Prosecutors think they have a tight case. They claim that Lieber was recruited into China's Thousand Talents Plan and paid handsomely to establish a research laboratory at the Wuhan University of Technology, but hid his affiliation with the US grant agencies. There are six felony charges against Lieber, including two counts of making false statements to investigators, two counts of filing a false tax return, and two counts of failing to report a foreign bank account.
The government will prove that Lieber made false statements in order to protect his career at Harvard University, according to a case summary filed last week.
Mukasey said that the government wouldn't be able to show that he made a false statement.
One of only a handful who are not Chinese is the highest-profile academic to be charged under the China Initiative.
The government has several cases pending against professors in the US who are accused of not revealing their China affiliations to grant agencies.
Andrew Lelling, the former US attorney for the District of Massachusetts who was on the steering committee of the China Initiative, said that he expects the government to be successful in prosecuting cases like the one of Lieber.
The research integrity cases usually result in a win for the government. The government will win most of the unresolved cases because they have been slowed by covid, according to Lelling.
The China Initiative is about China.
The China Initiative was announced by Jeff Sessions, then the Trump administration's attorney general, as a central component of the administration's tough stance toward China.
An MIT Technology Review investigation published earlier this month found that the China Initiative is an umbrella for various types of prosecutions somehow connected to China, with targets ranging from a Chinese national who ran a turtle-smuggling ring to state-sponsored hackers believed to be behind some of the biggest data Of the 77 cases identified by MIT Technology Review, a quarter have resulted in guilty pleas or convictions, but nearly two-thirds are still pending.
The prosecution of researchers like Lieber for hiding ties to Chinese institutions has been the most controversial aspect of the government's efforts. Half of the new cases brought under the China Initiative in 2020 were against scientists. The Economic Espionage Act was not accused of being violated in these cases.
Hundreds of academics from across the country signed a letter calling on Attorney General Garland to end the China Initiative. They wrote that the initiative has deviated from its original mission of fighting intellectual-property theft in China and is instead hurting American research competitiveness by discouraging scholars from coming to the US.
There have been cases that have resulted in guilty pleas.
Xiao-Jiang Li, a former professor of genetics at Emory University, pleaded guilty to a single count of filing a false tax return. He was sentenced to a year of supervised release and was ordered to pay $30,000 in fines. He is a researcher at the National Academy of Sciences.
In November 2020, Song Guo Zheng, a former Ohio State University professor, pleaded guilty to a single count of making false statements to investigators about his affiliation with a Chinese university and the Thousand Talents Plan. He was sentenced to 37 months in prison last summer and was ordered to pay $4 million in restitution to the National Institutes of Health and his former employer.
Prosecutors said they hoped his fate would serve as a message to other academics. The acting US attorney for the Southern District of Ohio hopes the prison sentence for Zheng will deter others from involvement in China's "Thousand Talents Plan".
Science on a trial.
The first China Initiative prosecution of an academic ended up in the courtroom. Anming Hu, a professor at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, was acquitted of all charges by a judge in June after a jury couldn't agree on a verdict.
There are five pending cases involving research integrity charges against US university professors. Click here for a list of research integrity cases. Click here for the full China Initiative database.
Gang Chen, an MIT professor, was arrested at Boston'sLogan Airport in 2020 and charged with deceiving grant agencies and failing to declare a foreign bank account. The main collaboration at issue was in fact a formal agreement, according toMIT, which is paying for Chen's defense.
There are wires.
A neural mesh that could be injected into the brain as a brain-computer interface was one of the projects that Lieber ran a prominent lab that specialized in.
The neural mesh paper was one of the most popular in the lab, with nearly everyone on it having a Chinese name. Many of them were recruited from mainland China for demanding roles in cutting-edge chemistry and were being trained as the next generation of scientists.
David Liu is a professor in Harvard's chemistry department and is a specialist in gene editing. He says that Charlie was a kind and devoted mentor to students and junior colleagues, and someone who worked hard to help others.
