An American Scientist Lied About His Ties to China. Now He’s Working There.

The State Department ought to revoke Charles Lieber’s passport. He has gone to work for China and his work poses a danger to the United States. Our government was lax when it let Lieber leave the country; the least we can do is make sure that it is a one-way journey.

Lieber, the Harvard chemistry professor convicted in 2021 for lying to the Federal government about his connections with China and its Thousand Talents Program, now has a job at Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School. Tsinghua is the Harvard of China (more or less), and Tsinghua Shenzhen is a branch institution a bit north of Hong Kong. My colleague Ian Oxnevad has noted that Tsinghua is “a key instrument of the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign influence efforts and has played a key role in advancing China’s influence at American colleges and universities.” It makes perfect sense that China would find a berth for Lieber at one of Tsinghua’s campuses. 

Yet Charles Lieber did not just show up in China one day the way members of the Cambridge Five fled to Russia. He is there because of lax oversight by the different branches of the Federal government. As far back as 2024, a Federal judge gave Lieber permission to visit China, including for job-hunting purposes. 

You read that correctly. A federal judge gave former Harvard Chemistry professor Charles M. Lieber permission to visit China for “employment networking” and give a lecture in Beijing — nearly three years after Lieber was convicted for lying to federal investigators about his relationship to China. 

Either the Federal government did not mind, or it was unable to prevent the judge from giving Lieber his tourism permit. In either case, members of both the executive and the judicial branch seem not to have taken the Lieber case very seriously. We must combine preserving the individual liberties of American scientists with an adjustment by the executive branch and the judicial branch to strengthen national security oversight of activities by American scientists. The Lieber case highlights widespread complaisance in the Federal government. 

Lieber seems to have been motivated by money—mercenary in his motivations rather than a true believer in the Chinese system. This suggests that we should tighten our financial disclosure laws for scientists who receive government research funds, especially for those who work in fields vital to national security. It also suggests that we strengthen the punishments for violating financial disclosure laws. Federal agents caught Lieber, but the punishment amounted to a slap on the wrist: “time served (two days) in prison; two years of supervised release with six months of home confinement; a fine of $50,000; and $33,600 in restitution to the IRS.” The sentence recommended by the government would not have been much stiffer: “90 days in prison and a $150,000 fine.” Two years in prison seems a more reasonable minimum sentence than two days. 

We also should adjust our national security-science policy to take into account structural lessons from the Lieber case. It is now plausible for leading American scientists to want to work in China, and to produce top-level work. There will always be American scientists willing to work for our rivals, but most foreign powers aren’t equipped to use them. Lieber, and other turncoats like him, are most dangerous when affiliated with a peer scientific-industrial rival—and that is China.

We also should take steps to address other forms of foreign threat to our scientists. Congress and the FBI both have announced investigations into the deaths and disappearances of more than 10 American scientists in recent years, all working in security-related fields. Israel’s campaign to eliminate Iran’s nuclear scientists also highlights the importance of individual scientists’ for national research efforts—and their vulnerability. America needs to keep a closer eye on scientists of Lieber’s character not just to watch out for potential misdeeds, but to protect them from the real threat of being targeted by foreign regimes. 

We also should be aware that the internationalized structure of scientific research poses a structural danger to national security. The Lieber Lab webpage, not updated for several years, displays the professional affiliations of its alumni: a great many work in China, as well as in other foreign countries. Whatever China may have learned from Lieber, it presumably could learn nearly as much from the Lieber Lab alumni in its employ. And this presumably is true of every pioneering scientific research endeavor in American universities: they have multinational personnel and multinational partnerships, and they are structurally prone to leak information to America’s rivals—above all, China. If the U.S. National Institutes of Health’ collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the lead-up to the COVID-19 pandemic exemplifies the fruit of international scientific collaboration, the costs far outweigh the benefits. In any case, if we wish to prevent our rivals from learning our secrets, we will have to reform and renationalize our entire scientific structure. 

This will be no easy task—and there will likely be trade-offs. We might create a system with more secure laboratories, but less productive ones. This may well be a net improvement, but we should be sober about all the costs as well as the benefits. Still: at the very least we should ban all graduate students from China from participating in American laboratories that receive federal money to work on research that forwards national security. We also should require those laboratories to avoid all funding with China, and all partnerships and other connections with Chinese individuals and institutions. Moreover, the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) also should be amended to remove all exemptions for higher education. Existing FARA law should be enforced thoroughly, as should the extension of FARA law to previously exempt areas of higher education. 

The Lieber case is serious. It requires us to look at the broader structure of American science—our nearly (but not completely) unrivaled scientific-industrial infrastructure, our structural commitment to internationalized scientific research, our broad national commitment to individual liberty, and our lax sentencing guidelines for scientists caught lying about working for foreign powers. We must also take concerted efforts to reform American science to align better with our national security interests. The aforementioned steps are a good place to start.

This article was originally published by RealClearScience and made available via RealClearWire.