China is investing over $1.4 billion in a new institute managed by former scientists from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab, as part of an ambitious program to attract top U.S. scientists and acquire advanced American technology, as reported by The Washington Times.
The Eastern Institute of Advanced Study (EIAS) is described on its Chinese website as the precursor to the planned Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT) in Ningbo, China. Organizers are offering million-dollar salaries and other attractive benefits to American scientists for their knowledge of cutting-edge technology that China has been unable to develop independently.
According to documents and open-source research specialists, the program has recruited some of the most experienced scientists in the United States.
The EIAS and the proposed EIT are funded and politically supported by the regional Chinese Communist Party in Ningbo. The project is the latest iteration of Beijing’s Thousand Talents recruitment initiative.
The Justice Department’s China initiative targeted the Thousand Talents program for its focus on American technological knowledge and skills. Since 2018, the Justice Department unit has prosecuted more than 20 U.S. figures with ties to American universities, many of whom were allegedly involved in sensitive U.S. government research while covertly working for Chinese government-linked projects.
The China initiative was launched during the Trump administration to curb an estimated annual loss of $250 billion to $600 billion from Chinese technology theft. The Biden administration halted the legal initiative due to concerns that the prosecutions appeared racially motivated.
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The Times investigation into the technology theft and recruitment program is based on information and interviews provided by specialists with knowledge of the program, as well as documents outlining the project’s goals and objectives, and information posted on the Chinese internet.
According to security researchers familiar with the programs, the EIAS plan for the Eastern Institute of Technology aims to systematically steal U.S. intellectual property, mainly in the field of semiconductors.
The ‘Kunpeng Plan’
China is calling the talent recruitment effort the “Kunpeng Plan,” according to EIAS documents. The plan is a crucial element of China’s response to multibillion-dollar U.S. investments in semiconductor manufacturing and U.S. export curbs on sales of advanced microchips to China.
Kunpeng is a term derived from a mythical Chinese leviathan-roc, a creature that transforms from a large fish into a predatory bird. In addition to hiring Nobel Prize-level technology specialists, the EIAS plans to obtain advanced technology from the United States in the areas of semiconductors, artificial intelligence, batteries, and advanced computing.
“The practices of EIT faculty and administration would be blatant violations of trade secrets and noncompete clauses in any U.S. company,” said one expert who has studied the project.
The EIAS plan is funded by an initial commitment of $4 billion from Yu Renrong, founder and chairman of Will Semiconductor Co. Ltd. in Shanghai, double the early $2 billion estimate of the program’s total cost, the investigative report says. The Chinese government also agreed to bankroll 20% to 30% of the initial investment.
The planned Eastern Institute of Technology website describes “a new-style research university” funded by Mr. Yu, a Ningbo-based billionaire and CEO of OmniVision Technologies. The local Zhejiang government provided a large plot of land that eventually will become a high-tech university campus.
OmniVision was a relatively small enterprise until 2019, when it quietly purchased the U.S.-based OmniVision for $2.178 billion, assisted by a $50 billion grant from the China National Integrated Circuit Investment Fund. The fund’s publicly stated goal is to pursue China’s “fusion projects” benefiting the commercial and military sectors.
OmniVision is among the world’s leading providers of image sensors, which are critical elements for self-driving cars, medical devices, cameras, phones, and weapons systems. Mr. Yu did not immediately respond to a request for comment submitted through an OmniVision spokesman.
‘Innovation superpower’
The Pentagon’s latest annual report on the Chinese military said Beijing is aggressively acquiring military-civilian technology to become an “innovation superpower” no longer reliant on foreign technology.
In 2015, the government of President Xi Jinping launched the “Made in China 2025” plan to accelerate advances in emerging technology sectors. The plan calls for setting up regional innovation centers, such as the one in Ningbo, that will “leapfrog foreign technological competitors and create a superior innovation ecosystem,” the report said.
Beijing is focused on dominating emerging dual-use civilian-military technologies, the report said, including next-generation artificial intelligence, quantum information systems, brain science and biotechnology tools, advanced semiconductors, and deep-space, deep-sea, and polar-related technologies.
“Beijing has a clear understanding of its remaining [science and technology] deficiencies and wields industrial policies and the country’s massive tech transfer apparatus in an effort to close these gaps,” the report said.
China is a global leader in AI technology with an announced goal of overtaking the West in AI by next year, the report said. AI and autonomous weapons are central to China’s “concept of future warfare.”
China currently relies on advanced foreign capabilities for AI hardware, including semiconductor fabrication and electronic design automation software, but Beijing researchers are pressing ahead with design concepts for next-generation semiconductors.
China “has mobilized vast resources in support of its defense modernization, including through its military-civilian development strategy, as well as espionage activities to acquire sensitive, dual-use, and military-grade equipment,” the report said.
High pay, strong incentives
Zhejiang officials say the EIAS is offering high salaries and lucrative incentives to hire 200 technology experts over the next five years. It recruited 48 U.S. specialists by mid-2022.
Those eligible under the recruitment program must hold a Nobel Prize, Fields Medal, or other prestigious international award. Scientists for the program must be younger than 60 and have experience in world-renowned universities and scientific research centers in the past two years, the project document states.
Chiefs and technology officers of leading technology companies in the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and Australia are also being recruited.
The recruits must resign from their positions and commit to working in Zhejiang province, where Ningbo is located, for more than five years. Chinese experts are also being recruited.
The most prominent experts will be paid more than $1 million annually. Lesser-known researchers are offered salaries of $110,000 to $137,000.
The project will pay recruited experts 20% of the cost of buying a house, fund their children’s education, and provide medical treatment at “key municipal medical care” facilities, a perk usually reserved for members of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Zhejiang provincial Communist Party Secretary Peng Jiaxue proposed a broad plan for an advanced digital economy for Ningbo that was approved in September 2022, according to one planning document.
Building a new university
The Ningbo government and the EIAS announced in December that a university, tentatively called the Ningbo Oriental University of Science and Technology, would be built with an initial investment of $110 million. Other information indicates that the university’s name will be the Eastern Institute of Technology.
A second document details the types of research and technology the institute is pursuing, including “intelligent hardware and perception” with a focus on “super-resolution detection, super-sensitive sensing, cross-modal fusion, and multi-modal integrated non-contact smart sensors.”
The artificial intelligence research will seek to develop massive data storage, intelligent reasoning, and decision-making. Blockchain technology and information security are also major focus areas.
The EIAS program is part of Beijing’s response to the Biden administration’s 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, a $53 billion investment plan for the U.S. semiconductor industry, as reported by the research group Frontier Assessments. Chinese officials accuse the U.S. of unfairly blocking access to critical high-tech product lines to curb China’s rise as a rival economic superpower.
China’s technology ambitions, embodied in initiatives such as EIT, EIAS, and the Kunpeng Plan, “demonstrate a concerted effort to pivot the epicenter of technological innovation eastward,” the report said.
On Oct. 31, two House panels wrote to the director of the National Science Foundation questioning the security of the foundation’s nearly $7 billion in funding for research at 2,000 universities. The letter said foreign talent recruitment at U.S. universities is a continuing threat.
The Republican chairmen of the panels warned about “systematic attempts to exploit, degrade, and misappropriate our open system of science.”
One case involved the federal indictment in 2021 of Mingqing Xiao, a professor at Southern Illinois University who was paid $151,099 by the National Science Foundation and concealed funding he was receiving from the Chinese government and a Chinese university.
“Defending American research is essential to maintaining U.S. scientific competitiveness and safeguarding economic and national security,” said the letter by Reps. James Comer of Kentucky and Frank D. Lucas of Oklahoma. Mr. Comer is chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. Mr. Lucas chairs the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.
