The dark side of academics’ search for meaning in China

A decade ago, an academic­ colleagu­e in China approache­d Xiao Dong Chen with a suggestion: why not apply for a prestigious­ Thousand Talents scholarship?

Xiao Dong Chen.

A decade ago, an academic­ colleagu­e in China approache­d Xiao Dong Chen with a suggestion: why not apply for a prestigious­ Thousand Talents scholarship?

Professor Chen, an accomp­lished food scientist at Monash University, was in the market for an Australian Research Council fellowship, a lucrative but difficult-to-land grant handed out to the country’s best researchers. The Thousand Talents scholarship, he thought, could be another option.

And it held another promise. Professor Chen was born in China and had moved to Australia in his early 20s, rising to become a manage­r in the sprawling campus hierarchy at Monash. His children spoke little Mandarin and had only a tenuous connection to their homeland. He was looking for something different, and the Thousand Talents was offering that. He applied.

Around the time of that approach­, China was in a particular bind. Its economic and military standing was quickly growing. But its research and higher education infrastructure was woefully under­developed compared with other major powers.

Only three Chinese universit­ies — Tsinghua, Peking and the University of Science and Technol­ogy of China — were in the best 100 in the world, according to the respected Times Higher Education rankings. By comparison, there were five Australian institution­s.

Those rankings are highly dependent on research output and indicated a major gap in Chinese academia. Many of China’s greatest scientists were hard at work — but at Berkeley, MIT, Harvard and, of course, in Australia.

The Thousand Talents Plan, overseen by the overseas high-level talent recruitment work group tied directly to the Chinese government’s Central Committee’s Organisation Department, was established to reverse this.

Professor Chen accepted the scholarship and was quickly at Xiamen University in Fujian, a sprawling province in China’s southeast, where he set about establishin­g a lab.

“The laboratories, certainly the one I went to, were very run down and very backwards, so they really needed people who had exper­ience to bring them up,” he told The Australian. “I (had been) contacted­ by headhunters for a couple of UK universities asking me if I wanted to be like one of those pro-vice-chancellors working on international relationships.

“And I suddenly realised: that’s the career that people see me going into. In fact, I am not really interested in that, I really want to do some solid research.

“I found that my work at Monash­ was fairly stable in a way that I didn’t see would change for quite a long time, and at the time I sort of felt … I could easily spend five or maybe 10 years working in a more challenging place and maybe it would have a bit more meaning.

“I left (China) when I was 22, so really I had very little understanding of the culture and such, and I found my kids couldn’t speak much Chinese, so I thought maybe they could spend a few years in a Chinese school.”

For his move, Professor Chen was given a $200,000 one-off payment­ — for his relocation and to pay for schooling for his children — and a salary that matched his Monash package.

His experience, in the early days of the Thousand Talents Plan, was a good one. Even Aust­ralia, like China, recruits inter­national scientists who are the best in their field and there is no suggestion­ Professor Chen did anything untoward: he was pursuing a legitimate academic opportunity and was completely open with his Australian university.

But, over the past decade, the Thousand Talents Plan has ­morphed into something different. Underneath the collaborations and joint laboratories and exchanges­ that mark the normal course of international research, there is a darker side.

The program is now not only trying to recruit, but actively facilit­ating the transfer of intellectual property — including in sensitive­ defence-related academia and often without the knowledge of the universities where the researchers work.

Only this week, the US Depart­ment of Justice accused NASA scientist Zhendong Cheng of secretly collaborating with a Chinese university and a Chinese-owned company, and charged him with conspiracy, giving false statements and wire fraud.

Professor Cheng, a professor at the Texas A&M College of Engineering, had been employed by the university full-time since 2004. But, the criminal complaint alleges, he was secretly employed by the Guangdong University of Technology from 2012 to 2018.

Professor Cheng had also been appointed to the Southern Universi­ty of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, for which he was paid a salary, housing allowance and travelling allowance.

Had he disclosed these affiliations, NASA said, he would not have been allowed to participate in its research programs.

“The Chinese talent plans are programs established by the Chin­ese government to recruit individuals with access to or knowledge of foreign technology or intellectual property,” the FBI wrote in its affidavit in support of the complaint­.

“Through these plans, the Chin­ese government has created a significant financial incentive for foreign, talented individuals to transfer international technology and intellectual property to China, licitly or otherwise.”

Professor Cheng is only the latest­ academic involved in the Thousand Talents Plan in the US to have had a string of such charges­ laid against him. In February­, authorities arrested their most high-profile target: Harvard chemistry department­ head Charles Liebler.

According to documents outlining the charges, Dr Liebler allegedl­y received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Wuhan University of Technology and agreed to lead a lab there.

When asked by US agencies about his involvement with the program­, he denied any participation or formal affiliation with WUT.

As The Australian revealed this week, dozens of leading scientists at major universities across Australia have also been recruited to the Thousand Talents Plan.

A number of universities — including­ the University of Queensland, the University of NSW and the University of Newcastle — told The Australian that patent­ applications naming their researchers as inventors had been filed and assigned to Chinese universitie­s without the knowledge of the academic.

Other universities said evidence that their academics were in the Thousand Talents Plan or had postings at Chinese univer­sities were wrong, while others quietly indicated they had only become aware of Thousand Talent Plan participation after the departure­ of the researchers.

The University of Technology Sydney said evidence suggesting material chemist Guoxiu Wang was in the Thousand Talents Plan was wrong, and that the title had been given to him as a “sign of ­respect” and was “not meant to litera­lly signify that the academic is part of a formal Chinese government-sponsored program”.

A UTS spokesman said Chin­ese universities’ websites were “not official Chinese government websites” and were “written by the universities themselves”.

One website, which noted that Professor­ Wang was a “recipient of the National Thousand Talents Program”, is maintained by Hubei University; the other by Dongguan University.

UTS also dismissed questions about a number of patent applications assigned to Chinese universities, including Dongguan and the Guangdong University of Technology. Professor Wang had “no knowledge of 10 out of 11 patent­ applications referenced”, a spokesman said.

“We understand that it is not unusual within China for academi­c collaborators to submit patent­ applications associated with published research papers.”

Concerns about intellectual property theft and the Thousand Talents Plan has roiled through the higher education sector in ­recent months. The universities and federal Education Minister Dan Tehan say they are putting in place new measures to prevent foreign interference in the sector — but they are only doing so now.

The Australian Research Council, which is the main funding body for academic grants, says it is working with the office of the National Counter Foreign Interference Co-ordinator.

But the sector’s sensitivities are clear. Many universities simply declined to comment when presented­ with evidence that their academics may have affiliations with Chinese universities, even to confirm that those associations had been disclosed. Having been alerted to The Australian’s work, a Universities Australia staffer repeatedly­ asked for details.

Part of the issue, it appears, is a push by administrators of the Thousand Talents Plan to scrub out the details of participants. Lists of scholars affiliated with the program were removed from governmen­t and institutional websites in China, the respected journal Nature reported in 2018.

The Australian, in its investigation, accessed archival versions of university websites.

The Thousand Talents Plan has also come to the attention of ASIO, which has repeatedly briefed the country’s universities about possible foreign interference and intellectual property theft, as The Australian reported on Tuesday. The agency also expressed­ concerns about some specific academics.

Others are more public with their concerns. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a defence­ think tank run by former Defence Department deputy secretary­ Peter Jennings, last week released a report into the Thousand Talents Plan and similar­, noting that the “scale, organisatio­n and level of misconduct associated with CCP talent-recruitment programs sets them apart from efforts by other countries’’.

“China’s prodigious recruitment of overseas scientists will be key to its ambition to dominate future­ technologies and modernise its military,” ASPI analyst Alex Joske wrote.

“Participants in talent-recruitment programs also appear to be disproportionately represented among overseas scientists collaborating with the Chinese military … many recruits work on dual-use technologies at Chinese institutions that are closely linked to the People’s Liberation Army.”

As for Monash’s Professor Chen? His stint as a Thousand Talents scholar was at a different time completely. There were fewer tensions between Beijing and Australia before allegations of foreign interference, hostility in the South China Sea and disquiet about the worsening human rights situation in Hong Kong.

Professor Chen, now the head of chemical and environmental engineering at Soochow University in Suzhou, 100km northwest of Shanghai, said he had seen a shift in the program to a degree, particularly in its focus.

“I know certain people come to this country and it’s like a red carpet, you know. It’s pretty amazing. I would say they’re in the right area,” he told The Australian.

He too sees problems with academics­ who sign up for the Thousand Talents Plan but remain working at universities in Australia, or the US and Canada.

“My parents told me I shouldn’t be on both sides, so if you work for somebody you work there full-time until you don’t want to,” he said. “There must be a weakness in people.”