China views American universities as places from which spies can be recruited and secrets can be stolen. Beijing has deployed thousands of intelligence officers and agents to steal cutting-edge research for the Chinese Communist Party’s benefit.
This bears note following the publication on Monday of a Sept. 8 letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. Written by 177 Stanford University faculty members, the letter demanded an end to the FBI-led “China Initiative.” The initiative has focused resources on disrupting Chinese intelligence activity in U.S. society. Unfortunately, the Stanford signatories offered only a passing hat tip to this important objective.
“We acknowledge the importance to the United States of protecting both intellectual property and information that is essential to our national and economic security,” the letter said. But, the faculty complained, the initiative is “is fueling biases that, in turn, raise concerns about racial profiling.” They lamented that many of those investigated have been targeted for their “personal or professional connections with China.”
Well, yeah, doesn’t that make sense?
If it’s searching for spies, surely the FBI will pay more attention to those people who have contact with people or entities at the source of the threat concern: China.
Still, this silliness does point to a broader issue with the letter: It shows that the faculty do not understand how espionage actually works.
We see this most clearly when the academics lament how, in most initiative-related prosecutions, “the alleged crime has nothing to do with scientific espionage or intellectual property theft. Most prosecutions are for misconduct such as failure to disclose foreign appointments or funding. While such problems should be addressed, they should not be confused with national security concerns.”
This is silly stuff. Espionage is hard to prove, especially when the spies are trained in techniques to avoid detection and prosecution. The reason many prosecutions are focused on undeclared foreign relationships or funding is quite simple. Those undeclared activities evince a concealed relationship with the Chinese Communist Party apparatus. If researchers wish to avoid these prosecutions, they need only to declare their contacts with the Communist Party honestly. It’s not complicated.
The faculty appear more concerned with keeping China happy than they are about protecting U.S. secrets. The academics observed that “many of our most challenging global problems, including climate change & sustainability and current & future pandemics, require international engagement.” This seems intended to translate as: “We must be nice to China or they won’t cooperate with us.”
Those who signed this letter should wake up. China is engaged in an industrial-scale campaign to steal American secrets. China doesn’t even hide its prioritization of universities in this regard. Indeed, one of its best civilian universities is led by a spy!
The very least the U.S. government should be doing in face of this threat is enforce the law.
