Theory No More, Part Three: Open Secrets, No One Admits
Between 2000 and 2005, they built the economic framework...and after 2006, they began perfecting it.
Below is an excerpt from a report of the 11th “Five-Year Plan” of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from GlobalSecurity.org.
These plans are advised by the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and sully the leading businessmen in the private sector to the geopolitical agenda of the ruling Chinese Communist Party and the military capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army.
It should come as no surprise that major world events have been coincidental with “Five-Year Plans” and U.S. Presidential election years alike since 2001. The Chinese government has directly been influencing American politics as far back as 1996 with President Bill Clinton.
As covered in the previous part of this series, the Chinese restructured their scientific, military, and financial sectors to be outward-facing for open global markets in 1998, as Bill Clinton dredged up WTO support for accepting the communist nation.
By the time China was accepted in 2001, their entire society was ready to support the added load of global markets.
In this part, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the central communist government of China manage to extend their reach into a budding election company and a university that’s home to a U.S. technological gold mine.
Picking Up the Previous Timeline
2005 saw the CAS establishment of a new “Key Laboratory of Virology” at the now infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology, located at Wuhan University.
Though 2006 was relatively quiet for Eugene Yu in the States, his fresh new “K-12 platform” company, Jinhua Konnech had just been launched and moved into a Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) science park in Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province, China.
Alongside the opening of Jinhua Konnech in Zhejiang Province, Eugene Yu registered the “SchoolBrief.com” and “BestBrief.com” domain names in 2006.
You can find an abbreviated timeline of Konnech’s history here.
Also in China, it was not so quiet for who could be called the grandfather of Konnech, Lionel Mingshuan Ni (Chinese: Ni Mingshuan).
In 2006, Ni became involved with the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) 973 Program of China. It is very intimately linked with the Chinese military.
He was named Chief Scientist in September and would remain at the post until August of 2011, making it almost as if he were an integral part of the 11th Five-Year Plan.
In 2006, Dr. Ni already wielded a heavy presence in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing, but was also in cities like Heifei and Urumuqi.
However, his impact would very much be a global one.
With Ni Mingshuan at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), a partner of the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks (HKSTP), it provided him and any potential business associates a prime position between ready-for-market military technologies and a major vein of global capital markets.
AZKEF-lifa
Early in 2002 (with the beginning of the new Five-Year Plan), Microsoft wrote to the American Zhu Kezhen Education Foundation (AZKEF) to inform that they would match AZKEF’s academic contributions for the year.
Running up to 2004, the American Zhu Kezhen Education Foundation, who has direct support from Zhejiang University (ZU), had received a running total of $10 from an individual listed as “Chen, Wei” and with a spelling that matches the one found on Eugene Yu’s Konnech patents.
Did Wei Chen pay $10 for patent listings?
Also listed was Eugene Yu for $580, but these both are mere whispers compared to the depths that AZKEF runs. They didn’t exactly “roll over” once Yu departed.
It Wasn’t Only Charles Lieber
The AZKEF lecture series continued for well over a decade after Eugene Yu’s departure from the organization.
Some of the lecturers were economists, scientists, and even members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, themselves.
In October 2004, University of Michigan (U-M) Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Kang G. Shin visited Zhejiang University (ZU).
In 2005, University of California-San Diego professor Qian Xu was giving a ZU lecture on DNA, cloning and the like, however those are not the key takeaways.
Notice that the Party Secretary named the position of visiting professor, and that contact was made directly by AZKEF, themselves, directly to the Party.
Also in 2005, A professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, Barry S. Cooperman, cashed in.
In late March of 2008, another Harvard Professor, Raymond Erikson, was sent by AZKEF for a ZU lecture.
In October 2008, U-M Otis Dudley Duncan Professor Xie Yu to lecture at Zhejiang University…
…as well as Stanford’s Stephen Quake.
Wharton Business School’s Marshall Meyer visited ZU in 2008 for a lecture titled “China’s Second Economic Transition.”
ZUEF-USA
On May 1, 2009, AZKEF changed its name to the Zhejiang University Education Foundation USA, or ZUEF-USA.
After the formal transition from AZKEF to ZUEF, a 2009 ZUEF publication announced the 2009 Zhejiang-Hangzhou International Talent Exchange and Cooperation Conference.
As will be more apparent soon, this talent exchange and cooperation program helped to complete an invaluable pipeline of talent and resources between the crucial region in Mainland China and Hong Kong, directly.
2011 was an intensely busy year for the newly coined Zhejiang University Education Foundation, as a new Five Year Plan and other movement within the U.S. bureaucracy ramped up.
Muming Pu was among several scholars who traveled to Zhejiang on ZUEF’s dime that year, and was also the director of a CAS Institute.
Professor and Nobel Prize nominee Graham Cooks, from Lionel Ni’s alma mater Purdue University, went to ZU for a lecture in 2011 as well.
Around the same time in 2011, two lectures were held, “Resolving International Business Disputes—Arbitration as a Path to Economic Development,” and, “Cap and Trade Border Measures and WTO Law,” and both featured Cornell’s John J. Barcello, III, who is also a Harvard Law graduate.
In 2012, Wayne State University’s Guo Xiaofeng held a lecture at ZU.
Wayne State plays a pivotal, enabling role in this series as well.
For a FUN FACT:
Judging by a 2008-2009 ZUEF newsletter, the organization enjoyed Seneca Lake as much as Hunter Biden.
Just a Few More Things…
Stepping back for a moment to 2003, UC-Berkeley professor and foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chenming Hu, went to Zhejiang University to conduct a lecture on nanoscale semiconductors — tiny computer stuff — as a part of AZKEF’s Overseas Scholars Lecture Series.
According to Hu’s LinkedIn page, he was awarded the US National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama, and the Medal of Honor Award from the IEEE - the most elite of electrical scientists in the world.
AZKEF Directory
By examining a 2005 AZKEF member directory, it becomes even more apparent the depth and scope of Zhejiang University’s infiltration into American academia at the behest of the Party.
Email addresses make abundantly clear that members leveraged their own academic departments to send Chinese money to American professors through the lecture series.
Fei-Yue Wang
Another character of great interest is the AZKEF 2005 Vice President, Fei-Yue Wang, who undoubtedly designed much of the cutting edge in intelligent systems for as long as they have been in existence.
Wang was President of AZKEF in 2007 and 2008, just before rebranding to ZUEF-USA. He essentially runs the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and as done so for nearly a quarter century now.
He was employed by both University of Arizona and the Chinese Academy of Sciences for nearly three years, according to Wang’s LinkedIn page.
Not only was Wang a part of the Hundred Talents, but he apparently marched the Chinese Academy of Sciences — an openly stated R&D arm of the People’s Liberation Army — right into the University of Arizona by founding the Sino-US Joint R&D Center for Intelligent Control Systems.
Perhaps that story will arise another day.
Yu Don’t Say!
Then there was the one AZKEF member who stuck out immediately, in particular — Yizhou Yu (yes, I definitely targeted the surname).
Notice below that Yizhou Yu was a “visiting researcher” at Microsoft Research Asia for one month in 2008.
This is where Lionel Ni was the Director of the program in Beijing that was a direct initiative of the Chinese Ministry of Education.
Lionel Ni’s PhD. student at MSU also just happened to be on the same AZKEF member directory, as covered in Part Two.
Don’t Forget About Dos Equis
Xipeng Xiao, who now fills a senior role with Huawei Europe, studied under Lionel Ni in the eLANS laboratory at Michigan State.
This lab was operated through 2011 (we’ll get to what happened to it in the next article) by Michigan State and supported with funding from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Air Force, National Security Agency, Microsoft, IBM, HP, and TARDEC.
As is made clear below, Lionel Ni’s departure from the U.S. didn’t necessarily end his involvement with Michigan State University while receiving federal dollars.
In fact, in 2008, MSU filed for a patent, citing Lionel Ni as the inventor, along with two former colleagues from MSU’s eLANS.
Could it have possibly been a piece of technology Ni was capitalizing on, or integrating into another piece of intellectual property he had just developed? Perhaps related to another major project won just before the patent was filed?
Lionel Ni Lands BIG Boeing Deal
In 2007, Lionel Ni landed a monster deal with Boeing. The deal had no ceiling, and had no time limit - a professor’s dream, and one he was already enjoying with the full backing of both Ministries of Education and of Science and Technology.
Naturally, it, too, was run in conjunction with Tsinghua University.
Perhaps this cooperation between HKUST and Boeing was a result of Frank Wang’s 2006 success in building drones, which eventually blossomed into the notorious drones used for mischief around the globe.
It appears Wang may have utilized one of the incubators within the local science parks to Hong Kong.
At any rate, weeks following MSU’s patent filing, Eugene Yu copyrighted BestBrief, followed by Pollchief in Novemeber of 2008.
After securing the Boeing deal, Lionel Ni began as a professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications for three years — a typical term within a Chinese talent program.
Don’t Forget Jonathan Choi
In 2004, Michigan State University opened its Confucius Institute and financial advisor the CAS President, Jonathan Choi donated $5 million to the school to support the chapter.
It was this money that inevitably funded Konnech building and launching ChineseBrief, built by Yu on Lionel Ni’s technology.
In the fall of 2003, Choi was on the board of Advisors at HKUST (then called University of Science and Technology - Hong Kong) to where “grandfather” Lionel Ni moved his employment.
Choi would retain the post through 2008, and remained current on his foundation’s former website “sunwahgroup2021.com” as well.
Michigan State University 2006-2011
Keep in mind that the NSF had recently opened its office in Beijing — there were open lanes of talent, intellectual property, and money between Lionel Ni, AZKEF, Michigan State University, the Chinese government, Microsoft, HKUST, and Zhejiang University since the 1990’s.
One of Lionel Ni’s colleagues even went with him to HKUST, named Yunhao Liu.
Here is just a sample of grants that came into Michigan State University between 2006 and 2009 while the university employed talent from Zhejiang University.
All images are linked to the entries.
Zhejiang University is one of several Chinese universities plainly stated by the FBI to be a risk to national security.
But somehow, they’re not a risk in this particular case.
Somehow, Michigan State University manages to always keep a open line to Zhejiang University one way or the other.
Remember, this is still setting the stage for the most egregious disregard for national security in articles to come.
I will show you at least part of ONE reason the FBI acts like nothing is going on at MSU as we dive deeper into this series.
This is not one of them, but a strange one nonetheless:
Awkward Pause Between Installments
What are the odds after everything discussed (we’re only in 2008 so far), that moving into 2009, two computer science professors from Michigan, a Michigan law professor, and a Wayne State University law professor (among other shared talent) could all be in and out of the exact same university on assignments?
What if each one of those person’s assignments all played together and created a perfect storm of chaos?
Next, we look at the piece of the pie that the NSF and U.S. government and military decided was worth building with the geopolitical foe who openly states their hostility toward the United States.