recent trip to China and that it became evident their vision for the school did not line up with Wesleyan’s focus on liberal education. “Further conversations with those who proposed the partnership have made it clear that our respective goals could not be sufficiently aligned – not to mention the questions we had around issues of academic freedom and the implications for our home campus,” Roth wrote in a campuswide email.

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Two senior members of Congress, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), asked U.S. intelligence officials late Wednesday to determine whether the Chinese-owned social-networking app TikTok poses “national security risks.” In a letter to Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, the lawmakers questioned TikTok’s data-collection practices and whether the app adheres to censorship rules directed by the Chinese government that could limit what U.S. users see. TikTok, which provides users a feed of short videos, has become wildly popular among teenagers worldwide.

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The Trump administration is divided over how aggressively to restrict China’s access to United States technology as it looks for ways to protect national security without undercutting American industry. President Trump and many of his top advisers have identified China’s technological ambitions as a national security threat and want to limit the type of American technology that can be sold overseas. But a plan to do just that has encountered stiff resistance from some in the administration, who argue that imposing too many constraints could backfire and undermine American industry.

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China has accepted tougher academic limits over its Confucius Institutes, crafting a new model that some analysts believe could help stem a string of cancellations by US universities. In a two-year contract renewal with Tufts University, the Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes accepted repeated references to the host university’s supervision over the institutes’ non-credit courses in Chinese language and culture.

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From: United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Indiana

HAMMOND – Dr. Qingyou Han, 61, of West Lafayette, Indiana, pled guilty today to committing the criminal felony offense of wire fraud, before U.S. District Court Judge Philip P. Simon. Dr. Han’s wife, Lu Shao, 53, of Lakewood, Ohio, also pled guilty, on behalf of her company Hans Tech, LLC (“Hans Tech”), to participating in the same wire fraud scheme. 

The charging documents in the case allege that Dr. Han, a Purdue University professor and the Director of its Center for Materials Processing Research, devised a scheme to defraud the National Science Foundation (“NSF”) into giving Hans Tech over $1.3 million in research grants through its Small Business Innovation Research (“SBIR”) and Small Business Technology Transfer (“STTR”) programs by making materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations, promises and material omissions. In pleading guilty, Dr. Han, individually, and Ms. Shao on behalf of Hans Tech, acknowledged that the purpose of the scheme was to obtain grant funds allocated for research and to use some or all of those funds for other purposes, including to pay personal expenses or for the enrichment of Dr. Han, Ms. Shao, or their children.

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A politician-turned-defense official who is trying to shake up the acquisition bureaucracy in the U.S. Department of Defense told contractors they need to better prioritize security in order to do business with the Pentagon, and stifle foreign theft of defense secrets. “This is a change of culture,” Katie Arrington, chief information security officer of the Pentagon’s acquisition policy office, said Wednesday. “It’s going to take time, it’s going to be painful, and it’s going to cost money.”

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The Trump administration will soon require Chinese officials in the United States to notify the State Department ahead of any contacts they plan to have with American educators, researchers and local and state governments.

The release of the new rules was accompanied by notices to American educational and research institutions and local governments informing them of the reporting requirement. The change is effective Wednesday.

State Department officials say the change is made to reciprocate for similar rules faced by U.S. diplomats in China. But, they said the rules are less onerous than China's because the Chinese must approve such contacts. In contrast, the American government will not be requiring any Chinese official to receive permission from the State Department for any of the meetings.

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Germany will not ban Chinese telecoms giant Huawei from helping to build its national 5G networks, snubbing calls from the U.S. to bar the company over national security concerns.

A spokesperson for Germany’s Interior Ministry confirmed in a phone call Wednesday that the decision had been made on Tuesday.

The move is a blow to the U.S., which has been pressuring its allies to exclude Huawei from 5G infrastructure, claiming its presence in the networks would enable Chinese espionage. Countries including Australia and New Zealand have already banned the company from their domestic networks.

Under Chinese law, organizations can be forced to hand over data to the state if requested to do so, but Huawei has repeatedly denied claims that its presence in 5G networks would act as a back door for China.

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If you want to understand what’s happening in the National Basketball Association, turn off SportsCenter and pick up “The Art of War.” More than 2,000 years ago, the Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote that “the skillful strategist defeats the enemy without doing battle, captures the city without laying siege, overthrows the enemy state without protracted war.” That’s how the NBA lost its recent battle with China, and it’s how China has been beating Americans the past few years. Let’s back up.

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For two years reports of mass incarceration have seeped out of the remote Chinese province of Xinjiang. Over 1m people, mainly Uighurs and other Muslim minorities, have been locked up in camps. Millions more live under a police state. American officials, fearful of upending trade negotiations, have dithered over a response. On October 7th, three days ahead of the 13th round of talks, they put their foot down. The Commerce Department banned American firms from selling software and hardware to 20 public-security organs. It also blacklisted eight Chinese companies whose products, it says, facilitate the Orwellian surveillance in Xinjiang.

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As the FBI handles the threat of China’s espionage with ever-growing scrutiny, Beijing is rolling back its “Thousand Talents Plan”—an ambitious initiative to attract foreign experts to China. The Thousand Talents Plan, a state recruitment program also known as the “Recruitment Program of Global Experts,” is of particular concern for U.S. officials. Established by the Chinese communist regime in December 2008 to bring academics and researchers to China, the program has been described by the U.S. National Intelligence Council as a means of enabling technology transfer to China from the United States.

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The FBI has been reaching out to colleges and universities across the country as it tries to stem what American authorities portray as the wholesale theft of technology and trade secrets by researchers tapped by China. The breadth and intensity of the campaign emerges in emails The Associated Press obtained through records requests to public universities in 50 states. The emails underscore the extent of U.S. concerns that universities, as recruiters of foreign talent and incubators of cutting-edge research, are particularly vulnerable targets.

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U.S. prosecutors say Hao Zhang is a professor-spy who conspired with a colleague from USC to steal and sell American secrets to the Chinese government and military through a shell company in the Cayman Islands. Zhang’s lawyers will try to show at a trial set for Wednesday in San Jose that his work at one of China’s most prestigious technical universities to develop radio-filtering technology used in mobile phones has always been about advancing scientific knowledge — and not for the benefit of the Chinese state.

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U.S. prosecutors say Hao Zhang is a professor-spy who conspired with a colleague from the University of Southern California to steal and sell American secrets to the Chinese government and military through a shell company in the Cayman Islands. Zhang’s lawyers will try to show at a trial set for Wednesday that his work at one of China’s most prestigious technical universities to develop radio-filtering technology used in mobile phones has always been about advancing scientific knowledge — and not for the benefit of the Chinese state.

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The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) thinks it may have figured out how China’s foreign talents recruitment program is undermining its system for making awards and ensuring ethical behavior by its grantees. In an interview yesterday with Science, Michael Lauer, director of NIH’s extramural research program in Bethesda, Maryland, described a two-pronged strategy that NIH believes China’s Thousand Talents Program has pursued to improperly reap the benefits of NIH-funded research. One entails breaching NIH’s vaunted system of reviewing grant proposals to share information with colleagues in China. The second consists of setting up shadow labs in that country to replicate NIH-funded research.

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The limits to academic freedom imposed by the Chinese state pose risks for the nation’s scholars around the world, for the future progress of its universities and for international institutions linking with Chinese partners, according to the Scholars at Risk network. Obstacles to Excellence: Academic Freedom & China’s Quest for World Class Universities was published in English and Chinese on 24 September by SAR, an organisation based at New York University, which aims to promote academic freedom worldwide.

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After a decade of booming enrollment by students from China, American universities are starting to see steep declines as political tensions between the two countries cut into a major source of tuition revenue. Several universities have reported drops of one-fifth or more this fall in the number of new students from China. To adapt, some schools are stepping up recruiting in other parts of the world and working to hold on to their share of students from China.

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The Trump administration is working to publish new export rules on so-called emerging technologies by the end of the year, Commerce Department officials said on Tuesday. The rules, which were mandated as part of last year‘s Export Control Reform Act are seen as part of a broader strategy to protect sensitive U.S. technology from falling into the hands of China and other adversarial countries. “There will be a number of rules related to emerging technologies that will be published before the end of the calendar year,” Karen NiesVogel, director of the Office of Exporter Services at Commerce‘s Bureau of Industry and Security, said at a public advisory meeting on Tuesday.

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One of America's most recent espionage cases started with a friendly hello over the Internet. It ended with a jury in Virginia finding former CIA officer Kevin Mallory guilty of spying for China. The Mallory case — a rare counterintelligence investigation to go to trial — provides a lesson in how Chinese spies use social media to try to recruit or co-opt Americans. For the head of the Justice Department's National Security Division, John Demers, it also highlights a broader point. "The Chinese," Demers told NPR, "are our No. 1 intelligence threat."

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The legendary former Navy SEAL Adm. William McRaven said at an event on Wednesday that China's technical and defense capabilities were quickly approaching — and sometimes surpassing — those of the US, representing what he called a "holy s---" moment for the US. McRaven, who was the head of Joint Special Operations Command during the 2011 operation on the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's Pakistan compound, said at the Council on Foreign Relations event that "we need to make sure that the American public knows that now is the time to do something" about China's rapid developments in research and technology that threaten US national security.

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Research universities in the United States have felt increasing government pressure to confront the potential theft of intellectual property and national-security secrets from countries like China. Now White House representatives will visit campuses to discuss that effort.

In the next few months, representatives from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will hold meetings at academic institutions to speak with researchers and students about “matters of research security,” according to a letter the office’s director sent on Tuesday to universities and professional organizations. The letter warned about some nations’ “increasingly sophisticated efforts to exploit, influence, and undermine our research activities.”

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The Department announced today the arrest of Zhongsan Liu, who was charged by complaint for his involvement in a conspiracy to fraudulently obtain U.S. visas for Chinese government employees. Liu was arrested today in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and presented this afternoon in Manhattan federal court before the U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang.

“We welcome foreign students and researchers, including from China, but we do not welcome visa fraud – especially on behalf of a government,” said Assistant Attorney General John C. Demers of National Security.  “We will continue to confront Chinese government attempts to subvert American law to advance its own interests in diverting U.S. research and know-how to China.”

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A Chinese professor who taught at the University of Texas appeared before a federal judge in Brooklyn on charges he stole state-of-the-art technology from a Silicon Valley firm while secretly employed by technology giant Huawei, court papers and reports show. Bo Mao, 36, was arrested in Fort Worth, Texas, on Aug. 14 and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud in the theft of a first-of-its-kind drive from CNEX Labs in February 2017, according to the New York Post and the criminal complaint about his arrest.

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In the first few weeks of 2019, 20 engineers from Huawei Technologies arrived in the riverside town of Jiangyin in eastern China on a secret mission. They took up stations at the state-backed Jiangsu Changjiang Electronics Technology, China's largest chip packaging and testing company, where they went to work upgrading the facilities and increasing the site's capacity, ahead of a production surge in the autumn. "These Huawei staff are on-site almost seven days a week, from day to night, nitpicking and reviewing all the details ... demanding strictly that the local company meets global standards as soon as possible," one chip industry executive familiar with the situation told the Nikkei Asian Review. "It's honestly like preparing for wartime."

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The Chinese professor a Silicon Valley startup accused in a civil lawsuit of stealing its trade secrets for Huawei Technologies Co. now faces a federal criminal charge, as the U.S. escalates its crackdown on the telecom giant. Bo Mao, a professor at Xiamen University in China and a visiting professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Arlington, is charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud against a California technology startup to obtain its “property” on behalf of a Chinese telecommunications company.

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Miami Dade College is severing ties with a Chinese government-affiliated language program that has been a target of conservative politicians and groups with concerns over propaganda and censorship. The college announced late Thursday that it will be sunsetting the Confucius Institute, a Mandarin-language program housed on the Wolfson campus, at the end of the semester. Interim college president Rolando Montoya, who was hastily tapped for the temporary position last week, found that dwindling enrollment no longer justified keeping the program.

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One former senior foreign policy official in the Obama administration received messages from someone on LinkedIn offering to fly him to China and connect him with “well paid” opportunities. A former Danish Foreign Ministry official got LinkedIn messages from someone appearing to be a woman at a Chinese headhunting firm wanting to meet in Beijing. Three middle-aged men showed up instead and said they could help the former official gain “great access to the Chinese system” for research. A former Obama White House official and career diplomat was befriended on LinkedIn by a person who claimed to be a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology, with a profile page showing connections to White House aides and ambassadors. No such fellow exists.

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The FBI criminal fraud probe of Kansas University’s Life Sciences Labs follows a 2018 conviction of Chinese-born nationals for stealing $75 million of genetically-modified rice. The FBI began focusing on China’s attempts to steal high-value intellectual property in Kansas after U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement Agents checking bags for the return flight of a Chinese agricultural delegation visiting Kansas, discovered a third of a cup of genetically-modified rice that cost Ventria Biosciences $75 million to develop.

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America’s plan to catch China in the race to deploy super-fast hypersonic weapons may begin in college classrooms. Academic leaders, lawmakers, and military and intelligence officials say Washington needs to take a harder look at the number of Chinese who come to the U.S. to study engineering, aeronautics, astronautics, quantum mechanics and other fields that have direct connections to national security. The massive influx of Chinese students in recent years, they say, has led directly to Beijing’s advantage in the development of hypersonics and other cutting-edge technology — though U.S. officials say privately that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to track individual cases of students gaining specific insights in a given area and then taking that knowledge back home.

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A researcher at the University of Kansas (KU) was indicted today on federal charges of hiding the fact he was working full time for a Chinese university while doing research at KU funded by the U.S. government.

Feng “Franklin” Tao, 47, of Lawrence, Kansas, an associate professor at KU’s Center for Environmentally Beneficial Catalysis (CEBC), is charged with one count of wire fraud and three counts of program fraud.  He was employed since August 2014 by the CEBC, whose mission is to conduct research on sustainable technology to conserve natural resources and energy.

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Federal lawmakers are ramping up pressure on Confucius Institutes hosted by American colleges, even as some of the schools close or announce plans to shutter the Chinese-funded organizations. Following up on a June op-ed by Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, last month Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri pressed two institutions in his state to reconsider their relationships with foreign actors. At least two bills have been introduced in the Senate, one by Grassley, that would crack down on Confucius Institutes in America as part of a broader push to curtail foreign influence.

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The House and Senate have completed work on their respective versions of the annual legislation that updates U.S. defense policy. The bills include numerous proposals related to DOD’s research laboratories, innovation policy, nuclear weapons, research security, and climate change, among other areas. Before the House and Senate departed for August recess, both chambers passed their respective versions of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The annual legislation updates policy for the Department of Defense and National Nuclear Security Administration and always includes numerous provisions bearing on R&D, the nuclear weapons complex, and other science-related matters.

Research Security

In last year’s NDAA, Congress took its first steps toward addressing what the FBI and a number of lawmakers from both parties take to be systematic efforts by rival governments, primarily China’s, to exploit U.S. research and technology through both licit and illicit means. Since then, congressional interest in the subject has grown considerably and proposals for further action have proliferated, a few of which are included in this year’s NDAA bills.

Forums for consultation

The House bill incorporates the Securing American Science and Technology Act, which would establish in statute an interagency committee for coordinating efforts to protect federally funded research from foreign interference and exploitation. It would also call for a new National Academies roundtable devoted to convening stakeholders in the research and security communities. Scientific societies and higher education institutions have backed the provision as an alternative to more restrictive approaches to bolstering research security.

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Twenty-two higher education associations and rights groups today (August 12) released a statement in response to an NPR report earlier this summer about a push by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Institutes of Health, and other government officials to monitor certain Chinese scholars working at US universities. “This move seemingly stems from growing suspicion that the Chinese government is engaged in espionage of American higher education, with the aim of stealing data and intellectual property,” reads the statement, whose signatories include the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). “However, this is an area where the government must tread carefully.”

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The U.S. government's top counterintelligence official has a stark warning for visitors to China: The Chinese government can spy on your smartphones, tablets, and computers. Bill Evanina is director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, a division of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper spoke with him recently about Chinese spying.

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If the United States is going to win the great power competition that is ongoing in the world today, government, industry and academia are going to need to work together just as they did in helping this country triumph in World War II and the Cold War. That was the message Dr. Michael Griffin, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, delivered to a capacity crowd of Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Division Newport employees and dignitaries on July 22.

Among those in attendance were Senator Jack Reed, the Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee; Rear Adm. Eric Ver Hage, Commander, Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) Warfare Centers; Don McCormack, SES, Executive Director, NAVSEA Warfare Centers; NUWC Division Newport Commanding Officer Capt. Michael Coughlin; Brown University President Dr. Christina Paxson; and Dr. Donald DeHayes, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Rhode Island.

“Today, we see more separation between the university and government than we should want,” Griffin, who has experience working in all three sectors, said. “We see more separation between industry and university, and we see a more adversarial relationship between government and industry.”

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President Donald Trump on Monday announced the US would expand its existing sanctions against Venezuela with an executive order banning Americans doing business with President Nicolas Maduro's government.

The executive order freezes assets of the government of Venezuela and associated entities and prohibits economic transactions with it, unless specifically exempted. Exemptions include official business of the federal government and transactions related to the provision of humanitarian aid.

It marks an escalation from the already expansive US measures against the Venezuelan government since the start of the country's chaotic political and economic crisis earlier this year. 

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Huawei Technologies Co., the Chinese tech giant embroiled in President Trump’s trade war with China and blacklisted as a national security threat, secretly helped the North Korean government build and maintain the country’s commercial wireless network, according to internal documents obtained by The Washington Post and people familiar with the arrangement.

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UC San Diego professor Shirley Meng’s laboratory is a veritable United Nations of research, with 48 scholars from six countries exploring how to improve battery storage for electric vehicles, robots and — someday — flying cars. But Meng and her colleagues worry that one country soon will be left out of the lab: China. The Trump administration has intensified its crackdown over trade, technology and security — and now it has spread to America’s vaunted universities, turning the University of California into an especially big target.

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Two years ago, the director of the National Institutes of Health hailed genetic research from Emory University as a promising advance in the quest to treat Huntington’s disease, a devastating neurological disorder. A Chinese-born couple, Xiao-Jiang Li and Shihua Li, both Emory professors, were among the authors of the study on gene editing in mice. NIH Director Francis S. Collins called the results “reassuring news” as scientists explore the “potential curative power” of gene editing. Published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the study was a prime display of the globalization of science and the deep Chinese connections to U.S. higher education.

Now, the Lis are booted from Emory, their laboratory shuttered, their tale an example of the rising scrutiny of ethnic Chinese scientists that has rattled campuses from coast to coast.

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Mounting efforts by U.S. lawmakers and agencies to prevent federally funded research from being exploited by foreign governments have elicited increasing pushback from university leaders.

Lawmakers have been developing proposals throughout this year to respond to the allegedly systematic misappropriation of U.S. research and technology by the Chinese government and other rival nations. Backers of some of these proposals are currently vying to include them in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), major defense policy legislation that Congress by tradition passes annually.

One proposal that has broad support from higher education associations and scientific societies would establish mechanisms to facilitate dialogue between security agencies and the scientific community. Other proposals would require the government to compile lists of foreign research institutions that it believes pose an espionage risk. Still other, more aggressive measures have been floated in Congress but are not presently close to becoming law, such as increasing the vetting of research grantees.

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A California-based electrical engineer has been found guilty of attempting to export sensitive military electronics to China and could face more than two centuries behind bars.

Yi-Chi Shih, 64—a part-time professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)—was convicted on 18 federal charges last week, linked to a plot to illegally obtain microchips from an American company and export them to China, where they could be used in a range of military systems including missiles and fighter jets.

The Department of Justice announced Tuesday that Shih faces a faces a statutory maximum sentence of 219 years in prison. A co-defendant—Kiet Ahn Mai of Pasadena, California—had already pleaded guilty to smuggling charges linked to the plan in December.

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Click here to view the Press Release from the Department of Justice.

U.S. intelligence agencies are encouraging American research universities to develop protocols for monitoring students and visiting scholars from Chinese state-affiliated research institutions, as U.S. suspicion toward China spreads to academia.

Since last year, FBI officials have visited at least 10 members of the Association of American Universities, a group of 62 research universities, with an unclassified list of Chinese research institutions and companies.

Universities have been advised to monitor students and scholars associated with those entities on American campuses, according to three administrators briefed at separate institutions. FBI officials have also urged universities to review ongoing research involving Chinese individuals that could have defense applications, the administrators say.

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As more and more Chinese universities and institutions are added to United States government lists to control exports and other exchanges, including research, universities are becoming more nervous about falling foul of the rules. 

The move by the Bureau of Industry and Security of the US Department of Commerce to add Chinese institutions to its ‘Entity List’ is seen as a way for the US to protect the transfer of ‘sensitive’ technologies. For some universities it means extra paperwork, while others could be deterred from collaborating with listed Chinese universities or from university-industry collaborations for fear of inadvertently breaking the rules. 

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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration added five Chinese entities to a United States blacklist on Friday, further restricting China’s access to American technology and stoking already high tensions before a planned meeting between President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China in Japan next week.

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China’s leaders are investing billions of dollars every year in high-tech surveillance.  China has turned the Xinjiang region in its far west into an incubator for automated authoritarianism that could spread across the country and beyond.

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WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Commerce Department said on Wednesday it is adding Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and 70 affiliates to its so-called “Entity List” - a move that bans the telecom giant from buying parts and components from U.S. companies without U.S. government approval. 

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WASHINGTON — President Trump moved on Wednesday to ban American telecommunications firms from installing foreign-made equipment that could pose a threat to national security, White House officials said, stepping up a battle against China by effectively barring sales by Huawei, the country’s leading networking company.

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Click here to view the Executive Order.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A former State Department employee who held a top-secret clearance pleaded guilty Wednesday to misleading investigators about her contacts with Chinese intelligence agents.

Court documents accuse Candace Marie Claiborne, 63, of knowingly supplying information to Chinese intelligence agents in exchange for “tens of thousands of dollars in gifts and benefits” over a five-year period. 

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Spying for the state is a duty of the citizens and corporations of China under the law, much like paying taxes.

Last week, the Supreme Court of British Columbia set a hearing date in extradition proceedings against Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, bringing her one step closer to being sent to the United States for trial. This is a make-or-break moment for Huawei’s international ambitions — and perhaps China’s — if only because the company is widely tipped to lead the world in soon-to-debut fifth-generation (5G) technologies.

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A newly released letter from a government watchdog has shed a little light on an ongoing U.S. government effort to scrutinize federally funded biomedical research for potentially problematic foreign involvement.

The letter reveals that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, recently asked federal investigators to review 12 allegations of rule violations, mostly involving researchers at U.S. universities who allegedly failed to disclose foreign affiliations on their grant proposals.

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Washington (CNN): In August 2015, an electrical engineering student in Chicago sent an email to a Chinese national titled "Midterm test questions."

More than two years later, the email would turn up in an FBI probe in the Southern District of Ohio involving a suspected Chinese intelligence officer who authorities believed was trying to acquire technical information from a defense contractor.

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The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) today announced a settlement of $996,080 with e.l.f. Cosmetics, Inc. (“ELF”) of Oakland, California.  ELF has agreed to settle its potential civil liability for 156 apparent violations of the North Korea Sanctions Regulations, 31 C.F.R. part 510 (NKSR).  The apparent violations involved the importation of false eyelash kits from two suppliers located in the People’s Republic of China that contained materials sourced by these suppliers from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  OFAC determined that ELF voluntarily self-disclosed the apparent violations and that the apparent violations constitute a non-egregious case.

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Click here to view the Web Notice (PDF).

Multiwire Laboratories, Ltd. of Ithaca, NY

BIS has notified the respondent of its intention to initiate an administrative proceeding pursuant to EAR Part 766.3. Specifically, BIS believes that Multiwire committed the following two violations:

Charge 1-2: 15 C.F.R. Part 764.2(a): Engaging in Prohibited Conduct.  Specifically, Multiwire exported Real-Time Back Reflection Laue Camera Detectors and Accessories, designated EAR99, to the University of Electronic Science and Technology China in Chengdu, China, without the required BIS licenses. The Chinese entity was at all relevant times listed on the EAR's Entity List. Multiwire did not have an export control compliance program.

Civil penalty of $80,000.

Date of Order: 16 Jan 2019.

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Students and faculty at the University of California (UC) have been warned not to use messaging apps and social media while visiting China, for fear their communications could be used against them by the country's law enforcement agencies.

The guidance from one of the biggest school networks in the US is the latest concern to be raised over Western travel to China following the December 1 arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at the request of US authorities. 

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Polish authorities detained an employee of Chinese tech giant Huawei and charged him with spying on behalf of China, amid growing global concerns that the company is tied to Chinese intelligence agencies, Polish authorities said Friday.

The arrest of Huawei’s local sales director in Poland comes a month after the company’s chief financial officer was detained in Canada at the U.S. government’s request. Those charges were related to breaking sanctions against Iran, but the Polish move reflects long-standing suspicions by Washington and its allies that Huawei could be used as an arm of Chinese intelligence services.

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“Last year He Jiankui, an academic from Shenzhen, edited the genomes of embryos without proper regard for their post-partum welfare—or that of any children they might go on to have. Chinese artificial-intelligence (ai) researchers are thought to train their algorithms on data harvested from Chinese citizens with little oversight. In 2007 China tested a space-weapon on one of its weather satellites, littering orbits with lethal space debris. Intellectual-property theft is rampant.  The looming prospect of a dominant, rule-breaking, high-tech China alarms Western politicians, and not just because of the new weaponry it will develop. Authoritarian governments have a history of using science to oppress their own people. China already deploys ai techniques like facial recognition to monitor its population in real time. The outside world might find a China dabbling in genetic enhancement, autonomous ais or geoengineering extremely frightening.  These fears are justified. A scientific superpower wrapped up in a one-party dictatorship is indeed intimidating.”  

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• The U.S. case against the chief financial officer of China's Huawei, who was arrested in Canada last month, centers on the company's suspected ties to two obscure companies.
• U.S. authorities allege CFO Meng Wanzhou deceived international banks into clearing transactions with Iran by claiming the two companies were independent of Huawei, when in fact Huawei controlled them.
• Huawei, U.S. authorities assert, retained control of Skycom, using it to sell telecom equipment to Iran and move money out via the international banking system.

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