Monday, August 9, 2021

TTP - Thousand Talents Scam - Qiming

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TTP - Thousand Talents Scam ..

In response to widespread Western negative reaction and pushback, Xina has attempted to duck beneath the radar by relabeling its scheme to poach intellectuals and steal intellectual property. The current iteration of the program is called Qiming, administered by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Qiming Venture Partners (啟明創投; Qǐmíng chuàngtóu) is a Xina based Venture capital firm. It primarily invests in Technology, Internet and Healthcare related companies across Xina. It is headquartered in Shanghai with offices in Beijing, Suzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong. It mainly focuses on investments in China. Investors include Princeton University, Duke University and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In 2017, it set up its American branch, Qiming Venture Partners (USA). The branch is headquartered in Seattle, Washington with offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts and San Francisco, California.

The Thousand Talents Plan or Thousand Talents Program (TTP), or Overseas High-Level Talent Recruitment Programs was established in 2008 by the central government of China to recognize and recruit leading international experts in scientific research, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Both the United States and Canada have warned that China intends to use scientists who are involved with this plan to gain access to new technology for economic and military advantage.


The success of the program in recruiting U.S.-trained scientists back to China has been viewed with concern from the U.S., with a June 2018 report from the National Intelligence Council declaring an underlying motivation of the program to be “to facilitate the legal and illicit transfer of US technology, intellectual property and know-how” to China

In January 2020, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Charles M. Lieber, the chair of Harvard University's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, for lying about his ties to the program

In May 2020, the FBI arrested a former researcher at the Cleveland Clinic for failing to disclose ties to the Thousand Talents Program. 

In June 2020, it was reported that the National Institutes of Health had investigations into the behavior of 189 scientists. In November 2020, Song Guo Zheng, a TTP participant, pled guilty to making false claims to the FBI about his ties to the Chinese government during his employment at Ohio State University.

In November 2019, the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held an open hearing on the China's Talent Recruitment Plans, including the TTP, and called the programs a threat to national security. The report from the hearing cited TTP contracts as violating research values, TTP members willfully failing to disclose their membership to their home institutions, and cited numerous cases against TTP members for theft of intellectual property and fraud. One TTP member stole proprietary defense information on U.S. military jet engines. The report indicated that "TTP targets U.S.-based researchers and scientists, regardless of ethnicity or citizenship, who focus on or have access to cutting-edge research and technology."

In August 2020Canadian Security Intelligence Service warned both Canadian universities and Canadian research institutions of the TTP, saying that it recruited researchers and scientists around the world to persuade them to share their research and technology — either willingly or by coercion.

The program grew out of the "Talent Superpower Strategy" of the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2007. The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and State Council of the People's Republic of China elevated the program in 2010 to become the top-level award given through China's National Talent Development Plan to strengthen innovation and international competitiveness within China. In 2019, the program was re-branded as the "National High-end Foreign Experts Recruitment Plan." The United Front Work Department's Western Returned Scholars Association is the official representative body for program participants.

1000 Talent Plan professorship is the highest academic honor awarded by the State Council, analogous to the top-level award given by the Ministry of Education. The program includes two mechanisms: resources for permanent recruitment into Chinese academia, and resources for short-term appointments that typically target international experts who have full-time employment at a leading international university or research laboratory.

The program has three categories:
  • Innovative 1000 Talents plan (Long term / Short term) – for Chinese scholars below 55 years of age
  • Foreign 1000 Talents plan (Long term / Short term) – for foreigners only below 55 years of age
  • Young scholar 1000 Talents plan or Overseas Young Talents Project of China — for those below 40 years of age
The program has been praised for recruiting top international talent to China, but also criticized for being ineffective at retaining the talent.

Conflict of interest and fraud concerns: Although the program has successfully attracted top international talent to China, its efficacy in retaining these talented individuals has been questioned, with many of the most talented scientists willing to spend short periods in China but unwilling to abandon their tenured positions at major Western universities. Additionally, some Thousand Talents Plan Professors have reported fraud in the program including misappropriated grant funding, poor accommodations, and violations of research ethicsDismissals due to undisclosed connections to the TTP have taken place. Individuals who receive either of China's two top academic awards, the Thousand Talents Professorship and the Changjiang (Yangtze River) Scholar award, have become targets for recruitment by China's wealthiest universities so frequently that the Ministry of Education issued notices in both 2013 and 2017 discouraging Chinese universities from recruiting away top talent from one another [poaching].

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