DOJ escalates Chinese 'Thousand Talents' crackdown with arrest of Cleveland Clinic researcher

The Justice Department escalated its crackdown on Chinese influence within U.S. research institutions with the arrest of a Chinese-American researcher at the Cleveland Clinic.

Dr. Qing Wang, a professor of molecular genetics at the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western University, was arrested on Wednesday on charges of lying to investigators and wire fraud related to more than $3.6 million in funding that he and his research group at the Cleveland Clinic received from the National Institutes of Health under false pretenses. At the same time that he was receiving millions of dollars in U.S. government grants, court documents say he concealed how he was also the Dean of the College of Life Sciences and Technology at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China. He was also receiving grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and hid his participation in China’s Thousand Talents Program, a Chinese Communist Party effort to recruit academics to gain access to foreign technology and intellectual property.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Sen. Rob Portman, released a 109-page bipartisan report in November, concluding foreign countries “seek to exploit America’s openness to advance their own national interests,” and “the most aggressive of them has been China.” It found China used its Thousand Talents Program over the past two decades to exploit access to U.S. research labs and academic institutions. The FBI has deemed the Chinese effort to be a form of “non-traditional espionage.”

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