https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/the-thousand-traitors-program?utm_source=Natio
Charles Lieber was recently charged with “making a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement” to the Department of Defense. Lieber, Chair of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, allegedly lied repeatedly to federal investigators about his participation in China’s “Thousand Talents Program,” and in particular about his collaboration with Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) as a “Strategic Scientist.” Lieber’s case is the latest in a slew of reports about proven and suspected Chinese infiltration of America’s universities.
Lieber is a titan in his field. In 2011, his “citation impact score” led Thomson Reuters to rank him the top chemist of the 2000s. Lieber is internationally recognized as a pioneer of nanotechnology, has been awarded a bevy of academic prizes, and has taught at Harvard since 2011, where he leads the Lieber Research Group. He and his collaborators possess more than 35 patents; he has also founded two nanotechnology companies.
Lieber’s great success made him a natural target of China’s “Thousand Talents Program” (TTP), a “talent recruitment program” launched by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2008. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’ Threats to the U.S. Research Enterprise: China’s Talent Recruitment Plans warns that “the Chinese Communist Party is able to ‘exert exceptional’ levels of control” over the TTP, and reports that China may have signed more than 7,000 foreign scientists and engineers to lucrative employment contracts—exceeding its original recruitment goal of 2,000 more than threefold. TTP paid Lieber “$50,000 USD per month, living expenses of up to 1,000,000 Chinese Yuan (approximately $158,000 USD at the time) and … more than $1.5 million to establish a research lab at WUT.” That’s on top of his salary from Harvard.
