Officials in the United States have publicly said that a number of military researchers from China have been confirmed as collating “intelligence” in the fields of artificial intelligence and bio-medicine whilst based in America.
It is understood the U.S. government demanded the return to China of an undisclosed number of such researchers after the July closure of China’s consulate in Houston on the back of the discovery of a network of agents collecting intelligence at U.S. universities.
The first public reports of the U.S. defacto deportations came in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, with reports now indicating that individuals posing as ‘postgraduate students’ were in fact active duty military personnel in the Chinese forces.
Background checks into just how the Chinese military were able to secure posts for so many of its ‘researchers’ in universities in the states is still underway, but reports from the U.S. now mention visa restrictions on such individuals being put in place as early as May, and since June the FBI are believed to have spoken to 50 ‘researchers’ in 30 cities nationwide.
Publicly the Houston consulate closure was seen largely as the cause behind the closure of the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, China, although behind the scenes it is now known that Chinese officials in Houston were telling their agents to delete electronic files from a range of devices prior to their sudden return to Beijing.
As par for the course in such cases, Beijing has now denied any wrongdoing claiming that its staff “have never engaged in activities incompatible with their status” according to China’s Foreign Ministry.
