MIT professor charged with failing to disclose China ties while hitting up US Dept of Energy for research grant An MIT professor has been arrested and charged with federal grant fraud and failing to disclose contacts with the Chinese government, the US Attorney’s Office of Massachusetts said on Thursday. Gang Chen, 56, professor of power engineering in MIT's mechanical engineering department, faces criminal charges of wire fraud, …
Did you read the article? He had an undeclared Chinese bank account. If he was trying to get US funding for his project, it sounds like he was trying to get paid twice for the same work.
What surprises me is that they haven't charged him with being a spy. The story makes it look like he was an almost perfect 'sleeper' but got caught out by border control. Maybe they figure they can mitigate the damage by keeping him in prison rather than let the Chinese gov demand his return to China so they can debrief him for all the other knowledge he has accrued over the years.
There is actually an interesting angle on the Chinese effort to lure researchers from the West, especially those with Chinese ancestry. To understand this angle, you might want to read about the story of the "father of Chinese nuclear program", Quan Xuesen (Hsue-Shen Tsian, 钱学森).
Leave aside whether Quan was a communist. The number one objective in this kind of situation is to prevent him or someone like him to go back to China. The US failed in that for Quan. I am curious how many of the researchers caught in situation of MIT's Chen will eventually make their way back to China. Which, if you think about it, is actually worse than having them stay in the US so that they can be monitored. Flip them if you can. But the worst case is allowing them to go back to China.
So, what is the angle? Well, for the CCP, the ideal outcome is exactly that of Quan: the return of these researchers. How they get their way back is really not a concern of theirs. So, if along the way they need to let the US government know about the contact, the connection, to accelerate the process, well, that is just one step along the way to get the guy back in China permanently, no? They gain a researcher (a prominent one, in this case). The US lose a prominent researcher. The world loses his future research that will be published or shared with other researchers, as I doubt his research once he is back in China will ever be published openly.
I can talk about the mentality of Overseas Chinese in terms of how they look at China, the West, and the rest of the world. And how that makes them uniquely vulnerable to this kind of effort from China. But that is going to take a long message.
"Chen has been awarded numerous undisclosed contracts and received several appointments from various PRC government officials and entities, many of which are expressly intended to further the PRC’s scientific and technological goals"
Well, yes? Why else would they pay an professor of engineering lots of money to do research, if not to further their scientific and technological goals? Whatever dodgy stuff may or may not have been going on, "They expected to benefit from the work they paid him to do." just doesn't feel like a statement that needs to be made.
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