Us scientists china grants blog · MD
By Jeffrey A. Newman Esq.
In late April 2026, Reuters published a story that landed like a small bomb in Washington’s national security establishment. Charles Lieber, the former Harvard chemistry chair convicted in 2021 of lying to federal investigators about his ties to China, was no longer a chastened scholar living quietly with a felony record. He was running a state-funded brain-computer interface laboratory in Shenzhen, equipped with tools and resources he never had at Harvard. The lab is called i-BRAIN — the Institute for Brain Research, Advanced Interfaces and Neurotechnologies — and it is part of a much larger Chinese push to dominate one of the most consequential frontier technologies of the next two decades.
For Americans who had assumed the criminal justice system put a meaningful brake on the kind of foreign talent transfer that worried investigators, Lieber’s reappearance in southern China was a jolt. He served only two days in prison and six months of house arrest. Then, after a relatively brief retreat from public life, he showed up at a Shenzhen government conference saying he had arrived in China with little more than two bags of clothes and a dream. The state institute he now leads has access to deep-ultraviolet lithography equipment for chip fabrication and a primate research facility containing roughly two thousand cages — exactly the infrastructure required to push invasive brain implants toward human trials.
Lieber’s case is the most dramatic example of a pattern that has unsettled American policymakers for nearly a decade. It is also, on closer inspection, far more complicated than the usual headlines suggest. To understand what is at stake — and what is genuinely a national security concern versus what is overheated rhetoric — it helps to walk through several of the cases in detail, look at the dollar figures involved, and then ask the harder question: what does any of this actually transfer, and to whom?
The Lieber Case: $15 Million in U.S. Grants, Then Shenzhen
Charles Lieber spent decades at the apex of American nanoscience. As principal investigator of the Lieber Research Group at Harvard, he and his team brought in over fifteen million dollars in federal grants between roughly 2008 and 2019, drawn from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense. According to the original 2020 federal complaint, that funding broke down to at least three NIH grants worth about ten million dollars and at least six DOD grants worth roughly eight million. Some of his work also drew on funding streams associated with DARPA, the Air Force, and the Navy. He held more than fifty patents as principal inventor and won the Wolf Prize in chemistry in 2012.
The federal grants Lieber managed required disclosure of foreign financial conflicts of interest. He did not disclose that, beginning in 2011, he had become a “Strategic Scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology and a contractual participant in China’s Thousand Talents Program. His Wuhan contract paid him up to fifty thousand dollars a month, more than one hundred fifty thousand dollars in living expenses, and roughly $1.5 million in research funds to set up a lab in Wuhan that bore Harvard’s name and logo. When NIH and Harvard administrators eventually questioned him about the Chinese ties, he denied them. A federal jury convicted him in December 2021 on six counts: making false statements to federal investigators and tax-related offenses for hiding the Chinese income.
The technology itself matters here. Lieber’s research lies at the intersection of nanofabrication and neuroscience: building structures small enough and biocompatible enough to interface directly with the nervous system. His earlier work helped establish the field of bio-nanoelectronic sensors, which can detect single virus particles and probe individual neurons. Brain-computer interfaces have obvious medical promise — they have already restored some movement to paralyzed patients and offered new options for people with ALS. They also have less obvious military implications. The U.S. Defense Department has noted that researchers affiliated with China’s People’s Liberation Army have explored brain-machine interfaces as a way to enhance soldier cognition and situational awareness. DARPA, on the American side, funds adjacent work for the same reasons.
When Lieber relocated to Shenzhen in April 2025, he became founding director of i-BRAIN, an arm of the Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation. SMART’s 2026 budget rose roughly eighteen percent to about $153 million, all funded by the Shenzhen city government. Lieber’s lab sits inside a multibillion-dollar science campus that includes Brain Science Infrastructure Shenzhen, the primate facility, and houses an ASML deep-ultraviolet lithography system — a chip-making tool now subject to U.S. export controls. Brown University neuroscientist John Donoghue, who pioneered the BrainGate brain-computer interface, told Reuters that primate research is essential for translating neural interfaces to humans, and that such work is much harder to fund and conduct in the United States. China has named brain-computer interfaces a national priority in its current five-year plan.
The bluntest assessment came from Glenn Gerstell, the former general counsel of the National Security Agency, who told Reuters that China has effectively turned American scientific openness against the United States. Whatever one thinks of the rhetoric, the practical situation is this: a leading American nanoscientist, trained on more than a decade of federally funded research and convicted of lying about his Chinese ties, is now leading a state-backed Chinese lab pursuing technology with both medical and military applications, with infrastructure that exceeds what he had at Harvard.
A Wider Pattern: Other Cases of Federal Grants and Chinese Affiliations
Lieber is the most prominent case, but he is far from the only one. The Justice Department’s now-shuttered “China Initiative,” launched in 2018, brought charges against roughly two dozen academic researchers between 2018 and 2022, several of whom had received substantial federal funding.
Song Guo Zheng was a rheumatology and immunology professor at Ohio State University and previously at Penn State. According to court documents, his research groups secured more than $4 million in NIH grants while he simultaneously received overlapping funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and held an undisclosed appointment at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. He was arrested in May 2020 in Anchorage, Alaska, as he was preparing to board a chartered flight to China. Authorities found in his luggage two laptops, three cell phones, several USB drives, silver bars, expired Chinese passports for his family, and Chinese property deeds. He pleaded guilty to making false statements on NIH grant applications, was sentenced to thirty-seven months in prison, and was ordered to pay roughly $3.4 million in restitution to NIH and over $400,000 to Ohio State. His admitted purpose, in the government’s framing, was to use NIH-funded research to develop China’s expertise in his field.
Simon Saw-Teong Ang was an electrical engineering professor at the University of Arkansas and director of its High Density Electronics Center. Federal prosecutors said he received approximately $5 million in federal funding — primarily from NASA, but also from the Air Force — while concealing his ties to Chinese companies and his role in the Thousand Talents Program. The investigation began when a library employee discovered an email in which Ang reportedly warned a Chinese collaborator that his university job would be in trouble if his Thousand Talents affiliation became public. He was indicted on forty-two counts of wire fraud and two counts of passport fraud, and his work involved power electronics and aspects of power-grid research — areas with both civilian and defense relevance.
Xiao-Jiang Li was a Distinguished Professor at Emory University School of Medicine and a leading Huntington’s disease researcher. He pleaded guilty in May 2020 to filing a false tax return, having earned at least $500,000 in unreported income from positions at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Jinan University while still employed at Emory. Records show Li received roughly $1.7 million in NIH funding in fiscal 2018 alone across four grants. He was, in many ways, a particularly interesting case: his lab had genuinely pioneered a pig model of Huntington’s disease, the kind of breakthrough that takes decades to build. After his Emory firing, he and his wife Shihua Li relocated to Jinan University in Guangzhou, where they now run the Guangdong Key Laboratory of Non-Human Primate Research, continuing essentially the same line of work, and where Chinese state and provincial funds — and the access to non-human primate facilities that U.S. regulations make difficult — have given them institutional support that rivals what they had in Atlanta.
Chunzai Wang was a NOAA research oceanographer and one of the world’s leading experts on ocean-atmosphere interaction, climate change, and hurricanes. He won NOAA’s Employee of the Year award twice. In 2018 he pleaded guilty to accepting an unauthorized salary from China while serving as a U.S. federal employee — a violation specific to government workers, who are flatly barred from such arrangements. He had been involved in the Changjiang Scholars Program, the Thousand Talents Program, and the 973 Program, the last of which the U.S. attorney’s office described as oriented to Chinese national strategic targets. Wang was sentenced to time served, and is now a researcher with the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he continues his climate work.
These four cases share a structural similarity. In each, the scientist held a U.S. position funded substantially by federal grants. In each, the scientist also had a parallel Chinese appointment that was either undisclosed or under-disclosed. In each, the consequence in the United States was a conviction or guilty plea, professional ruin, and substantial financial loss. And in each — Lieber, Li, and Wang at minimum — the scientist’s career not only continued in China but in some respects flourished, with new institutional homes and better access to certain experimental resources.
It is also worth flagging cases that broke differently, because they speak directly to the policy debate. Gang Chen, an MIT mechanical engineering professor, was indicted in January 2021 on charges that he hid Chinese ties on a 2017 Department of Energy grant application. The case became a rallying point for hundreds of MIT faculty, who signed an open letter titled “We Are All Gang Chen,” arguing that the activities the government criminalized — collaborating with Chinese institutions on behalf of his university, hosting visitors, reviewing proposals — were routine academic work. In January 2022, federal prosecutors moved to drop all charges, telling the court they could no longer meet their burden of proof. Franklin Tao, a chemist at the University of Kansas, was the first academic indicted under the China Initiative; in 2024, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out his last remaining conviction, finding that the government had not shown his alleged nondisclosure was material to any DOE or NSF funding decision. By the time he was exonerated, he was reportedly more than a million dollars in legal debt and his family had been in turmoil for half a decade.
These contrasting cases are essential context. The pattern is real, but so is the pattern of overreach.
What Was the Federal Money Actually Buying?
To understand the national security stakes, it helps to think about what U.S. taxpayers were paying for in these labs. Federal research grants do not, in most cases, fund classified work or the creation of weapons. They fund what economists call basic and applied research: the slow, expensive, often dead-end-ridden process of figuring out how a phenomenon works. NIH grants pay for the kind of foundational biology that, decades later, makes a cancer drug possible. DOD grants on dual-use topics pay for the materials, devices, and design principles that may eventually become components of weapons systems but that, at the time of funding, look like ordinary research papers.
This is what makes the conflict-of-interest disclosure rules so important — and so easy to dismiss as paperwork. The U.S. system rests on a bet that openness pays off because scientific advances accumulate, and the country that hosts the best scientists captures most of the value: the trained students, the spinoff companies, the patents, the next generation of expertise. Federal grant rules are not designed to prevent collaboration with foreign scientists. They are designed to prevent a researcher from being paid twice for the same work, from steering U.S.-funded discoveries into another country’s national priorities without notice, and from concealing the kind of foreign appointments that would change how grant managers evaluate risk.
When those rules are broken, the harm is not always one specific stolen file. It is often diffuse. A researcher who has been quietly building a parallel lab in China can transfer not just data but tacit knowledge — the protocols, the failed experiments, the practical know-how — to that lab over a period of years. By the time U.S. authorities notice, what was once unique American capability has been replicated abroad. And in dual-use fields like nanofabrication, brain-computer interfaces, advanced materials, climate modeling, and synthetic biology, what looks like a medical breakthrough today can be a defense capability tomorrow.
Lieber’s case illustrates this most sharply. His Harvard work, funded by NIH and DOD, established him as one of a small handful of people in the world who could design nanoscale electrode arrays capable of reading and writing neural signals at the resolution required for serious brain-computer interfaces. He is not transferring a finished product to China. He is transferring himself — his judgment, his ability to recognize a promising experimental direction, his network of former students. That kind of transfer is much harder to police than a flash drive at an airport, and it is what export control regimes were never really designed to capture.
Song Guo Zheng’s situation was similar in structure but different in implication. His work was on autoimmune disease, where dual-use concerns are weaker. The government’s framing — that he used U.S. grant money to build Chinese expertise in rheumatology and immunology — captures a genuine concern about value capture, but the path from his research to a national security threat is longer and less obvious than in Lieber’s case. The same is true of Xiao-Jiang Li’s Huntington’s research. These are areas where most analysts would say the global public good of the science likely exceeds the geopolitical cost. Chunzai Wang’s climate work is yet another category: scientifically important and obviously dual-use only in narrow domains like military weather forecasting.
In other words, “national security risk” is not a single dial. It varies sharply by field, by the specific technology involved, and by what stage of development the work is in. A nanoscale neural electrode is not a hurricane model.
Why China Is So Aggressive — and Why the U.S. System Is So Hard to Defend
China’s approach to foreign talent has been remarkably explicit. The Thousand Talents Plan, established in 2008, was designed to recruit overseas experts to help China leapfrog in strategic fields. The Changjiang Scholars Program, the 973 Program, and a series of provincial and municipal initiatives have served the same broad function. China’s “military-civil fusion” doctrine, articulated under Xi Jinping, deliberately blurs the line between civilian research and defense applications, on the theory that any cutting-edge science the country develops should be available to its military when needed. Shenzhen, the city that now houses Lieber’s lab, is the model environment: deep municipal funding, aggressive recruiting of foreign expertise, light regulation on areas like primate research, and tight integration with Chinese national priorities.
The American system was built for a very different world. Federal grants flow to universities, which operate as relatively autonomous institutions. Disclosure rules were designed to prevent garden-variety conflicts of interest, not to identify foreign-state-directed research relationships. Universities themselves have powerful incentives — institutional, financial, intellectual — to encourage international collaboration and to view aggressive enforcement as both racially fraught and corrosive to their mission. The country that decides to “lock down” its research enterprise risks becoming the country whose enterprise no longer attracts the best people.
This is the harder dimension of the story. The China Initiative, launched in 2018 and shut down in 2022 after sustained criticism, prosecuted roughly 148 individuals, of whom about 88 percent were of Chinese heritage, by one MIT Technology Review tally. Many of those cases never resulted in convictions; some, like Gang Chen’s and Franklin Tao’s, ended in dismissals or appellate reversals after years of damage to the defendants and their families. Chinese-American scientists in U.S. universities reported feeling targeted, surveilled, and unwelcome. Surveys conducted between 2021 and 2023 found a substantial increase in U.S.-based scientists of Chinese descent who were considering leaving for positions abroad, including in China. Some of the country’s most accomplished researchers — people whose work has demonstrably benefited American science — concluded that their best option was to move.
The result is a paradox. The very enforcement effort intended to staunch the flow of American expertise to China may have accelerated a quieter, larger flow: not of indicted defendants returning under cover, but of unindicted, fully innocent researchers walking out the front door because they decided the U.S. environment had become hostile. That is not a hypothetical concern. Estimates of the annual return migration of Chinese-origin scientists from the United States to China have risen sharply since 2018, with life sciences hit particularly hard.
What Would a Smarter Policy Look Like?
If you accept that there is a real problem and also a real risk of overreaction, the policy challenge becomes one of precision rather than volume. A few principles emerge from looking at the cases together.
First, the most clear-cut national-security cases tend to involve dual-use technologies — nanofabrication, neural interfaces, semiconductors, synthetic biology, advanced materials, autonomous systems — where the gap between civilian and military applications is narrow and where the U.S. has either a unique lead or a slim one. These warrant tighter disclosure rules, more aggressive export-control review, and clearer institutional protocols. The current U.S. system treats Lieber’s brain-electrode work and Wang’s climate research the same way at the disclosure level. It probably should not.
Second, the consequence regime is poorly calibrated. Lieber served two days in prison for a conviction that, if the government’s underlying theory of harm is correct, involved the transfer of meaningfully important technology. Song Guo Zheng got thirty-seven months. The variation has more to do with prosecutorial choices and case-specific facts than with any systematic judgment about how much harm the underlying conduct caused. And from the standpoint of deterrence, what may matter more than the prison sentence is whether a convicted scientist can simply reconstitute their lab abroad with better equipment than they had before. If the goal is to discourage that pattern, the U.S. has very few tools — perhaps tightening export controls on specific equipment, perhaps restricting what convicted researchers can do with American-trained students who follow them, but ultimately, the United States cannot prevent a U.S. citizen from accepting a job in another country.
Third, the disclosure regime itself needs to be both clearer and less weaponized. The Gang Chen case collapsed in part because Department of Energy rules in 2017 did not actually require Chen to disclose much of what prosecutors said he had hidden. The rules changed in 2020, and prosecutors then applied the new standard retroactively. Franklin Tao’s appeals court reversal turned on the fact that the government could not show his alleged nondisclosure was material to any actual funding decision. Vague rules enforced selectively are a recipe for both injustice and ineffective deterrence. They sweep in the innocent and leave loopholes for the genuinely problematic.
Fourth — and most importantly — the United States has to compete on the upside as well as the downside. The reason a scientist like Lieber finds Shenzhen attractive is not only the salary. It is the access to primate facilities, the scale of state funding, the absence of certain regulatory constraints, the willingness of a national government to designate a research area a strategic priority and put real money behind it. American policy has, for two decades, allowed the basic-research budget to drift in real terms, allowed primate research to become more difficult and expensive, and allowed the visa system to push talented foreign Ph.D.s out the door after we trained them. If the United States makes itself an inhospitable place to do ambitious science, it should not be surprised when ambitious scientists leave.
Concern
The Lieber story, and the cases that surround it, do represent something real. It is genuinely concerning that an American convicted of lying about ties to a foreign-state recruitment program can resume his career two years later in that same country, leading a lab pursuing technology with potential military applications, with better equipment than he had in the United States. It is concerning that the U.S. enforcement apparatus, having spent years on his case, ended with a two-day prison sentence and no meaningful constraint on his subsequent activities. And it is concerning that several of the other cases — Zheng, Ang, Li — show a similar pattern of substantial federal funding flowing to researchers with significant, undisclosed Chinese commitments.
At the same time, the simple narrative — that the U.S. is being plundered by Chinese-American scientists working in plain sight — does not survive contact with the case files. Many of the highest-profile prosecutions failed. The China Initiative was ended because, on close inspection, much of what it had criminalized was either routine collaboration or genuine ambiguity in disclosure rules. The real risk is not chiefly that good American research will be stolen. It is that the United States will lose its long competitive advantage as the place where the most ambitious scientists in the world choose to build their careers — partly through legitimate Chinese investment in attractive alternatives, and partly through self-inflicted wounds at home.
Policymakers will spend the next decade trying to draw the line between protecting genuinely sensitive technology and preserving the openness that made American science strong in the first place. The work is unglamorous: rewriting disclosure forms, calibrating export controls, funding primate facilities and basic research, fixing the visa system, building institutional protocols that catch problems early without humiliating the innocent. None of it makes for a satisfying headline. But the alternative is a system that catches a Lieber every few years, hands him a slap on the wrist, and watches him rebuild in Shenzhen — while the people the United States most needs to keep are quietly leaving, too. The scientists Americans should worry most about losing are not the ones in handcuffs. They are the ones with no charges against them at all, who looked around their American institutions and decided their work was no longer welcome here.
Jeffrey Newman, JD, MBA, is a whistleblower lawyer whose firm represents physicians and other heathcare providers who become whistleblowers in healthcare fraud cases. Whistleblower laws in the U.S. allow individuals with information about export control violations or tariff fraud to report it under the False Claims Act which if successful awards the whistleblower a percentage of the amount collected. The Firm’s website is www.JeffNewmanLaw.com. Attorney Newman can be reached at Jeff@Jeffnewmanlaw.com or at 978-880-4758. For other blogs, see: http://JeffNewmanLaw.com
