A Chinese army officer was arrested this week as he prepared to board an airport bound for home with American research, and he admitted he had been asked to study an American lab in order to bring back information on how to replicate it in China, federal authorities said.
Xin Wang has been charged with visa fraud because he concealed his ties to the People’s Liberation Army when he applied for and won a work-study visa in 2018.
Customs and Border Protection officers interviewed Mr. Wang as he was trying to board a flight in Los Angeles on Sunday, and he admitted that he was still an officer in the PLA — something he had concealed when he applied for the visa.
At that time, he’d said he was a former PLA professor but had left the army in 2016.
Not only was he still tied to the PLA, but was being paid by them and the Chinese Scholarship Council even as he was in the U.S., double-dipping by collecting payments from the American university where he was studying, according to prosecutors.
Mr. Wang is the latest Chinese citizen to be nabbed by U.S. authorities, who say China’s government is engaged in large-scale attempts to steal American knowledge.
In Mr. Wang’s case, he was in the U.S. to study at the University of California-Santa Barbara.
American taxpayers funded some of the lab work Mr. Wang was associated with, prosecutors said.
“Wang provided information to CBP that he had been instructed by his supervisor, the director of his military university lab in the PRC, to observe the layout of the UCSF lab and bring back information on how to replicate it in China,” the prosecutors said in announcing the charges.
CBP had also been told Mr. Wang was carrying American research with him as he tried to leave the country.
Mr. Wang wiped his cell phone of WeChat messages before heading to the airport, prosecutors said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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