American Military News by Ryan Morgan December 03, 2020
1,000+ Chinese military-linked researchers fled US amid summer crackdown, DOJ official says
U.S. assistant attorney general for national security John C. Demers said on Wednesday that more than 1,000 Chinese researchers linked to China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fled the U.S. this summer as the Department of Justice began a crackdown on Chinese researchers who concealed their PLA ties.
“Over this past summer, we arrested five or six researchers who were here from China on visas who were affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army, the Chinese military, but who hadn’t disclosed that affiliation, had hidden that affiliation when they applied for their visas. Those five or six arrests were just the tip of the iceberg, and honestly, the size of the iceberg is one that I don’t know that we or other folks realized how large it was when we began down that road,†said Demers during a panel discussion at the Aspen Institute’s Cyber Summit.
“Between those five and six arrests, between the dozens of interviews that the bureau did of individuals who were here under similar circumstances, and then ultimately the closure of the Houston consulate to disrupt both foreign influence activity and economic espionage activity, more than 1,000 PLA-affiliated Chinese researchers left the country,†Demers said.
Demers, who is also head of the Justice Department’s China Initiative, said the prosecutions the Justice Department was able to bring forward were “just the beginning†of an effort to stop Chinese infiltration into U.S. research, adding, “[the prosecutions] allowed us to message to the Chinese government that if you’re going to send individuals here, you’ve gotta do so honestly, and you can’t do so hiding their affiliation to the PLA and Chinese military universities.
More:
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/12/1000-chinese-military-linked-researchers-fled-us-amid-summer-crackdown-doj-official-says/
