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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

>These grants require the disclosure of significant foreign financial conflicts of interest, including financial support from foreign governments or foreign entities

Meanwhile:

>paid up to $50,000 a month, in addition to $150,000 per year

Seems pretty straightforward.

He must be a smart guy, I wonder how he thought he would get away with it?

Even if he could hide the money run of the mill espionage could find it.

He was supposed to do research at Wuhan University and even file for parents for and sort of promote that school. Hard to imagine nobody would notice that.

I wonder if he kept taking the money after he told investigators that he wasn't a part of the program? He had to suspect they were on to him?

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I guess the story is that when he started in 2012 he thought nobody cares. Actually he got it right at that time. Although it was violation of government rules, nobody really cared at that time.

He could not predict the change of direction of the U.S. foreign policy. China is taking place of Russia as the No. 1 threat. How could he predict this in 2012?

BTW, I am curious to know did he pay tax for those income? If not, that will be another very serious problem.

> He could not predict the change of direction of the U.S. foreign policy. How could he predict this in 2012?

This isn't really that relevant, all he had to do was disclose his connections. It's not the crime, it's the cover up. The US govt certainly understands hundreds if not thousands of academics have connections to China. It's not a crime to accept research money. It's lying about it that's the issue. If you're lying to the country about who you work for, what else are you lying about?

It is relevant, if it is not because of the change of direction of the U.S. foreign policy, he can still keep undetected.

> change of direction of the U.S. foreign policy, he can still keep undetected.

I don't think he would have remained undetected and the timing of all of this isn't that important. The recipients of the 1000 talents programs aren't some huge secret. It's actually very likely that the government knew all along and was seeing who would lie about it. If he had disclosed his connections, he wouldn't be facing charges.

It's not a crime to accept research money from China as an academic. It is a crime to accept money from China, lie to the government about it, then accept US govt defense dollars.

Imagine if you were working at AWS but moonlighting at Google Cloud. No one would bat an eye if you were fired and taken to court.

I think being asked to disclose at the time should tell him clearly what to do.

Wasn't China the #1 fear in 2012. More around the economy taking over/high growth rates / pegged currency. Russia only came back in vogue after Trump/election.

You have this a bit backwards. Russia sanctions predate Trump and were kept in place by Congress despite his efforts to overturn them. They were not put in place by Trump.

He lied on a sworn affidavit, basically, when going out for his grants which includes a background check. You swear your statements to be true. He lied. It doesn’t matter what country is in vogue at the time, and in 2012 China was very much considered a threat for these exact kinds of things.

This is pretty black and white, assuming the evidence presented is legit, which he will have the opportunity to oppose in court.

I don't think that the parent comment is arguing that what he did was justified back then, but now it isn't. They explicitly state that it was definitely a violation of rules even back then.

The parent comment was just trying to make a suggestion, that if that scientist had stopped before the tide has turned against China in the past few years, then he probably would've gotten away with it. He did the calculations right for his chances of not being caught being pretty good back in 2012, he just simply didn't adjust them as the time passed and the situations changed. Or maybe he did the adjustment, but a lot of people tend lose their minds and get too greedy to stop before it is too late when it comes to big money.

Fair point. I am also suggesting it was a serious problem in 2012 that was already recognized by the government. Hard to think of a period in recent memory when China has not been considered a threat for this kind of thing.

Furthermore, juxtaposing the two statements implies a sort of grey area like that doesn’t make sense here. It’s hard to draw any conclusion other than greed and/or malice.

But then again, people can be smart in some areas and quite error prone in others. This was a really terrible miscalculation.

The president of the US in 2012 made fun of his opposition for calling Russia a serious national security threat.

It's not a threat to the national security of a nation surrounded by two oceans, and in possession of six thousand nuclear bombs, but it's a threat to some national political ambitions.

Whether those ambitions are worth pursuing is another matter entirely.

It is bizarre how for so many that history just never happened. Not just the president but the press. At least the president was something of a man of "nuance", always trying to take positions somewhere in the middle. Though I do recall it was a somewhat awkward process as he came around to making increasingly stronger stands against his successor.

Of course the press (not to mention twitter mob) just toggled from the extreme on one side to the other.

I have a real hard time getting past "oh well nobody cares now I'll just lie to U.S. Defense Department....".

If you're lying to them, maybe someone cares.

Chinese espionage on college campuses was very much on the government radar in 2012.

The paperwork telling him to disclose was probabbly a big hint.

The talks about China as a serious geopolitical rival go back a while longer than 2012, but even so, if he was completely unaware of any potential conflict of interest then he obviously could have disclosed this funding.

The fact that he hid it I think makes very clear that he was aware of the problematic nature of taking that money.

In 2012, he agreed to accept what he likely considered prize money and renting his name as an endorsement. I doubt he did much work for WUT. Fast forward to today and the Thousand Talents Program is considered an espionage tool by the US Senate, and when he is asked about it, he lies to both Harvard and the DoD. He is in deep shit.

I think how much trouble he is in is going to come down to whether he notified the IRS of the Chinese bank accounts. There is nothing juries hate more than millionaires who cheat on their taxes and it will look terrible if he hid the money.

> In 2012, he agreed to accept what he likely considered prize money and renting his name as an endorsement.

If you are a tenured/tenure-track professor at a tier-1 research university, your name is literally your career - you don't rent this out lightly on some whim. You also don't take money from another institution to create the 'X+Y University Collaborative Research Lab' without running this by legal.

Further, the affidavit outlines more involved collaboration (co-advising / hosting / advising students, $800k to build a joint-lab etc).

He's a smart guy. Maybe not wise or ethical though.

While no one figures it out, China wins.

When some one figures it out, US loses a top researcher.

Win-win for China. Why wouldn't they play this game? It's a guaranteed win.

Additionally, it's systematic, from the article and in the same week:

Yanqing Ye, 29, who is currently in China, is charged with one count each of "visa fraud, making false statements, acting as an agent of a foreign government and conspiracy." She had been working at Boston University and is accused of lying about her position as a lieutenant in the Chinese military.

Zaosong Zheng, 30, was arrested last month at Boston's Logan International Airport and is charged with allegedly attempting to smuggle vials of biological materials and other research materials stolen from U.S labs. Zheng, who was a a Harvard-sponsored cancer researcher, has been indicted on that charge along with a count of making false statements.

Professor != researcher. It's more like a research manager. Not a huge loss to the field.

I would be willing to bet money that there are literally 0 tier-1 tenured research professors that didn't make significant contributions 'on their own' before becoming PI's in the US. (although 'on their own' is questionable anyway since this was probably in someone else's lab)..

Yes, they've made those contributions in the past. By the time they become professors they're mostly mooching off their grad students' work.

A nicer way to put it would be they're managing and directing research projects.

Also makes it easier to poach info from multiple research streams...

> While no one figures it out, China wins.

Do they though? If China is hiring people who don't honestly fulfill their disclosure requirements, it may be the case that they're getting people who fake research results as well. They're actually selecting for low levels of integrity.

I don’t think the article suggests China did anything nefarious, other than paying a US professor to do some research in China and help develop a university in China. Which in my opinion is what every other country should try to do with good foreign researchers. In this case the game seems to be played by the researcher.

> I wonder how he thought he would get away with it?

Simple. Most institutions simply do not CHECK. Think about how you'd detect that this is happening. You'd need to somehow gain evidence that they hold a bank account that is receiving funds originating from China.

Not easy. In fact, damn near impossible.

So let's look at this case...

> Lieber was also awarded more than $1.5 million by WUT and the Chinese government to establish a research lab and conduct research at Wuhan University of Technology.

> For a large part of the time frame in question, Lieber was also the principal investigator on at least six U.S. Defense Department research grants

...ah ha. So the DoD caught him because he was being so blatant.

> Not easy. In fact, damn near impossible.

Simply not true. FATCA is a thing, and the USG is comfortable hammering foreign banks for info. It's a lot harder with China, but they absolutely comply: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-agrees-fatca-compl...

This is also why that Chinese money goes to Canada (esp. Vancouver) -- the Canadian government doesn't dig as hard.

I don't see how FACTA is relevant here.

1. FACTS doesn't report domestic accounts that are funded by foreign sources.

2. Harvard didn't catch this - the DoD did.

The point is that other schools could not possibly detect this sort of behavior unless it becomes as wildly blatant as this guy did it.

>>Even if he could hide the money run of the mill espionage could find it.

According to the affidavit, there was a paper trail, contracts on both countries with a suspected spy agency, er University research department, etc etc. Not sure he knew what he really got into. Maybe did it once and then he got used to the money

It might be a misunderstanding about our legal system and what is a serious issue versus one that can be overlooked or patched up somehow.

Maybe like a foolish US tourist taking some recreational drugs to China?

(I'm not comparing the two issues in a moral way, just to show how different crimes can be minor/serious in different countries.)

I'm not sure what is misunderstanding about lying on some paperwork. It's still lying, they know they're lying.

I mean misunderstanding the seriousness of the crime. Like, a recreational drug user might know that drugs are illegal in China, but not realize how bad the penalties are.

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