New alleged threats from China regarding stolen intellectual property are surfacing, especially concerning university-level research.
The FBI in Dallas notified around 100 administrators and faculty members of universities across Texas about the alleged threat of intellectual property theft by the Chinese government, according to CBS News.
Matthew DeSarno, the special agent in charge of the Dallas FBI, asserted upon his retirement in October that the research conducted at higher learning institutions, generally funded by American taxpayers, is being targeted by the Chinese.
“There are adversaries out there who are trying to steal as much intellectual property as they can to accelerate their own advancement,” he said.
University officials discussed methods that they could employ to protect their research from being stolen by visiting students or researchers. By studying and conducting research at an American university, these individuals could later transfer their work back to their own universities in China, according to CBS News.
DeSarno said, “I think the key is awareness, the understanding of what are the motives of the Communist Chinese Party.”
He referenced a case at the University of North Texas in 2020.
Following a briefing by the FBI that fall, the university expelled 15 scholars it had been hosting whose stay had been funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council. Without a host institution, the visiting students’ visas were revoked and they were ordered to return home as quickly as possible.
UNT has since severed ties with the Chinese Scholarship Council.
The Denton-based university said that “UNT takes seriously its responsibility to protect intellectual property and to work with authorities to prevent against cybersecurity attacks and the threat of stolen intellectual property.”
Similarly, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center fired three senior scientists, all of whom were Chinese, after federal authorities expressed concerns in 2019, according to the journal Science.
In 2020, a University of Texas professor allegedly took proprietary technology from a silicon startup and handed it over to Chinese telecom firm Huawei, according to NBC News. Similar instances have been reported at Harvard, UCLA, the University of Kansas, and the Chicago Institute of Technology.
Also, during the FBI conference, Dr. Tedd Mitchell, chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, revealed that his university had discovered a researcher who neglected to disclose an affiliation with a foreign university. While the individual in question eventually left the country, the university could not identify what material had been lost or compromised.
“[T]hat’s the whole problem with this is when you have folks that are embedded in your labs, we don’t know exactly what all is being lost,” he explained.
The Texas Tech University System now has professors sign a conflict of interest statement, according to CBS News.
Mitchell added that while his universities have conducted background checks on visiting researchers for those who stayed for at least six months, they have since realized that the biggest problem is scholars from other countries who come and go, according to CBS News.
“They come in there literally just a week or two,” Mitchell explained. “Historically, we’ve not done background checks on those folks. We are starting to do that now to make sure that if somebody’s coming to our campus, even if it’s for a short period of time, that we know where they’re from, we know whether or not they’re being financed by government agencies elsewhere.”
Mitchell said that for many years universities were oblivious to this threat.
Furthermore, the chancellor said that state lawmakers have not addressed the threat yet, but that it will be discussed at the upcoming session in January.
“State law hasn’t been beefed up to address this, but this is something that our state legislators are becoming aware that this is an issue,” he explained.
While China has previously denied stealing intellectual property, this is far from the first accusation. In May, CBS News reported that Chinese hackers stole trillions in intellectual property from 30 multinational companies.
On January 31, Director of the FBI Christopher Wray said the FBI has opened over 2,000 investigations focused on the Chinese government trying to steal U.S. information or technology, according to the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
