Conflict of interest and fraud allegations Some Thousand Talents Plan Professors have reported fraud in the program including misappropriated grant funding, poor accommodations, and violations of research ethics. Concerns were raised because some TTP contracts contain
non-disclosure agreements that forbid informing the home university or home government of the award. Dismissals due to undisclosed connections to the TTP have taken place. In 2019, executives and researchers at the
H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute resigned following scrutiny into their links with the TTP. Individuals who receive either of China's two top academic awards, the Thousand Talents Professorship and the Changjiang (Yangtze River) Scholar award, have become targets for recruitment by China's wealthiest universities so frequently that the Ministry of Education issued notices in both 2013 and 2017 discouraging Chinese universities from recruiting away top talent from one another.
Effectiveness assessments Evaluations of the program's efficacy and impact have been mixed. Although the program has successfully attracted top international talent to China, its efficacy in retaining these talented individuals has been questioned, with many of the most talented scientists willing to spend short periods in China but unwilling to abandon their tenured positions at major Western universities.
Foreign government reactions Canada In August 2020,
Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) warned both Canadian universities and Canadian research institutions of the TTP, saying that it recruited researchers and scientists around the world to persuade them to share their research and technology — either willingly or by coercion.
South Korea In June 2023, the
Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency arrested a Chinese TTP researcher on espionage charges for allegedly stealing thousands of files relating to medical robot technology.
United States The success of the program in recruiting U.S.-trained scientists back to China has been viewed with concern from the U.S., with a June 2018 report from the
National Intelligence Council declaring an underlying motivation of the program to be "to facilitate the legal and illicit transfer of US technology, intellectual property and know-how" to China. US and Canadian authorities have asserted that China intends to use scientists who are involved with this plan to gain access to new technology for economic and military advantage. In January 2020, the FBI arrested
Charles M. Lieber, the chair of Harvard University's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, for lying about his ties to the program, and was convicted in December 2021. In May 2020, the FBI arrested a former researcher at the
Cleveland Clinic for failing to disclose ties to the Thousand Talents Program, although a year later federal prosecutors dismissed the case. In June 2020, it was reported that the
National Institutes of Health had investigations into the behavior of 189 scientists. In November 2020, Song Guo Zheng, a TTP participant, pled guilty to making false claims to the FBI about his ties to the Chinese government during his employment at
Ohio State University. In November 2019, the
US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held an open hearing on the China's Talent Recruitment Plans, including the TTP, and called the programs a threat to national security. The report from the hearing cited TTP contracts as violating research values, TTP members willfully failing to disclose their membership to their home institutions, and cited numerous cases against TTP members for
theft of intellectual property and fraud. In September 2022, it was reported that TTP programs recruited over 150 scientists who worked on U.S. government-sponsored research at
Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Academia Although the program has successfully attracted top international talent to China, its efficacy in retaining these talented individuals has been questioned, with many of the most talented scientists willing to spend short periods in China but unwilling to abandon their tenured positions at major Western universities. Moore stated that while the program posed several challenges for developed democracies such as incentivizing recruited professors to improperly transfer of resources to their concurrent workplace in China, the biggest challenges had less to do with national security than to "increasingly outdated and misguided immigration policies common among developed democracies." According to Moore, the high number of participants in the program with a specialization in the life sciences prompted US policymakers to view the TTP as signaling by Beijing of its intention to "mount a full-spectrum challenge to US leadership in the biotechnology sector", with one US policymaker saying the TTP helped build China's talent pipeline for the sector. Academics Dongbo Shi, Weichen Liu, and Yanbo Wang conducted an analysis of Young Thousand Talent program participants, and concluded "that China's YTT program has been successful in recruiting and nurturing high-caliber scientists and that YTT scientists outperform their overseas peers in post-return publication, mainly owing to their access to greater funding and larger research teams. These results show the potential of talent programs as a policy tool for countries to attract expatriate scientists and promote their productivity." == See also ==