A Harvard University chemistry professor was convicted in the United States for keeping his ties to a China recruiting program under wraps. Charles Lieber, former dean of the chemistry department of the prestigious university, pleaded guilty to making false tax returns and not declaring an account in a Chinese bank.
The professor was arrested on campus in January 2020 on suspicion of not declaring he received a $ 15,000 scholarship. According to the indictment, the chemist had become a “strategic scientist” at Wuhan University in 2011, and between 2012 and 2017 he was included in the Chinese program for the recruitment of foreign teachers and scientists, called the Plan of a thousand talents.
The accusations against Lieber, who now faces a sentence of several years in prison and a fine of up to one million dollars, came as part of the action launched in 2018 by the then Trump administration, called “China Initiative”, To identify alleged Chinese economic spies in the United States.
The initiative was criticized for the methods adopted, which often targeted university professors of Asian origin. In recent months, a group of professors from Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, Princeton and other major universities have written to the attorney general of the Biden administration, Merrick Garland, asking him to stop the initiative that is “damaging research and technological competitiveness. of the USA “.