On Tuesday, a Harvard University professor was found guilty on all counts of hiding his involvement in a Chinese-run recruiting campaign. Former Harvard chemistry and chemical biology department chair Charles Lieber, 62, had pleaded not guilty to two counts of filing fraudulent tax returns, making false claims, and failing to file reports for a Chinese bank account. After five days of testimony in a federal court in Boston, the jury deliberated for two hours and 45 minutes before reaching a decision. Lieber’s lawyer, Marc Mukasey, had argued that the allegations were untested. He said that investigators had no evidence of their conversations with Lieber before his imprisonment. Prosecutors would not be able to prove Lieber acted “knowingly, intentionally, or willfully,” or that he made any significant false statements, he said. According to Mukasey, Lieber was not accused of transferring any technology or classified information to China. Prosecutors claimed Lieber, detained in January, suppressed his role in China’s Thousand Talents Plan, which aims to attract individuals with foreign technology and intellectual property information to China to safeguard his reputation and career.
During investigations by US authorities, including the National Institutes of Health, which had given him millions of dollars in research money, Lieber denied his participation, according to prosecutors. According to authorities, Lieber allegedly hid his income from the Chinese program, which included $50,000 per month from the Wuhan University of Technology, up to $158,000 in living costs, and over $1.5 million in awards. They claim Lieber committed to publishing studies, arranging international conferences, and filing patent applications on behalf of the Chinese institution in compensation. The lawsuit is one of the most high-profile to emerge from the Justice Department’s so-called “China Initiative.”The campaign initiated in 2018 to combat Chinese economic espionage has been criticized for harming academic research and amounting to ethnic profiling of Chinese scholars. Hundreds of professors from Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, Princeton, Temple, and other prestigious universities have written letters to US Attorney General Merrick Garland urging him to halt the endeavor. According to experts, the endeavor jeopardizes the country’s competitiveness in research and technology and has stifled foreign scholar recruitment. In addition, the letters allege that the inquiries have unfairly targeted Chinese-origin scholars. Since his arrest in January 2020, Lieber has been on paid administrative leave at Harvard.
