The Chinese Communist Party believes in psychological warfare operations and other forms of subversion to strangle you with your own systems. In other words, they observing how different countries operate, what is controversial within their systems, how does their systems function and how they can use those systems.
They believe in twisting things around to cause chaos to mess things up and to use the chaos against you. You believe in free speech so they will have protests in your own backyard and call you out. You say you believe in free press and they will start up state-run media in your country and spread their propaganda.
You believe in free markets and they will bring state-run companies that can sell below cost and put your companies out of business and take over your industries.
They can use racism and they have been doing it for a long time. Every time a Chinese spy is arrested, they call it racism because they know we are sensitive over it, never mind their own horrible record.
Chinese military has a doctrine on this three warfare’s doctrine, psychological warfare, media warfare and legal warfare. This is a publicly adopted into their military system.
Psychological warfare is not necessarily lying to you. Psychological warfare is altering how you interpret information. And so when you see a virus coming out of China, people say this virus came out of China. If you call it the Chinese virus they want to use this twisted around and say it is racist. If you talk about the origin of the virus they say you started it.
Media warfare is the manipulation or control about lots of information not just news outlets, but social media, online platforms and the ability to speak openly. Anything that would allow people to communicate.
Legal warfare is the manipulation of the international legal system.
This is war fighting.
Subversion of Education System
When it comes to the education system, the universities and research centres, it is no different. The Chinese use your own resources and your talent to their own advantage.
The US National Institute of Health (NIH) has been on the forefront of federal efforts to identify and block behavior that many U.S. government officials say poses a significant threat to the country’s economic well-being and to national security. Several bills pending in Congress seek to limit that threat in various ways, including by limiting the flow of scientific talent from China to the United States, and by restricting access to federally funded research that provides a foundation for cutting-edge technologies and new industries.
The Case of Charles Lieber. The arrest of Charles Lieber, the former chair of the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard in January on allegations that he hid his involvement in China’s Thousand Talents Plan has set the proverbial cat among the pigeons.
Charles Lieber was arrested in January on allegations that he hid his association with China’s Thousand Talents Plan, a program designed to recruit people with knowledge of foreign technology and intellectual property to China. U.S. claims this as intellectual property theft and corporate espionage orchestrated by Beijing.
Charles Lieber, 61, was paid $50,000 a month by the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China under his Thousand Talents Program contract and awarded more than $1.5 million to establish a research laboratory at the Chinese university. Lieber,in exchange had agreed to apply for patents and do other work on behalf of the Chinese university.
During his questioning, Lieber lied about ties to both the university and the program, denying any involvement in the program. When the National Institutes of Health (NIH) questioned Harvard about Lieber, the professor caused the school to falsely report that Lieber “is not and has never been a participant in” China’s Thousand Talents Plan, prosecutors said.
Undisclosed Grants. The National Institutes of Health has been investigating grantees suspected of not disclosing their ties to foreign institutions and companies, most notably the ones from China. The National Association of Scholars has detailed the effects on higher education of China’s Confucius Institutes, and China’s Thousand Talents Program has also come under scrutiny in institutions ranging from Harvard to West Virginia University for its use as a means to purloin America’s scientific research.
About 115 colleges got monetary gifts, contracts or both from sources in mainland China in the six and a half years through June, according to a Bloomberg analysis of U.S. government data. The leader was Harvard University, which pulled in $93.7 million, the majority as gifts. The University of Southern California and University of Pennsylvania were second and third.
Some 54 scientists have resigned or been fired as a result of this and the investigation continues. In 93% of these cases, the hidden funding came from a Chinese institution.
The new numbers come from Michael Lauer, NIH’s head of extramural research. Lauer had previously provided some information on the scope of NIH’s investigation, which had targeted 189 scientists at 87 institutions. But his presentation today to a senior advisory panel offered by far the most detailed breakout of an effort NIH launched in August 2018 that has roiled the U.S. biomedical community, and resulted in criminal charges against some prominent researchers, including Charles Lieber, chair of Harvard University’s department of chemistry and chemical biology.
“It’s not what we had hoped, and it’s not a fun task,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in characterizing the ongoing investigation. He called the data “sobering.”
One university received research funding from a Chinese multinational conglomerate to develop new algorithms and advance biometric security techniques for crowd surveillance capabilities.
Another had multiple contracts with the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China.
Another university accepted funds from the arm of a foreign government to create an “academic” centre expressly for the dissemination of propaganda and to conduct other “soft power” information activities.
In the vast majority of cases, Lauer reported, the person being investigated has been an Asian man in his 50s. Some three-quarters of those under investigation had active NIH grants, and nearly half had at least two grants. The 285 active grants totaled $164 million. Some 70% (133) of the researchers had failed to disclose to NIH the receipt of a foreign grant, and 54% had failed to disclose participation in a foreign talent program.
Financial Opacity
Under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, US institutions of higher education are not barred from accepting money from, or entering into contracts with foreign governments, companies, persons or their agents. But, with limited exceptions, they are required to disclose transparently their foreign money and contracts to the department.
The Department of Education said many profit/non-profit universities are multi-billion, multi-national enterprises operating, inter alia, via financially opaque foreign campuses, captive companies and other structures to generate revenue, including from foreign sources.
The Department believes the investigations have raised concerns that “at least some institutions of higher education appear to believe their disclosure and transparency obligations to the US government and US taxpayers must be qualified by their desire to expand financial relationships with foreign governments, corporations and persons, including anonymous foreign donors”.
The department found that the universities use sophisticated methods for soliciting, managing and tracking grants, contributions and contracts over time and from many thousands of sources, foreign and domestic, but it appears they have not deployed similar systems with respect to reporting under the provisions enshrined under Section 117.
Universities solicit foreign governments, persons, companies and corporations in a variety of ways, including institutional fundraising operations, quasi-entrepreneurial initiatives by professors and administrators, and foundations and alumni organisations.
But some of these foreign governments and corporations are hostile to the United States and may be seeking to project ‘soft power’, steal sensitive and proprietary research and development data and other intellectual property, and spread propaganda.
It also raised concern about the higher education sector’s “poor cyber-security record and posturing”, on which it ranked 17th out of 17 industries ranked by the information technology security company Security Scorecard.
Evidence from at least one of the institutions undergoing investigation suggests foreign campuses’ IT networks are interconnected with the domestic IT networks, with the possibility that foreign persons might have access to the institution of higher education’s entire information domain.
This creates a risk that students and faculty on foreign campuses may be able to circumvent US government vetting mechanisms while retaining substantially unrestricted access to institutions of higher education information networks.
The number of Chinese students at U.S. universities has tripled over the last decade. China currently accounts for one-third of the 1.1 million foreign students enrolled in the U.S, according to data from 2018-19 compiled by the Institute of International Education.
Chinese students have helped to diversify the makeup of US student bodies and they often contribute positively in the classroom and make real contribution in joint research projects.
But the sheer size of the Chinese student population at US universities presents a major challenge for law enforcement and intelligence agencies tasked with striking the necessary balance between protecting America’s open academic environment and mitigating the risk to national security.
Rather than having trained spies attempt to infiltrate US universities and businesses, Chinese intelligence services have strategically utilized members of its student population to act as “access agents” or “covert influencers,” according to Joe Augustyn, a former CIA officer with firsthand knowledge of the issue from his time at the agency.
“In China, only the government can grant someone permission to leave the country to study or work in the United States and we have seen the Chinese government use their power over their citizens to, in
some cases, encourage those citizens to commit acts of scientific or industrial espionage to the benefit of the Chinese government,” he told CNN.
The ruling Communist Party in China has tightened its grip over all aspects of Chinese society, including academia, under President Xi Jinping, who has routinely said that “the Party exercises overall leadership over all areas of endeavor in every part of the country.”
The Chinese government has pushed back strongly against these accusations, claiming they are rooted in racism and McCarthyism.
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The Case of Ji Chaoqun
Beijing is leaning on expatriate Chinese scientists, businessmen and roughly 35,000 students from China who study in the US every year to gain access to anything and everything at American universities and companies that’s of interest to Beijing.
In August 2015, Ji Chaoqun, a Chinese electrical engineering student on F1 visa for international students, in Chicago, sent an email to a Chinese national titled “Midterm test questions.”
Two years later, the FBI, while probing a suspected Chinese intelligence officer who authorities believed was trying to acquire technical information from a defense contractor in Ohio identified Ji as enlisted in the US Army Reserve. His email had nothing to do with exams but instead Ji had attached background reports on eight US-based individuals who Beijing could target for potential recruitment as spies, all at the direction of a high-level Chinese intelligence official.
The eight — naturalized US citizens originally from Taiwan or China — had worked in science and technology. Seven had worked for or recently retired from US defense contractors. The complaint says all of them were perceived as rich targets for a new form of espionage that China has been aggressively pursuing to win a silent war against the US for information and global influence.
Ji was arrested in September 2018, accused of acting as an “illegal agent” at the direction of a “high-level intelligence officer” of a provincial department of the Ministry of State Security, China’s top espionage agency. He was formally indicted by a grand jury on 24 January 2019. He pleaded not guilty.
The Chinese had taken advantage of US law, which permits foreign nationals to be recruited in the US Army Reserve if their skills are considered “vital to the national interest.”
Ji’s case demonstrates how China uses people from all walks of life with increasing frequency.
For more than a decade, US law enforcement and intelligence officials have raised internal concerns about US universities becoming soft targets for foreign intelligence services that use students and staff to access emerging technologies.
Rather than having trained spies attempt to infiltrate US universities and businesses, Chinese intelligence services have strategically utilized members of its student population to act as “access agents” or “covert influencers.”
The Chinese government has pushed back strongly against these accusations, claiming they are rooted in racism and McCarthyism. Chinese state media has highlighted several high-profile cases of wrongly accused Chinese-American scientists to bolster the government’s claims that US concerns are vastly overstated.
