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China’s Brain: Made in USA
China’s scientists and engineers are being educated at American universities. Americans are literally training their worst enemy.
By William F. Jasper
Is Communist China’s meteoric rise over the past four decades from a pre-industrialized nation to an industrial/technological powerhouse a testament to the superiority of central planning? It is, according to enthusiasts of central planning such as Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. However, as shown in the accompanying articles, the astonishing progress the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has made on the scientific, technological, industrial, and military fronts has been almost completely dependent on the continuous importation of expertise and technology from foreign sources, principally the United States. No less important than the technology transfers — including whole factories and processing plants — from the United States and other capitalist countries has been the PRC’s continuous reliance on Western universities and research centers, again, principally American, to train its scientists, engineers, and social-science professionals.
Xi Jinping is general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and chairman of the Central Military Commission, the CCP’s enforcement arm, which controls the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Armed Police. Even though the term “president” doesn’t appear in Communist China’s constitution, Xi and the CCP are happy to have Western media and politicians refer to him as “President Xi,” since it gives a softer image and falsely infers elected legitimacy.
Chairman Xi’s top advisor is Liu He, a Harvard-trained economist who serves not only as China’s economic czar, but also as technology czar in charge of China’s push for supremacy in supercomputing and next-generation chip development. After graduating from Renmin University in Beijing, Liu He studied at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, then obtained a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University. A longtime confidant of Xi Jinping, Liu He is now a vice premier of China and a Politburo member of the CCP. Yi Gang, who now heads the People’s Bank of China, received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois and then taught as a professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Guo Shuqing, chairman of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, was educated at Oxford University. Unlike Xi, when Liu, Yi, and Guo address the World Economic Forum and other globalist assemblies, they speak in fluent English.
Subversive Students
Over the past several decades, millions of Chinese students have been educated at colleges and universities in the United States and other Western countries. Many of them now hold prominent government posts in Communist China or are playing significant roles in China’s science and technology (S&T) innovation. Others who were trained in the social sciences in the United States and have a good grasp of American language, culture, politics, and psychology have gone back to China to help craft the CCP’s propaganda war using the American media and social-media platforms. Many of the Chinese students who have remained here have attained top positions at American universities, think tanks, research centers, and media organizations, from which they dispense pro-Beijing propaganda and attack Americans who question our ongoing suicidal policies vis-à-vis the PRC.
During the 2019-2020 school year, more than 372,000 Chinese students were enrolled at U.S. colleges and universities. According to a 2018 study by the Defense Innovation Unit, 25 percent of U.S. STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) graduate students are Chinese foreign nationals. Chinese STEM doctoral students are an especially important priority for China, not only for the crucial part they will play in advancing the PRC’s S&T programs when they return home, but also because their Ph.D. candidates tend to be funded by the universities or federal research grants (i.e., the U.S. taxpayers). A STEM Ph.D. is also helpful in obtaining a highly coveted research position in one of America’s national research laboratories, where many of the United States’ defense systems are developed.
China’s recognition of the need for STEM assistance from the United States goes back to the early days of Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s tyrannical rule. Qian Xuesen, the “Father of Chinese Rocketry,” was trained at MIT and Caltech. He also worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and was involved in the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Returning to the PRC in the 1950s, he guided the research for China’s missiles, space program, and nuclear weapons. Another “founding father” of China’s space and missile programs was Wang Xiji, who studied engineering at Virginia Tech before returning to China in 1950 to teach at several universities and then head the Shanghai Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. In A Place for One’s Mat: China’s Space Program, 1956–2003, authors Gregory Kulacki and Jeffrey G. Lewis note that “Ren Xinmin, who earned his Ph.D. in engineering mechanics from the University of Michigan and briefly taught at the University of Buffalo before returning to China in 1949, was the chief designer of the communications satellite project as well as the lead negotiator with the Americans on the failed attempt to purchase one.”
The Chinese student influx to the United States that began spiraling upwards in the 1980s and 1990s has exploded in the past decade, topping 200,000 in 2012 and surpassing 300,000 every year since 2014.
To assure that these students don’t succumb to freedom in America and defect to “No. 1 Enemy,” the CCP holds their families in China hostage with the prospect of reprisals. In addition to this enforcement leverage, Chinese students in America (and other countries as well) are monitored by the CCP’s Confucius Institutes and the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which also organize and tutor Chinese students as propaganda agents within the United States to defend Xi Jinping Thought and bully opponents of PRC policies. Due to pressure from the Trump administration and exposure of these organizations, most Confucius Institutes have been closed; a September 2021 study by the National Association of Scholars lists 89 universities in the United States that have closed their Confucius Institutes.
Another initiative by the Trump administration attempted to reverse China’s exploitation of our higher-education institutions by restricting Chinese students from sensitive research programs, as well as by setting fixed timelines of four years for student visas and requiring that students return home and renew their visa applications. The Biden administration quickly jettisoned those proposed restrictions, to the huzzahs of the China Lobby inside the U.S. educational establishment. Dr. Esther Brimmer, CEO of the Association of International Educators, thanked the Biden administration and urged it “to continue its efforts to make the US a more welcoming place for international students.” Dr. Brimmer, like many of the other influential citizens voicing support for continued unfettered access by the PRC to our educational and research institutions, is a member of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The Committee of 100, a China Lobby adjunct whose members are prominent Chinese Americans in the business, education, and tech sectors, is likewise populated with pro-Beijing CFR members. Among them is Cheng Li, the director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution and a regularly featured China expert in the major media. Cheng Li, who came to the United States in 1985, received a master’s in Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and a doctorate in political science from Princeton University. He has taught at Hamilton College and the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, has written numerous books, and holds fellowships at the University of Toronto and Yale University’s Paul Tsai China Center. The Committee of 100, of which he is a member, was quick to denounce as “disturbing and prejudicial” the Trump administration’s proposal to tighten national security against China’s intelligence efforts to steal our technology and technical secrets. In a February 16, 2018 press release, the committee asserted that the proposal was “based purely on race and national origin” and “fans the flames of hysteria.”
U.S.-China Elites
Efforts to restore sensible national-security protections on Chinese access to our leading science and technology advances continually run up against roadblocks thrown up by America’s policy elites, especially as personified by the membership roster of the CFR. As we have noted in previous articles, CFR Chairman David Rubenstein is the chairman of the Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest and most influential asset-management firms. Rubenstein and Carlyle have been big boosters of investment in, and transfers of technology to, the PRC. Billionaire Rubenstein also has served as the chair of the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University, called “the MIT of China,” and even funded an endowed chair at the university. Another Wall Street denizen, Stephen Schwarzman (CFR), the billionaire CEO of the Blackstone Group, gave $100 million to build Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University. The alma mater of “paramount leader” Xi Jinping, Tsinghua University is the epitome of China’s Military-Civil Fusion program. It has launched a Military-Civil Fusion National Defense Peak Technologies Laboratory in Beijing to weaponize all the latest emerging technologies. In addition, under the auspices of the CCP, Tsinghua is building a “High-End Laboratory for Military Intelligence.”
Pure and simple, Tsinghua University is a de facto arm of the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army. That doesn’t seem to bother Deep State globalists such as Rubenstein and Schwarzman and their confreres in Big Tech and Big Academe. Tsinghua has entered into partnerships with dozens of major companies, including Boeing, Microsoft, Intel, Samsung, Siemens, and Toyota, as well as with Johns Hopkins University, MIT, Cambridge University, Imperial College London, Tokyo University, University of Toronto, University of Alberta, University of New South Wales in Australia, and the Aachen University of Technology in Germany.
Thousand-traitors Plan
In June 2020, Dr. Charles Lieber, former chair of Harvard University’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department and head of the Lieber Research Group at Harvard, was arrested by the FBI and indicted for making false statements to federal authorities regarding his participation in China’s Thousand Talents Plan (TTP). A report of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 2019 found that the TTP “talent recruitment program” launched by the CCP may have recruited more than 7,000 scientists and engineers. Dr. Lieber is alleged to have secretly been operating as a TTP “Strategic Scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China, and to have received payment of up to $50,000 per month, annual living expenses of $158,000, and $1.5 million for a bio research lab at WUT.
Obviously, with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic — also known as the Wuhan flu or the CCP virus — ravaging the planet and transforming it into a facsimile of China’s Orwellian dystopia, activities such as those Professor Lieber is alleged to be involved in take on very serious importance. This is especially so since the professor’s Lieber Research Group has been funded by more than $15 million in research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Department of Defense. As a result of the Lieber scandal, the NIH began investigations of 189 researchers at 65 American colleges and universities for “troubling foreign influence on extramural research, including withholding information about funding sources and conflicts of interests and violating the confidentiality of peer review.” The NIH subsequently flagged an additional 210 researchers for “possible concern” of violations.
William F. Jasper
Senior editor William F. Jasper is an author/journalist/commentator/documentary producer with a well-earned reputation as one of America’s top investigative reporters, most renowned for his in-depth, years-long investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing and its aftermath. For more than three decades he served as an accredited correspondent at the United Nations in New York and UN summits around the world.
Published with Permission of thenewamerican.com