Skip to comments.
University Of Arkansas Professor Arrested For Concealing Ties To China, The Fifth Case In The Past Year
Hotair ^
| 05/12/2020
| John Sexton
Posted on 05/12/2020 9:04:44 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Last Friday an engineering professor at the University of Arkansas was arrested for concealing his connections with China even as he was receiving grant money from NASA. Dr. Simon Ang was part of a Chinese effort to pay American academics to share their research in China known as the Thousand Talents program. Dr. Ang is at least the fifth professor who has been arrested in connection with the Thousand Talents program in the past year:
Simon Ang of the University of Arkansas, was arrested on Friday and charged on Monday with wire fraud. He worked for and received funding from Chinese companies and from the Thousand Talents program, which awards grants to scientists to encourage relationships with the Chinese government, and he warned an associate to keep his affiliation with the program quiet, court papers said.
He kept the financial arrangements secret, allowing him to secure other grants from American government agencies, including NASA, that the Chinese funding made him ineligible for, according to court documents.
The other professor, Dr. Xiao-Jiang Li, a former professor at Emory University in Atlanta, pleaded guilty on Friday to a felony charge of filing a false tax return that omitted about $500,000 that he received from the Thousand Talents program. He was sentenced to a year of probation and ordered to pay $35,089 in restitution.
Dr. Xiao-Jiang Li, the professor Dr. Ang allegedly told to keep quiet, was fired (along with his wife) from Emory University last May. The government claimed that they had both failed to disclose funding from China, but at the time Dr. Xiao-Jiang denied that he had done anything wrong:
Li Xiao-Jiang disputed Emorys claim, made in a university statement yesterday, that the two researchers had failed to fully disclose foreign sources of research funding and the extent of their work for research institutions and universities in China.
I have disclosed my Chinese research activity to Emory University each year since 2012, Li Xiao-Jiang said. I have provided documents requested by Emory University during the investigation of my research activity in China since early November 2018. He also stated that he has not received any copy of investigation that was sent to NIH by Emory, though I have requested Emory to give it to me.
Now that he has pleaded guilty to leaving $500,000 off his income taxes its clear he was lying through his teeth all along.
Similarly, last August University of Kansas professor Franklin Tao was accused of signing and then hiding a five-year contract to work at a Chinese university. He has also denied any wrongdoing. A superseding indictment was filed against Tao in January. Taos attorney is apparently telling a very different story about what happened:
A motion to dismiss the original indictment filed by Taos attorneys on Nov. 17 claims that a disgruntled, unpaid visiting scholar at KU tried to extort $300,000 from Tao, then hacked into his email and fabricated complaints to KU and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Tao is on administrative leave from his position as a professor of chemical engineering, KU spokesperson Andy Hyland says.
In January of this year, Dr. Charles Lieber of Harvard was arrested for failing to disclose payments from China of $50,000 per month from the Thousand Talents Program. Dr. Lieber is also on administrative leave.
And in February, associate professor Anming Hu was arrested and charged with hiding his connection to a university in Beijing even as he worked at the University of Tennessee.
Thats all the arrests of professors that Im aware of but there have been similar cases involving Chinese nationals who were looking to use their positions for espionage. Last November, Hongjin Tan pleaded guilty to stealing information from Phillips 66:
Hongjin Tan, 36, stole information regarding the manufacture of a research and development downstream energy market product that is worth more than $1 billion, the department said in a statement. The department identified the company where he worked as Phillips 66 in court documents filed in Oklahoma
An FBI affidavit said Phillips 66 called the agency in December 2018 to report the theft of trade secrets, around the same time that Tan told a former co-worker he was going back to China. Tan was arrested before he could return.
All of this makes me wonder how many more professors and researchers out there have not been caught yet. Clearly its a lot easier for China to simply offer to buy trade secrets and academic research than it is to try to send spies to get it for them.
TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: arkansas; china; spying; university
To: SeekAndFind
360,000 Red Chinese foreign exchange students are attending U.S. universities.
Gee, what could go wrong ?
2
posted on
05/12/2020 9:12:14 PM PDT
by
BrexitBen
To: SeekAndFind
Universities hiding ties to Communist China have been getting much attention recently. Rightfully so. But, in my opinion just as important is MSM parent companies’ and other corporate entities’ ties to Communist China.
The NBA overtly siding with China against our own country is but one example. Another is politicians and “news” outlets doing the same.
There are many other examples of this such as, the Board of Directors for the Retired Military Pension Fund investing BILLIONS of dollars in Communist China.
3
posted on
05/12/2020 9:14:01 PM PDT
by
ocrp1982
To: BrexitBen
“360,000 Red Chinese foreign exchange students are attending U.S. universities.”
I gave a talk at a security conference which include a portion about the Chinese threat and that it wasn’t a cyber threat. They’ve had a physical presence all over the world for decades, and the goal has to been to acquire intellectual property for China and they are not just students who land engineering and scientist jobs in the west, but also those who run that innocent small business in your town.
The above portion of the talk was met with silence because it was in an academic setting, but several IT and infosec people came up to me later and told me they agreed with me. The warning was sounded but not heeded and by others too.
4
posted on
05/12/2020 9:18:46 PM PDT
by
ConsCA
To: SeekAndFind
If we execute a Red Chinese spy or saboteur, can we call it “Chinese Carry-Out”?
To: SeekAndFind
The other professor, Dr. Xiao-Jiang Li, a former professor at Emory University in Atlanta, pleaded guilty on Friday to a felony charge of filing a false tax return that omitted about $500,000 that he received from the Thousand Talents program. He was sentenced to a year of probation and ordered to pay $35,089 in restitution.So he makes a $465,000 profit and does no time. I'm sure that stiff sentence will deter future criminal activity by other professors.
To: Oshkalaboomboom
I posted this on another thread a while back. Fits here too:
Because they are still in the employ of China and are expected to be spies and steal technology while they are here. Get. Them. Out!
Here is a first person testimonial. Mine. I am retired from working at a major IL University (UIC). I now live in FL, not IL, thank goodness as Gov. Pricker reigns supreme in his IL Democrat wonderland. I worked directly for the Head of the Math Dept. at UIC, located right beside the heart of the City.
We had professors of many nationalities from all over the world. The mostly all liberal professors in our Dept. loved hiring Mathematicians from other countries over hiring Mathematicians from our own Country. Chinese students and professors seeking employment in the U.S. naturally navigated to the Sciences because they could steal our intellectual property and mathematical research and ferry this information back to China. They are almost all spies for China. One professor in particular I just knew was tied into the Chinese govt and he was one of our more senior profs. They get permanent resident Green Cards, but seldom become actual American citizens. He was like a traveling ping pong ball between Chicago where UIC is located, and China. Reporting back to his true masters in Beijing.
As an aside, many Chinese students also choose primarily the Sciences as vocations because so many of them speak the English language so poorly. Language is less important in the Sciences where you deal with number theory, experiments, projects, etc. Chinatown in Chicago was a 10 minute spit away from the UIC campus, thus creating a huge pool of Chinese students seeking out their education at UIC.
In our Math Dept. there were large numbers of Chinese graduate students, and it was the same in all of the Science Depts, soft and hard. Biology, Statistics, Chemistry, Robotics, Computers, Engineering, Medicine, you name it, the Chinese were studying it, and you better believe many of them were being subsidized in their educations by money from the Chinese govt. The enemy within.
I might add that the Sciences were also very attractive to students from the Middle East. Lots of students from Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. Our American Universities are an unwatched and dangerous pot of foreign students who pay the hard cash that Universities love, paying full freight, and also getting grants, loans, and funding at the expense of our own American students. Asians are considered minorities, and they, foreign or otherwise, along with Blacks and Hispanics from the U.S. and any country are given preference over Whites. I know this firsthand.
Too many of our major Universities today are cesspools of liberal ideology and foreign influence from those that do not have U.S. interests in mind. These Universities need to be cleaned out and shaped up big time; I ought to know; I worked amongst the ideological enemy at a large one for many years.
7
posted on
05/12/2020 11:45:12 PM PDT
by
flaglady47
(Donald Trump, President for Life)
To: flaglady47
"Too many of our major Universities today are cesspools of liberal ideology and foreign influence from those that do not have U.S. interests in mind. These Universities need to be cleaned out and shaped up big time" Absolutely correct.
To: flaglady47
9
posted on
05/13/2020 2:41:27 AM PDT
by
EBH
(May God Save Our Freedom from our enemies within)
To: flaglady47; LS
Ping. I think youll find flaglady47s post unsurprising.
10
posted on
05/13/2020 3:38:23 AM PDT
by
FreedomPoster
(Islam delenda est)
To: SeekAndFind
Dr. Simon Ang??? Yep, ancestors came over on the Mayflower.
Makes one wonder: What on earth was the hook that enabled the Chicoms to buy him off?
11
posted on
05/13/2020 5:38:09 AM PDT
by
odawg
To: flaglady47
At the U of Dayton (a Marianist Catholic U supposedly) toward the end of my tenure in summer school fully half my students would be Chinese or Arab.
It was so bad that on the mall between classes, virtually the ONLY students visible were large groups of Arab men with women fully clad in burquas.
No effort whatsoever was made to evangelize them.
12
posted on
05/13/2020 6:30:46 AM PDT
by
LS
("Castles made of sand, fall in the sea . . . eventually" (Hendrix))
To: LS; MinuteGal
UIC being right next to downtown Chicago (what they call the “loop” area because of the CTA elevated trains that run in circles around the heart of the City) has been a breeding ground for foreign students in this Democratically controlled city for years. Now that Mayor Light in the Loafers is in control, the City is about as far leftist as you can get.
On the UIC campus, there is a huge contingent of Palestinian students who are basically radical terrorists in the making. I used to sit in my office in the Math Dept. where I worked (Ass’t to Dept. Head), and watch the Pali students (who were very well organized) parade past my window (I was on the second floor of a multi floor building, and I had a clear look at the shenanigans that periodically passed by). I had a birds-eye view of these Pali’s parading around in a long column, signs up advertising their grievance du jour, chanting, bull horning, and making a general nuisance of themselves.
At least the Chinese students didn’t band together and do group demonstrations like the radical Muzzie organizations did. They were too busy stealing our trade and patent secrets and passing them on to their true masters back home in China.
13
posted on
05/13/2020 8:17:36 PM PDT
by
flaglady47
(Donald Trump, President for Life)
Disclaimer:
Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual
posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its
management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the
exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson