Rats nest:Visiting researcher from China at UCLA is arrested | Hacker News Reader

Rats nest:Visiting researcher from China at UCLA is arrested

msn.com

6 pointsycombonator5 comments

Seems the fellow was a mathematician who worked with another mathematician at UCLA and was quite open about his affiliation with his military academy in China: https://www.math.ucla.edu/~wotaoyin/people.html

You do wonder what the point of it is apart from causing uncertainty for Chinese citizens, no sane Chinese scientist will set foot into the US, or they'll be hit with catch-all charges when the FBI doesn't like them.

He is a ranking officer in the Chinese military accused of destroying a hard drive after being interviewed by agents. Suspicious considering the CCP is actively seeding U.S. universities with clandestine military scientists via the Thousand Talents plan [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan

The guy is a PhD graduate of a military academy, of course he would be an officer. Graduates of military academies all over the world hold officer ranks.

China has been remarkably successful in developing domestic industries. 25 years ago you didn't see decent Chinese papers in international journals, now you encounter them all the time. Good for them! It would be good if the US also supported its domestic research, but Americans just won't get advanced degrees in the sciences because it's too hard and the pay is too lousy.

And China has been remarkably successful in stealing intellectual property and sensitive state information under the guise of "education". Ranking officers of foreign military governments does not exonerate his actions especially when he was caught hiding and destroying data.

> Guan had access at UCLA to a "graphics processing unit," a piece of technology with potential military applications

A GPU. Very dangerous. Very suspicious.

The Thousand Talents Program is just a talent recruitment program. Tons of countries have analogous programs. Canada calls theirs the "Canada Excellence Research Chairs" program. The UK calls theirs the "Rutherford Fund." The Chinese program has nothing to do with "seeding US universities." It's mostly about encouraging Chinese scientists to return to China, to reverse the brain drain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com