US charges MIT professor Gang Chen with failing to disclose Chinese ties
- The Chinese-born engineer was charged with defrauding the US Department of Energy when seeking grants and failing to disclose a China-based bank account
- The case is the latest to emerge from a US crackdown on Chinese influence within universities amid concerns about spying and intellectual property theft
An MIT professor and nanotechnology expert was charged with failing to disclose to the US Department of Energy millions of dollars in funding he allegedly received from China, the latest in a slew of similar cases.
Gang Chen, 56, a naturalised US citizen from China, was charged with wire fraud, making a false statement in a tax return and failing to disclose a foreign bank account, according to the US Justice Department.
In a court appearance by videoconference Thursday, a federal judge in Boston said he anticipated requiring Chen to post a secured bond “in the neighbourhood” of US$1 million.
The case follows a “China Initiative” launched by the Justice Department in 2018 to investigate and prosecute cases of economic espionage intended to benefit China. The programme has resulted in dozens of prosecutions for hacking and for data and trade secret theft.
Federal prosecutors filed a series of such cases across the country in 2020, an election year in which US President Donald Trump blamed China for the coronavirus pandemic, waged a trade war and accused Chinese technology companies of spying on Americans. The effort has extended into 2021.
On Wednesday, a senior Nasa scientist admitted to lying about his participation in a programme the US says is designed to siphon intellectual property to China.
“To put this threat into perspective, we have now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counter-intelligence case about every 10 hours,” said Joseph Bonavolonta, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s special agent in charge, at a press conference on Thursday. “And of the 5,000 active counter-intelligence cases the FBI has, nearly half of them are related to China.”