Louisiana Voice

Even as LSU fans celebrate the Tigers’ spectacular undefeated, national championship season, the potential for controversy and international espionage hovers over the university’s Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering.

LouisianaVoice has learned that Wang Wanjun, formerly a professor at North University, was recruited by China’s “Thousand Talents Plan” in 2010 while employed by LSU. He continues to serve as a professor in the state’s flagship university’s Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering.

North University has deep ties to the China military that go back at least half-a-century. In 2015, the school transferred its research results to the Chinese military and in 2018, an agreement was signed with China’s Aerospace Science and Industry to enhance the transfer of technological development from academia to the military.

The Thousand Talents Plan is a state-run program created in 2008 which recruits mostly Chinese science and technology individuals who have studied or lived abroad to work in China. Wang was recruited by the talent program in 2010, according to a February 2019 article in The Epoch Times. You can read that article by clicking HERE.

The plan has recruited more than 7,000 people for employment at universities, research institutes or state-owned enterprises.

Wang, after obtaining a grant of the equivalent of about $1.5 million from China in 2010, joined the Thousand Talents Plan to establish a lithography center and a lithography company. Lithography is a key manufacturing step in the production of semiconductor chips.

A just-released 109-page report (click HERE to read report) by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations entitled Threats to the U.S. Research Enterprise: China’s Talent Recruitment Plans, examines the Thousand Talents Plan, which it said “incentivizes individuals engaged in research and development in the United States to transmit the knowledge and research they gain here to China in exchange for salaries, research funding, lab space, and other incentives. China unfairly uses the American research and expertise it obtains for its own economic and military gain.”

The Chinese Communist Party “plays a lead role in administering the Thousand Talents Plan,” the Senate report says. “The party is able to ‘exert exceptional’ levels of control over the…plan and other talent recruitment plans.”

Plan members sign legally binding contracts with Chinese institutions. The contracts may “incentivize members to lie on grant applications to U.S. grant-making agencies,” the report says, adding that members may also be obligated to set up “shadow labs” in China to facilitate research identical to their U.S. research and in some cases, to transfer that intellectual research.

The Epoch Times article quoted Wang as saying he entered into the Thousand Talents Plan because the school (North University) allowed him “to serve his country and start a business.”

The report says that recruitment plan members removed some 30,000 electronic files before leaving for China, submitted false information on grant applications, filed Chinese patents based on U.S. government-funded research and hired other Chinese talent recruitment plan members to work on U.S. national security topics.

Following public testimony and heightened U.S. government scrutiny in October 2018, the Chinese government began deleting only references to the Thousand Talents Plan. Among the items deleted were any mentions about plan members. Chinese universities ceased promoting the program on their websites and the plan’s official website removed the names of scientists participating in the program. China’s recruitment of talent for the plan, however, continues.

“China’s talent recruitment plans, including the Thousand Talents Plan (China’s most prominent talent recruitment plan), undermine the integrity of our research enterprise and harm our economic and national security interests,” the report says.

“China’s talent recruitment plans (the so-called “brain gain” programs), such as the Thousand Talents Program, offer competitive salaries, state-of-the-art research facilities, and honorific titles, luring both Chinese overseas talent and foreign experts alike to bring their knowledge and experience to China, even if that means stealing proprietary information or violating export controls to do so,” the report says.

Besides Wanjun Wang, there is also a Yong Wang listed in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering ONLINE DIRECTORY. Both are associate professors of mechanical engineering but Wanjun Wang is the only one specifically mentioned in The Epoch Times article of last February as being affiliated with either China’s North University or the Thousand Talents Plan.

Efforts by LouisianaVoice to contact Wanjun Wang were unsuccessful.

There is no indication that Wanjun Wang is under investigation for his ties to the two, but Florida legislators have opened an INVESTIGATION into the “extent of foreign meddling in taxpayer-funded research” at that state’s research universities, according to an article in Inside Education.

The Florida investigation, believed to be the first state-level probe of this sort, was initiated after the National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued a warning of efforts by foreign enterprises to influence or compromise U.S. researchers.

The University of Florida has ceased approval of participation in any foreign talent programs as an outside activity, according to Steve Orlando, a spokesman for the university.

The NIH, meanwhile has begun cracking down on researches who fail to disclose foreign ties. The agency reported that as of last October, it had investigated a minimum of 180 scientists at more than 65 institutions for violations of policies requiring disclosure of foreign ties. The NIH investigation focused on the Thousand Talents Plan.

LSU’s official policy PERMANENT MEMORANDUM 11, governing outside employment of university employees does not specifically address employment with foreign entities other than requiring requirement of outside employment and the identities “to the extent the information is known to the employee” of the owners, directors, and majority shareholders of the outside employer. “Additional information about such contracts may be required by the university upon request,” the policy says.