China's "Wolf Warrior" Diplomacy on Display During US-China Talks and 'Thousand Talents Plan' 2.0
Hello, everyone, welcome to “Inconvenient Truths”. I am your host Jennifer Zeng.
Today I will talk about 2 important topics: the first high-level, in-person US-China dialogue since Joe Biden took office and the CCP’s upgraded version of the “Thousand Talents Plan” that is designed to steal technology from the US.
Before we go to our first topic, please take some time to subscribe to my channel, like my video and leave us a comment if you haven’t. YouTube is still heavily suppressing my channel. It’s a pity that not many people are seeing my videos.
The CCP’s “Wolf Warrior” Diplomats
Now, let’s move to our first topic today: the US-China talks.
Yesterday the US and China started the first high-level talks in Alaska; and the opening scene became quite a drama.
According to what both sides already agreed, each person should make a 2 minute opening statement.
The US side basically followed the protocol. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan both spoke for about 2 minutes.
However, when it was the CCP officials’ turn, things went out of control.
Foreign affairs chief Yang Jiechi spoke non-stop in Chinese for as long as 17 minutes without offering any translation!
After he finally finished, he asked foreign minister Wang Yi to continue to speak. When the translator interrupted by saying, “Would you mind me doing the translation first?” Yang said, “Do you really want to translate? Go ahead if you do. It's a test for any interpreter!”
I guess it is a test. Who can remember and translate a 17 minute speech in one go?
Well, then the CCP’s foreign minister Wang Yi talked for about 4 minutes.
So the whole “opening remarks” thing, which was supposed to be done in less than 20 minutes, dragged on for over an hour.
I won’t repeat what the CCP officials said here. I can only say it was very aggressive and insulting.
But let me play a very short video of what Yang Jiechi said in the follow up talks today.
Well, the video was cut off too quickly. The last sentence should be: “So let me say here, in front of the Chinese side, the United States does not have the qualification to say that you want to speak to China from a position of strength.”
Did you hear that? The CCP does not recognize the strength of the US anymore.
A popular Chinese commentator Zhang Tianliang tweeted this comment yesterday:
“The right thing for Blinken and Sullivan to do is to get up and leave without saying a word. Then go back to Washington and sanction the CCP officials.”
Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” said in his tweet, “In the past, #China’s diplomats were cunning, pretending to be friendly and responsible. Now, however, they are arrogant beyond belief. Yang Jiechi in #Alaska just dropped the mask to show #Beijing’s true ugly face.”
As a matter of fact, these long lectures, no matter how “ugly” they are, are still just “empty” words. Apart from these “empty” words, the CCP has also taken concrete actions.
The CCP’s “Hostage Diplomacy”
According to Washington Post , “nine students, including six Americans, who attend New York University in Shanghai were detained by Chinese police in two separate incidents on the same night last week.”
“Two of the U.S. students were apprehended at a bar... One of them, a young man, was kicked in the head by authorities and the other, a woman, sustained bruising as police in plainclothes attempted to apprehend her.”
“Seven students in a separate group, which included citizens of the United States...were taken into custody from a house where they gathered for a birthday party.”
Out of the 6 arrested Americans, two have parents who work for the US Defense Department.
Also, on the same day when the US-China talks began, the CCP started the trial of two Canadians who had been in prison for more than two years. Although the CCP denies it, it is widely believed that the arrests were made in retaliation for Meng Wanzhou’s arrest, as her arrest was done under the request of the US.
Meng Wanzhou is Huawei’s CFO, and the daughter of Huawei’s founder Ren Zhengfei.
So did you smell anything? The CCP is very good at the so-called “Hostage Diplomacy”. We also heard stories of the CCP hacking into the US government’s database and stealing tons of details of US government staff and military personnel.
So are the arrests in Shanghai just some random incidents? I can tell you they are definitely not! The CCP’s former premier Zhou Enlai had a very famous sentence: “There are no small matters when it comes to diplomacy.”
So when dealing with anything that is related to foreign countries, especially the most powerful country, the US, the CCP will definitely carefully calculate everything. So before they made the arrests of the students, they must have already known all their background.
Arresting the children of people who work for the US Defense Department definitely would make the US feel the heat.
By the way, the students were released several hours later after being subjected to drug tests. All their testing results were negative. So I guess it was hard for the CCP to come up with any excuses for the arrest. Before they arrested them, they might believe that those students were on drugs. Selling and using drugs in China are both criminal offenses. So if they were on drugs, the CCP would find some excuses to detain them longer.
“The Rising East and the Falling West”
Well, why are all these things happening?
Xi Jinping made some famous statements recently. He said that “the ‘Strong West and Weak East’ had become the past, and the new reality of the world is that the East is rising, and the West is falling. Or we can also translate it as the “Rising East and the Falling West”.
I think after one year of the CCP virus pandemic, Xi Jinping and the CCP are really feeling very good about themselves to see how the rest of the world is struggling with human life and economic losses. So that’s why Xi Jinping claimed that “both time and momentum are on our side”, and that’s why the CCP diplomats dared to insult their US counterparts in this US-China dialogue.
Gordon Chang posted another tweet this morning (show p4, let’s show his tweet), saying that “It’s a warning: #China’s regime sent its emissaries [ˈemɪˌseri] to #Alaska for the express purpose of insulting the #US. #CommunistChina’s next move may not be so symbolic.”
I kind of agree with him. We need at least watch out for what could be happening.
14th 5-Year Plan
Now, let’s move to our second topic today. The CCP’s upgraded version of the “Thousand Talents Plan. “
Making a greater effort to attract overseas top talents was listed as a priority in China’s 14th Five-Year-Plan that was just passed in the recent National People’s Congress in Beijing. Many Chinese people say that it is an upgraded version of the “Thousand Talents Plan”, and could pose a greater threat to the United States and the West.
Altogether, there are 58,450 words and 19 chapters in the “14th Five-Year Plan and the Outline of the 2035 Vision”.
Out of the 19 chapters, Chapter 2 is especially dedicated to “innovation-driven development” and “establishing comprehensive new advantages in development”.
Given that Chapter 1 is about the overall guidelines and goals of the entire plan, the fact that the “innovation-driven development” is outlined in Chapter 2 indicates that this is the most important goal to achieve in this plan.
The plan lists the following sectors as the key areas to focus on: quantum information, Internet communications, artificial intelligence, biomedicine, modern energy systems, integrated circuits, life and health, brain science, bio-breeding, aerospace technology, deep sea, deep earth and polar exploration, etc.
And the methods to achieve the goal include “strengthening national strategic science and technology force”, “enhancing the technological innovation capacity of enterprises”, “improving the institutional mechanism of science and technology innovation”, and “stimulating the innovative vitality of talents”.
According to the plan, more investment will be poured into basic research, talents will be heavily rewarded.
More Aggressive Policies to Attract Foreign Talents
To “create and train a high-level talent troop”, and “to provide an internationally competitive and attractive environment for overseas scientists to work in China”, the plan requires to have a more open talent policy be implemented; a scientific research and innovation highland be constructed to attract and gather outstanding talents from home and abroad.
Policies that can enable high end foreign talents and professionals to stay and work in China, as well as a permanent residency system for foreigners should be perfected.
In the meantime, the establishment of a skilled migration system should be explored.
Systems should be established to ensure that foreign talents and professionals can have better salaries and benefits, social security, tax incentives, as well as good education for their children, etc.
The plan says, in order to “actively promote open cooperation in science and technology”, a more open and inclusive, mutually beneficial and shared international science and technology cooperation strategy should be implemented.
China should also take the lead in “designing and initiating international scientific programs and projects”, allow the science funds to play an unique role, increase the opening of national science and technology programs to the outside world, launch a number of major scientific and technological cooperation projects, study the establishment of global scientific research funds, and implement scientist exchange programs.
China should also support the establishment of international scientific and technological organizations in China, and allow foreign scientists to hold posts in China's scientific and technological academic organizations.
An Extension and Upgraded "Thousand Talents Plan”
I hope you are not feeling dizzy after listening to all of these. Sometimes it is very painful to translate the CCP’s official documents. The language is so boring and sometimes even ugly. But what can we do? In order to learn their plans and intentions, we have to read and translate them.
So what can we get out of this boring and ugly 14th 5-year-plan? According to a Chinese economist, Dr. Cheng Xiaonong, the new five-year plan is an extension of China's previous "Thousand Talents Plan”. The essence is the same, both plans intend to steal foreign intellectual property and advanced technology by recruiting talents from overseas, only the new plan is more aggressive.
He said, “Previously, the so-called ‘recruiting’ was mainly done through spies in the technology area. Later on the U.S. government imposed tougher control on the (spying), so they thought about recruiting talents, together with the technology. If you succeed in recruiting talents, you naturally get the technology too.”
"Thousand Talents Plan” and More
The so-called "Thousand Talents Plan" is the CCP’s program to identify and recruit high-level overseas talents, which has been implemented since 2008 to steal technology from the US and other countries.
Apart from the national level "Thousand Talents Plan”, the CCP also has other plans such as the “Hundred Talents Program” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the "Changjiang Scholars" program of the Chinese Ministry of Education, as well as a number of local government programs.
Between 2008 and 2016, local governments of China recruited about 53,900 talents from overseas, while over 7,000 experts were recruited through the “Thousand Talents Plan” and the “Hundred Talents Program”.
Multiple “Thousand Talent Plan” Scholars Indicted
In Nov. 2019, the US senate committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs issued a 109 page report and said that the US “has been slow to respond to threats posed by Chinese talent recruitment plans….The FBI did not identify Chinese talent recruitment plans as a ‘threat vector’ until 2015.“
But it seems that since 2018, the FBI has increased the number of arrests and prosecutions of Thousand Talents scholars.
Let’s just quickly show a few cases here.
This is GE engineer Xiaoqing Zheng. He was charged in April 2019 with economic espionage and theft of GE’s trade secrets
This is Keping Xie. He was a former professor at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. In April 2019, the MD Anderson Cancer Center ousted three of five scientists who had ties to the “Thousand Talents Plan” and were identified by U. S. federal authorities as being involved in Chinese efforts to steal American research.
This is Yiheng Zhang. He was a former professor at Virginia Tech. In Sep 2019, he was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud. He used $1.1 million in research funding he applied for in the United States for research projects in China.
This is Xiao-Jiang Li. He is a former Emory University professor. In May 2020, he was convicted and sentenced. He was accused of replicating his U.S. research for the Chinese Academy of Sciences and earning at least $500,000.
This is Charles Lieber. He is the former Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. In June 2020, he was indicted on charges of making false statements to federal authorities regarding his participation in China’s Thousand Talents Plan.
He was accused of receiving $50,000 per month in salary, $158,000 per year in living expenses, and more than $1.5 million in research funding from Wuhan University of Technology in China.
"Thousand Talents Plan” Disappears From Chinese Websites, but Goes on with a New Name
And you know what? After the US started to crack down on these “Thousand Talents” spies, the CCP has taken off all information related to the “Thousand Talents Plan” from the website.
Let’s show a screenshot. When I searched for “Thousand Talents Plan” in simplified Chinese, that is, 千人计划, I can get 207 million results in 0.47 seconds.
But when I searched for the same thing in Chinese search engine Baidu, it said, “Sorry, we didn’t find any related websites.”
So, the term 千人计划 is 100% blocked in China.
But does this mean that the CCP has stopped recruiting overseas talents? Not at all. They just stopped openly using the name, or merged it into a different talent program with a new name.
Last November, a small conference was held in Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province in China. Only a few dozen people attended the conference.
Let’s show a picture of the conference.
So the CCP officials revealed in the conference that “In recent years, there have been more than 49,000 recruitments of foreign experts.”
They also said that in 2020 alone, 58 foreign recruitment workstations had been established in 19 countries and regions, including the US, Russia, Germany, France and the UK.
In addition, the province had selected a total of 40 foreign experts for funding from 2017 to 2020, with annual funding of 10 million RMB ($1.54 million), etc.
So, from this, we can see how aggressive the CCP still is in recruiting and funding foreign talents.
Well, that’s all for today’s “Inconvenient Truths”. I hope you have enjoyed it, although the facts are ugly. Again, please subscribe to my channel, like my video and leave us a comment if you haven’t. Please also make sure you share my channel on social media and with your friends and family.
Thank you very much. See you next time!
3/19/2021 *
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