Federal authorities have arrested a professor at the University of Arkansas for hiding the fact that he was accepting financing from communist China. Simon Ang of the University of Arkansas is accused of fraud. He hid the money that he was getting from China in order to qualify for federal money. If you accept money from the communists in China, you are not eligible for federal grants.
Ang was receiving money from China through the Thousand Talents program. That program is used by China to steal our technology.
The New York Times reported:
“Simon Ang of the University of Arkansas, was arrested on Friday and charged on Monday with wire fraud. He worked for and received funding from Chinese companies and from the Thousand Talents program, which awards grants to scientists to encourage relationships with the Chinese government, and he warned an associate to keep his affiliation with the program quiet.”
The Department of Justice said in a statement:
“The complaint charges that Ang had close ties with the Chinese government and Chinese companies, and failed to disclose those ties when required to do so in order to receive grant money from NASA. These materially false representations to NASA and the University of Arkansas resulted in numerous wires to be sent and received that facilitated Ang’s scheme to defraud.”
The New York Times added that also on Friday “Dr. Xiao-Jiang Li, a former professor at Emory University in Atlanta, pleaded guilty … to a felony charge of filing a false tax return that omitted about $500,000 that he received from the Thousand Talents program. He was sentenced to a year of probation and ordered to pay $35,089 in restitution.”
In January, federal law enforcement officials arrested a top Harvard scientist, Dr. Charles Lieber, for allegedly lying to the U.S. government about his involvement in the Thousand Talents program.
The New York Times reported that Lieber “was named a University Professor, Harvard’s highest faculty rank, one of only 26 professors to hold that status,” and that “he earned the National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award for inventing syringe-injectable mesh electronics that can integrate with the brain” in 2017.
“Unbeknownst to Harvard University beginning in 2011, Lieber became a ‘Strategic Scientist’ at Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China and was a contractual participant in China’s Thousand Talents Plan from in or about 2012 to 2017,” the statement said. “China’s Thousand Talents Plan is one of the most prominent Chinese Talent recruit plans that are designed to attract, recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security. These talent programs seek to lure Chinese overseas talent and foreign experts to bring their knowledge and experience to China and reward individuals for stealing proprietary information.”