 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm delighted to see so many people in the room, and I know we have many people who are also watching us through the live stream. So welcome to everyone. I'm Ann Curzan. I'm Dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. And getting to host these kinds of lectures is one of the very best parts of this job. So thank you for joining us as we celebrate the Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Professorship in Chinese Studies. So before I introduce our speaker, Professor Ann Chi Lin, I want to share a little bit about the history of this professorship. So in 2013, Richard and Susan Rogel made a $10 million gift for the Center for Chinese Studies. The gift reflected Mr. Rogel's interest in the region brought about by his friend, Professor Kenneth Lieberthal. An expert on China's political economy. Professor Lieberthal encouraged Mr. Rogel to join U of M's delegation trip to China in 2005, and which was a life-changing moment for him. He has said, the more I learned about the country, the more I fell in love with it. And I know from having gotten to speak with you about China the way you light up when you talk about your experiences there, which has really been wonderful for me because as you know, but not everyone here may know, I spent two really transformational years of my own life in central China teaching when I finished college. And it's been wonderful to get to talk with you about a country in a region that we both care deeply about. So in 2016, the Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Professorship in Chinese Studies was established, named to honor Professor Lieberthal's scholarly expertise. And Mr. Rogel's transformative support. Per the gift agreement, the holders of the professorship also serve as directors of the Lieberthal Rogel Center for Chinese Studies. Directing the center is not Professor Anne Chee Lin's first leadership role. Professor Lin is an associate professor of public policy and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy where she has been curriculum manager since 2016. She represents the school and its relationships with Chinese universities and co-created and leads its graduate global experience course on current Chinese policy. Professor Lin created the school's two-day integrated policy exercise required for all first-year students and teaches its core politics course and graduate and undergraduate policy seminars on immigration and voting. As a political scientist, Professor Lin's research focuses on policy implementation and national racial and ethnic differences in beliefs and behavior. Recently, she explored COVID-19 blame allocation between the US and China through a multinational study and studied the pandemic experiences of black, Latino and white residents of majority minority neighborhoods in the US and Puerto Rico. She's also interested in subnational labor migration policies in the US, Canada and Australia. Early in her career, Professor Lin investigated staff and prisoner participation in educational vocational training and drug treatment programs, collecting data from five medium security male prisons. Her findings led to her first book, Reform in the Making, the Implementation of Social Policy in Prison. Published in 2000, it was called an important and convincing book. Her interest in Arab immigrant experiences in Metro Detroit led her to being co-principal investigator of the landmark Detroit Arab American Study on which she based her co-authored 2009 book, Citizenship in Crisis Arab Detroit after 9-11. As you can see, this is a scholar who does incredibly timely projects as part of her work. She has co-authored, edited and co-edited six other books, two articles, six book chapters, research reports and book reviews. I do not know how you get it all done. Her service to her field is also exemplary. She was president of the Women's Caucus for the Midwest Political Science Association in 2000, served on the Public Management Research Association Board of Directors for four years and for the last 20 years on the Washtenaw County City of Ann Arbor Community Corrections Advisory Board. She's an active participant in Catholic academic community discussions on religious values and public policy. In 1994, we were lucky enough to have Professor Lynn come to the University of Michigan as an assistant professor in the Political Science Department. She later moved her appointment to the newly created Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy where she was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2001. Prior to her academic career, she was a social worker at Covenant House in New York City. She then served as a Robert W. Hartley Fellow in governmental studies at the Brookings Institute while obtaining her PhD in political science from the University of Chicago. As director of the Lieberthau Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, Professor Lynn plays an important role in Chinese studies, programming, development and outreach at the University of Michigan. She is also integral to recruiting and advising students in the Masters in International and Regional Studies program who are focused on Chinese studies. Based on her many, many contributions to her fields through her research, publications and service, we at the College of Literature Science and the arts find it most fitting that she be named the Kenneth G. Lieberthau and Richard H. Rogel Professor of Chinese Studies. Please join me in congratulating Professor Lynn on her many achievements past, present and all that we know is to come. Congratulations. So we started a new tradition a couple of years ago where before I turned things over, I get to ask the speaker a couple of questions. And the first question which we love asking just for students and for all of us as colleagues here is how did you discover your field? How did you come to do what you do? Well, I think you can tell from that very generous introduction that you read that I really don't have a field. You know, I just sort of move around as the case may be. But I would say I, but I will tell you how I got involved in this project which is that friends of mine in who are engineers in the engineering school were very upset about this issue many years ago. And they got in touch with me and they said, we want to send a letter to somebody in Congress. Can you tell us who to send it to? And can you read the letter? And so I didn't really know very much about the subject but I read the letter, I corrected the English, I was like toned down some of the passages and I thought, this is really important. Why are people talking about this? And so over the years I've just been pulled more and more into this and I really think it says something, you know, about the University of Michigan where our boundaries between schools and departments and disciplines are low where we can really work with each other scientists, scientists, social scientists, humanities, faculty, arts faculty and you know, really sort of work together to find important projects to work on. Scoot here so people can hear me who are live streaming. I think in some ways you've started to answer this but the second question is, what do you find the most rewarding part of your work? And sometimes I phrase it as what gets you up every day to go do the work that you do. When I wrote the prison's book, I really felt like I was lifting up the voices of people who wouldn't be heard, both prisoners and staff who were in these institutions. And then as I've been tremendously lucky to wander through my career, I think that's always stayed with me. You know, who here is not being heard? Who here needs to be heard? What difference would it make if we heard them? You know, and so that's what gets me up. Well, thank you for this talk and I can hardly wait to hear it so let me turn it over. Thank you. So, Dean Curzan, Richard Rogo and Susan Rogo, Ken Leverthaw and Jane Leverthaw, my colleagues and friends. In the mid 1800s, my grandfather's grandfather came to the United States, leaving his home in Tuishan, Guangdong Province. For the rest of his life, he worked in San Francisco as a laborer. He dreamed of filling a chest full of gold pieces and being able to bring that chest back home to show, you know, what he had accomplished. But he, but, sorry, I'm, no. But our family legend tells that, you know, when he had, he was almost done, he had one more coin left and he figured the best way to get it would be to go gamble, which was a really bad choice. And he'd lost most of the coins in his chest, just trying to get that last one and so he was never able to go back home. However, all during all this time, he was sending money home and he told his son that he had to use the money that was going home for education. He needed to study and his grandson, his son's son needed to study so that they wouldn't end up a laborer like him. In 1936, my grandfather came to the United States. His grandfather's money from China allowed him to become a, to go to a new high school, not the old, you know, Chinese literary classics, but a modern high school and then a new college, Nankai University. He met and married my grandmother who was one of the first women in China to get a degree in electrical engineering and then he won a scholarship, a government scholarship to come to the United States. And so he came here to Ann Arbor to get a master's in political economy. Well, he came in 1936 and those of you who know the area will know that 1936 was probably not the best time to start traveling. He got to Ann Arbor, he started his degree and then of course the Japanese invaded China and the Sino-Japanese War started and he was getting no more money from home. However, he moved, was able to move in with an elderly couple and to do their housework and do their yard work to get enough money to finish his master's degree here. Then because there was no more money, he went to San Francisco and in San Francisco he went and found his grandfather's grave and dug up the bones and wrapped them in socks and sent them back to China hoping that they could be buried in the graves of his ancestors. He himself worked as a teacher and a journalist and one of the essays he wrote about young Chinese youth and how China will progress impressed a prosperous immigrant so much that that immigrant decided to send him to England for his doctorate. He went to the London School of Economics, he got a doctorate in economics and then nine years after he first came to Ann Arbor, he returned to China just in time to meet my nine year old mother, his first child. So you can see that the stories of my family in sort of a very odd and complicated way have led me here to this place. My grandfather, before he died, I was hired at Michigan before he died and I was able to bring him here and to show him Brackham and walk past the house on Church Street, probably not the same house anymore where he'd lived with this elderly couple and take him to lunch at the Michigan Union and it was just a moment of really great joy for us. He has passed away now but I know that he is proud that his granddaughter is able to lead one of the nation's most prominent centers for Chinese studies and because of that, I think he would also find it especially fitting that the center is named for Kenneth Lieberthal who has been so important in interpreting China to the U.S. and the U.S. to China and also incredibly fitting that the name honors Richard Rogo, whose love for China has really brought about not only this transformative gift to the center but is illustrated in so many ways in the lives of the companies that you support and the university that you support. So thank you very much. So now I'm going to tell you about another Chinese immigrant. People who can't figure out. All right, there we go. And probably you can do this for me. I want to click on that link if I can do that. I was born in Beijing in China. I was in Peking University for nine years and during that time I met my wife, she and we came to the United States together. We had two daughters, Joyce and Sarah. We really realized that our home is here and our career is here, now our kids are here. So that was the time we decided to become American citizens. It was May 21, 2015 and early in the morning I was woken up by this very, very loud knock on my door. It was very urgent, very loud, like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, like that. And so I was wondering who would knock people's door like that. And so I quickly put on shorts and opened the door and I saw many people outside and some had weapons and two guys had batting ran ready to take down my door. And then there's a few agents asked, are you Xiaoxin Xi? I said yes. And then he announced that I was arrested. Of course, at that point I understand it was not the mistaken identity, they were here for me. Another agent stepped into the house, turned me around, put the handcuffs on me, armed the agent in bulletproof vest, ran into the house yelling FBI, FBI. My wife was opening her bathroom door. The FBI agent pointed the gun at her and said, you know, hands up. And then they got Sarah and Joyce. So they all came out, I combined, and with hands raised. The United States Justice Department is saying that the chairman of the Temple University Department of Physics is an international spy, passing off technology secrets to China. This world renowned physicist now faces four counts of wire fraud. He faces them. He faced a maximum sentence of 80 years in prison. So what was the basis of the federal government's claim? Well, they said he had purchased a proprietary device that had export control restrictions placed on it. In violation of those restrictions, he had sent the schematics of that device to China and in addition had sent unpublished research results that he had done with the help of this device which produced magnesium, diboride, thin films, material used for superconductor research. And so he was charged first for sending the schematics in violation of this license, but then also for wire fraud because he sent them over email and that's what gives you wire fraud. So as it turns out, after he was arrested, a bunch of scientists started coming forward and they said, I don't think the schematics that you're showing us are the schematics for this proprietary device. And it turns out that what profession she had sent over email to China was a completely different device using a completely different chemical compound and not restricted in any way his dissent. And furthermore that the research that he was sending was research that was published open, openly, not secret. Even after that, the government decided that it had to drop its charges. Now they'd only picked him out of the house at gunpoint, made him stop his research program, forbidden him to contact even his postdocs, much to his colleagues. But sorry, we got some statements from some scientists and we've decided that we were wrong. So what did the FBI learn from that? And the FBI learned from that that maybe it didn't do science very well. But instead of deciding, all right, maybe we should learn some science or maybe get some experts to help us interpret the science. What they did instead was say, you know what? We don't need to know the science, all we need to do is follow the money. If we figure out that people are communicating with China and we think that part of that communication is doing work for China that they could be paid for, then we know what they're doing is wrong. We know that that in and itself tells us that they've committed a crime. And so what do you see in the characteristics? Remember Professor Xi's case is in 2015. After 2016, what do you see? Well, first thing you see false statements, that people are being charged for failure to disclose that they participated in a Chinese talent program or failure to disclose that they had been on a review panel, like for the Chinese version of NSF, failure to disclose that they'd received grants from an agency in China. Then they're being accused of wire fraud, which is making those false statements which then can lead to some gain. You get money out of that over email, basically. Over wireless communication becomes wire fraud. And then the final thing that they talk about is tax fraud. Failure to pay taxes on an honoraria you received in China or salary you received from China or grant money you received from China. Now I hope the people in the audience who have gotten grants are saying wait a minute, you don't grant money, you don't pay taxes on grant money. One of the things that we discovered as these cases began to multiply is that the FBI didn't know much more about university activity than they knew about science. And so think about the false statements. They've brought a whole, they've prosecuted multiple people for the fact that they did not disclose that they were involved in these Chinese talent programs or had these relationships. And it turns out that when those faculty entered those relationships, this closure was not required. They then take the wire fraud. They look at the fact that they haven't disclosed their participation, so they're taking money from China. At the same time, they're also taking money from the US, they're taking money from the National Science Foundation or from DARPA or from NIH. And so now you, and you didn't tell those agencies about it, so now you're using email to commit this kind of fraud. The fraud now is against the US agency or the university, which that you're getting money from. Let me pause here really quickly to point out that it is not illegal for people to take money, to apply for grants from China. It is not illegal for people to participate in an honorary program where you become a Chinese professor, you have an affiliation. It's not even illegal for you to take leave from your university and go teach in China for a while. But because they thought that these faculty members were not forthcoming, they charged them with wire fraud. Finally, tax fraud. So I am here to remind all of you that if you are making speeches and you get honorary, I remember to put that on your income tax form because if not, you've committed tax fraud. But let me remind you what I said, you don't owe taxes on your grant money. Gang Chen, the professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, was charged receiving $29 million from China over the time that he was a professor at MIT. And guess what? He was charged for not paying taxes on that $29 million. It turns out a week after he's arrested, the president of MIT issues a statement. And he says, look, I can't comment on these charges, but I can comment on that $29 million. That was to set up a joint institute between MIT and the Southern University of Science and Technology, Sen Zen. That $29 doesn't go to Professor Chen's pocket, even though he is the inaugural director. So what are we looking at here? Obviously, as I'm presenting it, there's not a lot here to take offense at. So what's behind this? Well, if you look at the press release that the Department of Justice sent out when they arrested Gang Chen. So the first two paragraphs are about he committed this kind of crime, and by doing this, he committed that kind of crime by doing this, and then they have a sentence. And the sentence says, it is also alleged that Gang Chen displayed his commitment to improving or increasing Chinese science and technology by this email which he sent to himself, which we found in his email. And I think if you look at the email, this pretty obviously notes for the kind of speech that you give when you're saying, you know, we need to support more research in science and technology. But what the U.S. Attorney for Boston thought that email meant was that the allegations in this complaint implied that this was not just about greed, but about loyalty to China. Assistant Attorney General John Deemars in another case. This is just the latest case involving professors or researchers concealing their affiliations with China. We will not tolerate it. I will remind you again, affiliations with China are not illegal. All right, so here's what I'm gonna try to convince you of in the day's talk. First of all, I'm gonna describe federal law enforcement describes as a whole of society approach to addressing China's theft of intellectual property from the United States. What really happens, however, is that this whole of society approach basically criminalizes research while Chinese and it will not work to protect the United States. Next, I'm going to tell you about the response which is that federal agencies have created a disclose everything approach. You'll be fine as long as you disclose. This is not going to work either, not to protect our research and not to protect our universities. Finally, I'm going to talk to you about why these foreign federal government actions have created a chilling effect and what that chilling effect is. Unfortunately, this one is working and it's working because universities, including the University of Michigan, are finding it easier to handle the possibility of prosecutions and investigations by bypassing safeguards that have been established to protect academic freedom and faculty rights. Then I have some recommendations at the end, but I'll get to it later. Okay, all right. So very quick background, June 2015, this is a counterintelligence strategic partnership intelligence note. The FBI sends these out periodically on all sorts of different topics and this one is about preventing loss of academic research. I don't need to read it for you. They're basically concerned that foreign companies may act as agents of their government in interacting with American universities and then steal, bridge the R&D gaps that these countries have. Now, the preamble in particular is about theft of patents, trade secrets, IP, et cetera. But if you actually look at the note, they're concerned about a whole range of other things. They're concerned about hackers. They're concerned about students who take university property and send those back to their home countries. They're concerned about people at universities who might be intimidating the other members, other people from their country into not expressing views that are critical of the country that they came from. So this is really sort of a hodgepodge but it shows the FBI, I think this is the first focus on academics. By 2018, this letter has been repackaged and it's now called China the Risk to Academia. And the emphasis here is on China but really on America that our universities in particular are trying to protect this culture of collaboration and open science but in doing that, bad people are taking advantage of it. This is a 2018 National Counterintelligence, National Counterintelligence Security Center report about foreign economic espionage. It focuses on China, Russia and Iran and here it takes China's strategic goals and what I want you to notice is that four of the 10 are to do with universities. Why is federal law enforcement, why is the federal government so worried about what's going on in universities? Well, this is Chris Ray who's the director of the FBI and he's at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing and he says a couple of, again, you can read it yourself but let me just point out, non-traditional collectors, whether it's professors, scientists or students, that pretty much covers a lot of the people at universities, he's saying all of these people, non-traditional collectors. There's a level of naivete on the part of the academic sector. We have to view the China threat as a whole of government threat, not just a whole of government threat but a whole of society threat. So you go back to those professors, scientists and students, those people you wouldn't expect, their whole society is in it to steal our stuff and we're therefore going to require a whole of society response in order to prevent this. This isn't just coming from the FBI. As a matter of fact, one of the really important things I want to point out today is that the focus has, although federal has sort of is begun to move from federal law enforcement to the federal agencies. And so this is Francis Collins in 2018, pointing out that foreign entities have mounted systematic programs to influence the NIH researchers or to take advantage of open science. And then he says, it's not limited to biomedical research, it's been a significant issue for defense and energy. I think most of us would be think defense and energy, yes, those are absolutely topics of national security. Is biomedical research a topic of national security? Well, yes, he says and he uses, puts these three together to make that point. So what is he concerned about? He says, well, we're three things. We're really worried about diversion of IP. We're really worried that people are getting these grant applications and then the reviewers in the United States are sending these grant applications back to China so that researchers there can sort of use the information that's in these grant proposals. And then finally, we're worried about the fact that these researchers are not disclosing the substantial resources that they're getting from other sources, which threatens the distort decisions about the appropriate use of NIH funds. All of a sudden, we've moved from, we're stealing sensitive technology to we're stealing research money, not in the sense of like breaking open the bank, but in the sense of you are getting research money from China. So why are you also asking for research money from us? Let me give you an example from talent plans. So those of you who don't know, these are a program that China national government has created and funded through the United Front, through its United Front organizations at different universities, pretty much at every university. And they go under many different names. A thousand talents is one name, the Changjiang or Yangtze River Scholars is another. And the FBI says about these talent plans that they all incentivize its members to steal foreign technologies. And that members are these talent plans are required to share new technology developments or breakthroughs with China. If you look across multiple talent plans, talent plans from different universities, what you will find out is that universities themselves administer their own talent plans and that every single plan is customized for the researcher. And so some researchers may be able to come in the summer. That's how the plan is written. Some may be able to take a sabbatical year. That's how it's written. Some may not be able to go to China at all, but they'll take postdocs from China. That's how it's written, okay? And that it's important to understand again that when you look at universities incentives to do these, some might be interested in stealing IP, but others are to add these well-known names of scholars, both Chinese and non-Chinese, to their rosters. Why do they need to do it through talent plans? Because China is not attractive enough yet to have these foreign scientists move there permanently. And so instead they try to attract them part-time. Now these faculty use Chinese as well as non-Chinese affiliations in publishing and therefore the university of course gets more renowned, gets higher citation counts for having these faculty on their rosters. And the last thing I will point out that because the focus is publishing, published research is by definition not shared only with China. Publishing is publishing open to the world or at least to the universities that can afford journals. If you look at the successful prosecutions under the China initiative, under this foreign federal law enforcement move, what you will find is that after the first two really sensational ones, tons of restitution, very long prison sentences, and then Charles Lieber who has not been sentenced yet was a major blockbuster prosecution because he was so prominent and so prominent the chair of his departments and a very well-renowned scholar and also not Chinese. If you look at the other prosecutions, what you're finding is that they're getting plea three months prison, a negotiated guilty plea with only restitution. A Ming Qing Xiao's case which came down a week ago, he's a mathematician. He's a mathematician at Southern Illinois Carbondale. He got, he was cleared of all grant fraud accounts because it turns out that what the federal government was arguing were grants to him were actually grants for Southern Illinois Carbondale to establish joint center. But he was convicted of a failure to report his Chinese bank account. He was given a year's probation and a $600 fine. And then most recently, just two days ago, Franklin Tao, Feng Tao at the University of Kansas, this was a very high profile conviction last December because his case was written up in the New Yorker Magazine. So he was charged with eight counts. The jury found him guilty of four and the judge yesterday at his sentencing threw out three additional counts. Again, the only thing he's guilty of, he is now guilty of is the failure to disclose the Chinese bank account. So all of these cases are about disclosure. And if judges are realizing that the disclosure of the federal government is, the lack of disclosure is not serious, why are we worried? Michael Lauer, deputy director at NIH for extramural research. And this is about that case, Song Gao Zhang, which is this horrific case, researcher at Ohio State University, 37 months in prison and $4 million restitution. That $4 million restitution is the amount of his NIH grant. Federal overhead in NIH grants, paid to the Ohio State University. Franklin Tao was returning, sorry, Song Gao Zhang is returning that from his own pocket. Salaries to his postdocs, to students, to their stipends and tuition. Song Gao Zhang is paying that from his own pocket. The laboratory supplies that he bought, which produced papers that have been published. So that research, Michael Lauer says, is no good. The lack of candor in his application calls into question the validity of his research, and therefore we're unable to take for granted anything that was published through peer review, I might point out. Right, but Michael Lauer wants us to understand that his deception was a tragedy. There's a researcher out there, great application, outstanding score, didn't get funded. That researcher probably was going to make these great discoveries that would help us cure cancer. But unfortunately he didn't get to make them because Song Gao Zhang got the grant instead. And so now we are, I don't want to be too flippant about this. There are lots of very deserving people who don't get NIH grants. But now we're basically comparing a hypothetical, like what Song Gao Zhang is guilty of is depriving the world of a hypothetical scientific breakthrough. All right, and so I think what you really, why is this crucial? Since up to 2022, since 2018, the 2016, NIH has opened 241 cases. Under the China initiative, we never got a full accounting of how many cases were opened under the China initiative. MIT Technology Review counted 77. The DOJ's website I just counted yesterday lists 51. China initiative 7751, NIH 241 cases, and NIH is only one of the government funding agencies that has opened these investigations. And that's why I say that the focus on this has moved away from the federal government, especially we hope with the end of the China initiative. But things are not getting better. In fact, things are going to get worse. So this is NIH's report on its foreign interference cases. And first, you're not going to be surprised to know that 92%, to 84%, 100% involve China. If you look at race, again, you see the vast majority of cases are also about China. They break these down between internal self-disclosure, DOJ or FBI. You know what DOJ or FBI is, refer cases on, we won't talk about those. Self-disclosure is when researchers voluntarily approached NIH and said, oh, there's a mistake on my disclosure form. Can I amend it? They are doing that without any guarantee that they won't be prosecuted for that mistake, but they go and disclose it anyway. And then there's internal. What does internal mean? It's not internal to the NIH, it's internal to universities. How are universities handling this? Here's a set of outcomes. Institutional exclusion from grants. That means that 50 researchers were told by their university, you can no longer get grants. Run through your university. Termination or resignation. That means exactly what you think it means. Undisclosed, but then look at undisclosed equity patent or COI, conflict of interest cases. 16% of the cases involve undisclosed equity patent or FCOI. In other words, something that might look a little more like IP through intellectual property theft. Why are all these people getting terminated? Well, here's the process. The grant agency, NIH in this case, contacts the university. And it says, we are suspicious that your researcher has these undisclosed affiliations. We want to have access to their email to investigate. We wanna have access to their records to investigate. The university says, well, let's hope we can settle this before hopefully this is just the flash in the pan. It's not important. And so the university gives NIH the information without notifying the faculty member. Because it might be nothing. Why worry the person? Then the university, NIH, finds troubling information. At that point, the faculty members informed. And he suddenly asked to account for a bunch of things which could be 10 years old, 15 years old, 20 years old, which could involve co-authoring relationships with former postdocs who now may or may not have connections to military civil fusion research in China. And then what the university says is, look, NIH is gonna crack down on us. They're not only gonna make life difficult for you, they're gonna make life difficult for us. But if you will retire, this will all go away. Or if you decide to just stop doing research, teach, enjoy life, don't worry about getting citations. This will go away. And so the faculty member accepts because what he doesn't want is for the FBI to get the case. When the faculty member voluntarily decides to retire or resign or close their research program, no one, there is no board that hears that decision. There is no appeal, he's done this voluntarily. And so we never hear that this is going on. In last summer, I put together a survey for the Association of Chinese Professors here and we then sent the survey to other associations, similar associations around the country and four other universities use our survey instrument to survey their faculty. One of the things that the survey told us is that we have four people at the University of Michigan who've undergone that process that I just told you about. Voluntarily, voluntarily, quote unquote, resigned or retired or closed their research labs. We have this larger sample through our survey. And what we find is that 32 people out of the five universities, and to be perfectly frank, it's 32 people out of three because two of the universities didn't have any of these cases. We asked them whether they had been questioned by the university, whether they'd been questioned by law enforcement and whether they'd been questioned by funding agencies. And let me point out to you that most, the largest number, the source of questioning is from the university itself. Only 1% of those people who were questioned say that nobody ever told them that they had rights. And again, think about this. When the general counsel called you into his office, nobody's giving you a Miranda warning. Nobody's looking at the AUP list of faculty rights and responsibilities and saying, maybe you want to read this before you talk to the general counsel. So you have to wonder if federal grants are a trap for Chinese. 71% of the Chinese American researchers, we surveyed, said that they don't feel safe or that they feel safe at the moment, but they are not sure that they will. They're worried about the future. 28% have considered avoiding federal grants, but 48% feel they have no choice but to apply. I don't have an NIH grant for which my dean is very sad, but we have a lot of physicists and chemists and chemical engineers and mechanical engineers and astronomy faculty. And if they don't get these large scale federal grants, they have no research. So that's what these people are saying. They are scared of what's happening, but they have to keep going. They have to apply for these grants. They don't have the option to say no. And 40% feel that if they do run into trouble, the university is not going to defend them. One last point, and Rich, this might be incredibly, especially interesting for you. We asked people whether their universities encourage collaborations with China in China, Chinese colleagues, Chinese universities before 2018. 77% said that universities encourage them. 79% think universities still encourage them. And yet what these researchers are getting pulled into is a set of collaborations. They weren't tricked into the collaborations. They entered upon them willingly and joyfully, but they did them with institutional support. And now they don't think the institution is going to have their back. This is from Yousia, who many of you will remember. Sociologists used to be at UM now at Princeton. And what he did was he used web crawling technology to basically scrape the authors of articles in a couple hundred scientific journals, all different kinds, all different sciences. And they'd looked for people who had, it's more complicated, but they basically looked for people with Chinese names, whose first appearance in the journals was with an American affiliation, an American university, but then future subsequent affiliations were only with the Chinese university, no longer with an American university. The top half is the, and they use that basically as an estimate of who's moving their China or who's moving their research to China. The top graph is junior scientists. And you can see that the shaded area after 2018, the lines trend up. The bottom is senior scientists. And again, you see that same pattern. And the bottom is the one we should be worried about because junior scientists, postdocs, young assistant professors are going to go back to China. They're going to go back to their family. They're going to raise their children in their homeland. But people who have invested 20, 30, 40 years in the United States, if they are leaving, we are up a creek. All right, so the federal government tells us that disclosure is the solution. And I was going to bore you with this, but I've decided to have pity on you. I was going to show you the University of Michigan conflict of interest, conflict of commitment training. And those of you who have done this recently will remember you click on the button for the training. And it's very long. You have to scroll down multiple pages. And the font gets smaller and smaller as you scroll down. It lists the things that you have to report and lists the things that you don't have to report. But this is how universities like ours are trying to protect their scientists. There's national security, presidential memorandum out that said, look, this is a little bit crazy. All these disclosure requirements on all our agencies are going up. And we're getting a lot of pushback. And one thing people are saying is each agency has a different set of requirements. And so NSPM 33 said we need to mandate standardized disclosure requirement. OSTP just issued implementation guidance for public comment. The public comment period is up at the beginning of November. Read the guidance and write back. But again, all of this is sort of premised on the fact that if we can only get people to disclose everything, they will be fine. And if you talk to OSTP, which I have, or if you talk to OVPR at UM, which I have, they will say what we want is people to come and talk to us about their affiliation so we can head off potential problems. That's what they say about conflict of interest. It's not that you can't start a company. It's not that you can't work at this other university too. We just have to be able to figure out how to manage that. And OSTP, bless its heart, thinks that the problem is unmanaged disclosure. Acting Attorney Patel doesn't think that the problem is disclosure. We hope, this is back to Sun Gao-Zin, prison sentence deters others from having anything to do with China's so-called Thousand Talents Plan or any of its variations. The problem isn't disclosure. The problem is the affiliation. DARPA did a draft risk matrix and thank you, federal government, put it out for comment in September 21. And you look at this matrix and you realize that people who have some foreign ties, what is a tie? Family, friends, professional ties, financial ties are by definition at moderate risk. If you have those ties with a strategic competitor, Russia, China, you are of high risk. Which means that every single Chinese immigrant who still has father, a mother, a brother, a sister, college classmates in China is by definition high risk. Before you do anything else. They could be a professor of Chinese literature. All right, so here's the fear. University of Michigan, beginning of World War One. The beginning of World War One, nearly 1,300 students, a quarter of all UM students took German. German was one of the largest departments on campus. US enters the war. Remember, the US is neutral for three years. US enters the war and several months after this Professor Carl Edgar, he's German. He himself is of German origin. During the period of neutrality, he made some speeches saying that being pro-American doesn't mean that you're being pro-English. He's not making these speeches after the war has started, but the Regents decide that he needs to be dismissed. They fire him. Half a year later, the Regents vote to dismiss another four lecturers and assistant professors of German at the end of their contracts, which have all been changed from three-year contracts to one-year contracts so that they could be dismissed. They said, you know, there's decreased enrollment in German classes, and it's true. By the end of the war, instead of 1,300 people, students taking German, 150 were in German classes. It's a full professor in the German department, Iwab Buk. He had tenure, you can't dismiss him. He was pressured to take a leave of absence for a year. And then at the end of the leave of absence, he was not allowed to return to the university. The fear, of course, right, is the DARPA fear. That it's not your disclosure, and obviously it's not IP. We've left IP theft a long ways away a long time ago. But it's who you are. Well, so here's the good thing. DARPA changed its risk rubric. It now has four risk factors in its matrix. Talent program participation, denied entity lists, so these are universities or research institutes that the federal government thinks are connected to the PLA, the People's Liberation Army. Funding source, foreign institutions, or entities. They state clearly that co-authorship is not a consideration. You're not going to get in trouble for co-authoring. They also state that there are differences between affiliations and associations, and the difference is whether you're getting any sort of direct monetary or non-monetary reward. And then it says, what are we worried about with funding sources? It says we're worried about funding sources that are government or government-controlled entities of strategic competitors or chi-hosts. Government or government-controlled entities. If your university is a national university, national Peking University, national Remain University, is it a government or government-controlled entity? Of a strategic competitor, okay, I think we can figure out what a strategic competitor is, or a, this is country with historical tendency or historical, I think it's tendency to of unauthorized science or technology acquisition. So it's basically any country that the government thinks has this historical tendency to steal stuff. All right, well, I actually think this is a really important step forward, because at least it gives you something of a blueprint for figuring out what's possible and what's not possible. The problem, of course, is whether we're really talking about strategic competitors or not. Strategic competitors are not enemies. I had a slide saying if China is an enemy, I took it out. Instead I said, let's just think about strategic competitor. What could we do if we took that seriously? We took seriously it wasn't an enemy. Well, the federal government could pass laws about talent program participation. If it really is going to be something that you're investigated for, then just go ahead and tell us we shouldn't do it, right? Don't trap people into thinking that it's okay. Professional and scholarly associations could create expert panels to advise on sensitive and non-sensitive technologies. I'm not going to tell the physicists, and God knows the FBI shouldn't be telling the physicists what's sensitive, but we have ways to figure this out. This is not a problem that the US government has never solved. Bring this back, what is the problem we're trying to solve? The problem we're trying to solve is not disclosure. The problem we're trying to solve is not that the University of Michigan is making me fill out a conflict of interest form and I didn't read the damn thing carefully enough, right? The problem we're trying to solve is sensitive technologies. So let's get experts in to solve that. American and Chinese universities could create a set of mutual guidelines. There are, the University of Michigan has amazing joint institutes. Other universities have joint institutes. They could get together and sort of think about, all right, what are our guidelines for collaboration? Obvious one is focus on basic research, right? Focus on research that's going to be published openly. That is not a secret, right? Other issue is think about, you know, research that turns into IP, that turns into something you can commercialize or something the military might want to use. What do we do that? Do we have a protocol for handling this? Again, universities know how to figure this out and because, and as long as universities in China are able to negotiate their own agreements as they were for the talent plans, then you might even be able to get cross-national collaboration on some of these principles. Finally, I think we need to realize this. If China is a strategic competitor, but not an enemy, that means we really need people who understand what the competition is doing, who can help us figure out how to read what's going on, how to broker agreements when it's possible, how to disagree when it's necessary. And so I end up my talk today in the same place that I started it, hoping that we will have more scholars like Ken Lieberthal, who have been so important in creating that kind of a bridge and more generous donors like Rich Rogo, who have been so important in really strengthening the ties of affection and friendship that we need if we're going to exist in a world where we have strategic competitors. Thank you. Yep, that would be great. Yes, please, David. So I'd like to ask you to talk directly about the racism issue. And so there's a number of different people through history that the US, elements of the US did not trust. So process versus Catholic, they called papers and things like that. Japanese isn't the manzanar. And then Israel spies and so forth. And so is racism aggravating this? Racism is obviously aggravating this. But one of the reasons I sort of walked through this project, the way I did and why I hope to have this project that I have now sort of been pushed into doing, right? It's a project that sort of thinks about historical situations when the US is confronting competitors or enemies that it fears. And what happens then to the people who are of that country. And I think it's interesting to start with Germany because one of the things, let me just, the obvious place to start would have been Japan, right? And Japanese internment camps. But one of the things that I think is important to understand about racism, right? Is that it is not just fear or suspicion of a people, but it's also government and societal structures that enable that fear and suspicion, right? And a really important thing to know about Japanese, you know, at the time of World War II is that Japanese immigrants were not allowed to become US citizens, right? And so their political ability, their political effort, their political power, and the political power of their allies was already greatly restricted, exactly. We're not in that situation today. My father in the moment of despair and grumbling said to me, I don't think things have ever been so bad for any immigrant group in the US. And I just looked at them and said, come on, right? I mean, I am on calls with Chinese professors at Princeton University, you know, who are US citizens who have stature at their universities, you know, we are I am meeting in two weeks with an undersecretary at the Department of Defense who is Chinese American, right? We are in such a better position. But that doesn't mean that there isn't discrimination. And I think discrimination in this case obviously based on an image of China that is extremely problematic and at least partly racist. I turned it off. Thanks Ann, this is a great talk. You need to give this talk like everywhere, including DC. So I hope you continue to do this talk and do it there. I think that's really important and testify. And you know, I have a comment question. So one thing I wanna suggest is that the goal of the China initiative or the goal of these things in general is decoupling and is about reducing China's ability to compete, cutting ties, not allowing for sensitive technology. So I think it's, I think, I don't think it's about disclosure. I think it's really about this much more aggressive goal, at least among some people in the government in both the Trump administration and continuing in the Biden administration. And it's because they see the strategic competition as zero sum. And that's why biomedical research is a goal, is a target because they see this as if China cures cancer, then all of the benefits, the monetary and other types of benefits will go to China. And so discounting the fact that that would be a huge public health victory. So what do we do if that's the real goal? And it's not just about reducing risk because I think that is the goal for some people. And then just a brief, maybe you wanna comment on it. Do you see any change between the two administrations? Those are the really great questions. Decoupling, yes. I think there is, I think there's this very strong constituency in the granting agencies and cabinet departments for decoupling. And that part of what you're, part of why you ask people to disclose is so you get the opportunity to say to them, are you sure you wanna do this? I don't think you should be doing this. Your life would be so much easier if you didn't do this, right? And so I think it is, it's a sort of soft way of getting people to voluntarily give up collaborations and ties, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think that's the emphasis in law enforcement. I think Department of Justice has basically, their view of this is, China is evil. Everything and therefore anybody that does anything that connected to China is probably evil. And if they're not probably evil, then at least they're, creating the near occasion of sin, right? So, yeah. The second question, oh, a difference between Trump and Biden. When you start going back and look at these cases, I mean, one of the things you see is that this was happening in the Obama administration, and not as coordinated away, but it was absolutely there. And I think the, you would know better than me, but it seems to me that the Biden hawks on China are more hawkish than the Obama hawks on China were. You know, it's not entirely clear to me that those hawks have focused very much on the science side. And that I think you can make an argument, right? That there is, this is to come back to what David was saying earlier. It's not nothing that every, even in all of these, you know, law enforcement, you know, pamphlets and things like that, they always say the vast majority of Chinese Americans are wonderful people, they have great food, they smile a lot, you know, they do good work, we're not blaming them, you know, but, you know, so, and the fact that they have to say that, I think reflects, you know, something important in our, you know, in our public life together. But I think they have, you know, when I was, I spent a year in Taiwan when I was in seventh grade, I went into seventh grade, my brother, who was here, went into third grade, and he was asked to write in the third grade an essay, Xiao Xue Sen Zeyang Bao Mi Fang Die, how can elementary school students protect our secrets and oppose the communist devils, right? I think there are a lot of people in our law enforcement who have like, who are wearing that kind of blunder. So Professor, okay, I'm gonna have to, I'm afraid, stop this here, but I wanna thank you for this incredibly powerful and important talk that is essential as you're highlighting the issues, the concerns, and your recommendations for how to move forward, because collaboration with China is essential to the mission of the University of Michigan and so many universities across the United States. So thank you, we want to present you with a small token of our- I get elephant-ey swag, that's great. You get elephant-ey swag. And please join me in thanking people. Thank you so much. And we hope you will stay, there is food, so that you can ask your questions and talk with each other. This is an incredibly important topic, so we hope you will stay and continue the conversation.