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Espionage
OpinionComment
David Zweig
Kang Siqin
David ZweigandKang Siqin

Opinion | How China can show the US that its Thousand Talents Plan has nothing to hide

  • China can end the secrecy over the plan’s contracts, payments and participants, setting US minds at ease and allowing scientific collaborations to continue
  • The US must also work to limit the spread of anxiety among Chinese scientists in the US or the scaring away of Chinese students

Reading Time:4 minutes
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Illustration: Craig Stephens
David ZweigandKang Siqin

In 2008, Li Yuanchao, then director of the Organisation Department of China’s Communist Party, established the Thousand Talents Plan. Li hoped to convince 2,000 of China’s best brains to take the plunge and return full-time to their motherland. Li hoped their return would liberalise China’s scientific establishment and create an “innovative society”.

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Unfortunately for Li, about 75 per cent of those willing to join the Thousand Talents Plan would only do so as “part-timers”, maintaining their overseas posts and returning to China for only a few months a year.

Roll the clock forward 10 years, and we find that since April 2018, the Trump administration has been attacking this plan as part of a 10-part Chinese “toolkit for foreign technology acquisition.” As part of the Department of Justice’s “China Initiative”, the US seeks to prevent the transfer of US technology that China needs to challenge the US in the global arena.

To date, China’s best researchers have settled in the US, our research suggests. Data on more than 750 participants in the Thousand Talents Plan show that as of 2013, 55 per cent of part-time participants were in the US, and their scientific publications are far superior to full-time returnees.

But rather than herald their contributions to US science, the Trump administration has vilified participants in the programme. And, they have conflated the Thousand Talents Plan with efforts by China’s People’s Liberation Army to hack and steal defence-related technology.

04:26

Chinese-American scientists fear US racial profiling

Chinese-American scientists fear US racial profiling
The Thousand Talents Plan has problems, particularly the lack of transparency about who in the US has joined it. Under the Foreign Thousand Talents Plan, which is part of the overall programme, but targeted only at non-ethnic Chinese, some American scientists transferred their own technology to upgrade the quality of Chinese institutions in return for large payments into secret bank accounts. In June 2020, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) revealed several hundred cases where mainland-born Chinese scientists failed to inform the NIH of a second job in China or funding from the Natural Science Foundation of China for a related project.
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