This is one of those “make of it what you will” stories.
In July of 2020, the Trump administration began a crackdown on Chinese intelligence activities in the United States.
The Trump administration is intensifying U.S. pressure on China, piling on visa bans, sanctions and other restrictions that are battering already unsettled ties between the world’s two largest economies.
Attorney General William Barr, in a speech Thursday, warned U.S. businesses that they are at risk of collaborating with a Chinese government that ultimately seeks to supplant them in its expanding state-run economy. Administration officials are also discussing banning travel by China’s Communist Party members and their families to the U.S., people familiar with the matter said.
(Photo by Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images)
April 22, 2021
12:11 AM ET
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Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton will re-introduce the SECURE CAMPUS Act on Thursday, his office confirmed to the Daily Caller.
First introduced in 2020, the SECURE CAMPUS Act prohibits Chinese nationals from receiving student or research visas to participate in graduate or post-graduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) studies at American universities. It also imposes more stringent reporting requirements for universities that receive federal funding.
“Allowing China unfettered access to American research institutions is as senseless as granting Soviet scientists access to our critical laboratories during the Cold War. We shouldn’t allow the Chinese Communist Party to exploit the openness of American research institutions any longer. The SECURE CAMPUS Act will help stop Chinese nationals from stealing U.S. technology, which the CCP uses against our own troops and bus
Hunter Biden probe, Gov. Andrew Cuomo nursing home scandal expected to be topics at hearing for attorney general pick Merrick Garland. Jamil Jaffer, director of the National Security Law & Policy Program at George Mason University, with reaction.
Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland concurred Monday with the U.S. intelligence community’s view that China is a threat in certain ways to U.S. interests but declined to say whether he views the country’s leadership in Beijing as an enemy.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. cited remarks from former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who wrote in a Dec. 2020 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that China poses the greatest threat to America today. Blackburn asked Garland if he considered the Chinese Communist Party an enemy of the United States.
On Jan. 6, Zaosong Zheng, a former researcher at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, was ordered to leave the United States and return to China after being charged with lying to federal agents about allegedly smuggling cancer research. Zheng agreed to not return to the U.S. for 10 years.
Zhengâs sentencing, however, marks merely the latest development in an ongoing crackdown by the United States government and American universities on âacademic espionage,â or the transmission of academic research by scientists at American universities to foreign governments. Multiple Harvard affiliates, including former Chemistry Department Chair Charles M. Lieber, have been subject to criminal proceedings due to alleged misbehavior.
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Two recent cases illustrate that the United States government’s push against alleged instances of illicit tech transfer to China continues unabated. On January 14, the U.S. attorney’s office in Massachusetts announced that a mechanical engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was arrested and charged with wire fraud, failing to file a foreign bank account report, and making a false statement in a tax return, in relation to his alleged relationships with Chinese entities. The day before, on January 13, a chief scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center plead guilty to one count of making false statements about his relationship with the Chinese government in the Manhattan federal court in New York.