Theory No More, Part Four: Monopolies and Meritocracies
Incompetency or complicity?
Get a coffee.
I understand shying away from longer articles.
You need to read it all this one time.
After beginning the series with the connection between Hunter Biden’s business partner Ye Jianming and another CPPCC member from Hong Kong, Jonathan KS Choi, the foundation of our timeline so far has extended primarily through 2008.
That year, 2008, NATO published “Future Security Environment 2025” and laid out what NOA Branch Head of the Strategic Analysis and Intelligence Sub-Division, LTC Tohmas Brevick, saw as the greatest priorities to global security through the year 2025.
What you are about to read is also entirely based on open sources, but not all of them that I have.
NSF
NSF began funding “Bat Lady,” Shi Zhengli in 2004 through a study that ran through 2007, well after they had established an official presence in China.
Hunter Biden raised millions of dollars for Metabiota founder Nathan Wolfe in 2015.
In 2005, Nathan Wolfe was working with Dr. Deborah Birx on what he would turn into Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, and later, Metabiota.
This would lead to the program called the PREDICT Project which, through collaboration between NIH and USAID, had some hand in producing the Covid-19 pandemic.
Just after funding the Zhengli research, in 2005, the Pentagon signed the bioweapons proliferation agreement, as mentioned in Part Two, with Ukraine.
Up until around 2008, there had been no feasible way to pull off a task as ambitious as a global viral forecasting project.
Global Viral Forecasting was also the name of Harvard graduate, Hunter Biden beneficiary, and Metabiota founder Nathan Wolfe’s pilot non-profit organization that also seems to have gotten off the ground around 2008.
Wolfe was also a Fellow of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Research Council in 2008 and through at least 2011.
From his position, Wolfe was undoubtedly privy to other DARPA research that would be beneficial to his projects like MSU’s four-year DARPA project that touched their Computer Science and Engineering department to investigate, “the fundamental laws of biology.”
The 2008 press push was the round of publicity launched to secure funding that got his nonprofit off the ground with the PREDICT program in 2009.
This would mark the beginning of Wolfe’s USAID-funded adventures in China. In 2009, there was no actual Administrator of USAID, covered here, and before there could be one confirmed, President Obama restricted all communications with foreign governments as “classified.”
Following another round of Nathan Wolfe publicity in 2011, he rebranded his nonprofit into a for-profit, private company called Metabiota.
SIDE NOTE
2011 is a pivotal year in this series. Here is a comprehensive list of Global Viral’s partners in 2011 (excuse the broken images):
It was the following year that Global Viral Forecasting made the transition to into for-profit Metabiota, coinciding with what would be a ground-shift in the way the U.S. government funded research.
NSF’s Home in Beijing
The National Science Foundation (NSF) opened an office at the U.S. Embassy in May of 2006, but coordination from the new office was under way in September of 2005.
According to Wikipedia, the Chaoyang District is,
“home to more than 60 percent of the foreign business agencies in Beijing, over 3,000 foreign companies, 167 international news agencies, and two-thirds of the 158 of the global top 500 transnational companies that have invested in Beijing.”
The English version of the 2006 Chaoyang District website says that the district also overlapped the Zongguancun District, giving the NSF a front-row seat next door to Beijing’s Silicon Valley.
The NSF began working in China in September of 2005, around the beginning of fiscal year 2005, which was the first year of the new, permanent provisions within the USA PATRIOT Act. The Act codified surveillance protocols in the name of “national security” that had never been previously considered nor seriously debated.
Everything within the American science community from that point forward was geared toward building that surveillance infrastructure, and at all costs.
Revisiting Feiyue Wang
Feiyue Wang was a glancing focus of Part Three of this series. He was in leadership of the American Zhu Kezhen Education Foundation (AZKEF) from Eugene Yu’s time with the organization.
So far in this exploration, AZKEF is responsible for sending two foreign members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to Zhejiang University — one of which is now convicted of hiding his involvement in the Thousand Talents Program.
He abruptly left the states and his role in the Foundation weeks before the 2008 election, coincidentally enough, and had to have another Zhejiang alumni, Mingjiang Ni, finish his term.
With some crafty digging, Ni Mingjiang 倪明江 was found in a pair of Chinese Academy of Engineering review documents from 2011 and 2013.
University of Arizona
Feiyue Wang was a professor at the University of Arizona until 2009, but he was also beginning a professorship and serving as Vice President of the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
This coincided with Wang’s abrupt departure from, and the alumni organization immediately rebranding to ZUEF, covered in Part Three.
Wang’s position eventually turned into directing the PRC’s State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems.
The University of Arizona was also partner of the CITeR laboratory, and that’s where the story goes a little sideways.
CITeR was established in 2001 as a collaboration between West Virginia, Michigan State, San Jose State, and Marshall Universities.
By 2007, however, the NSF’s Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) had grown to eight participants to include the University of Arizona.
Michigan State University
MSU’s eLANS laboratory operated through 2008, when it appears the remaining grants through the lab with former MSU professor Lionel Ni concluded, and their resulting papers were subsequently published.
This coincided with the filing of a patent for, “Private entity authentication for pervasive computing environments,” by MSU, and a dream grant for Lionel Ni through Boeing with no fixed valuation and an open-ended, rolling term, to be reevaluated every year. This was covered in Part Three.
C9 League
A very important and alarming note to make is the grant’s express allocation for collaboration with Tsinghua University. Tsinghua is one of the “C9” universities in China — their “Ivy League” of research universities.
The C9 schools are all direct conduits of research and technology to and from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
MSU → HKUST
In 2006, Lionel Ni was collaborating with Michigan State University’s eLANS laboratory from his full-time employer, HKUST in Hong Kong.
As the lab wound down, another lab in the department began ramping up - CITeR — and many of the sponsors would also follow, but more on that later.
As uncovered in Part Three, Feiyue Wang was a Zhejiang University graduate, a member of a Hundred Talents Plan that earned him an award for his achievement in 2002. The Hundred Talents- and Thousand Talents Plans of the PRC are typically the mechanism for the most secretive, private transfers of money and intellectual property.
Zhejiang University is another one of the C9 League in China.
Back to Zhejiang
AZKEF and its later offspring, ZUEF, continued its “Distinguished Lectureship Series” all the way through 2018.
Throughout the course of the lecture series is a pattern of ZUEF members sending professors from their own States-side schools and departments back to their alma mater, C9 League member, Zhejiang University.
Continue to bear in mind that Zhejiang University, itself directed this alumni organization.
Xie Yu
One professor in the Distinguished Lecture Series in particular, Xie Yu of the University of Michigan, checked specific boxes that trigger major red flags.
One example of these red flags is that of posting two separate resumes — one in Chinese and one in English. The 2012 Chinese biographical sketch is posted in its entirety below.
It translates:
Xie Yu, Professor of the Department of Sociology, Department of Statistics, and School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, researcher at the Center for China Studies, Center for Social Research, and Center for Population Studies, University of Michigan…
was awarded the title of "Otis Dudley Duncan Distinguished Professor" at the University of Michigan in 2009. Academician of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Academia Sinica in Taiwan.
Chair Professor of Changjiang Scholars of Peking University, Chair Professor of Peking University Thousand Talents Program…
You read that correctly.
Since at least 2012, U-M professor Xie Yu is the Chair Professor of Peking University’s Thousand Talents Program, and was hiding it from at least the public.
Was it hidden from the federal government, too?
John Kerry was sworn in as Secretary of State on February 1, 2013 following the tumultuous Hillary e-mail debacle (this angle will likely be explored further within this series). His State Department oversaw her visa.
U-M Center for Chinese Studies
The Center for Chinese Studies was founded in 1961 by the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, and was later renamed the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies after longtime Ross School of Business professor, Kenneth Lieberthal, and Rich Rogel.
This will be important later in the series.
In a Fall 2010 newsletter, CSS welcomed a cast of new members from across Michigan, but those juicy details are for later in the series.
U-M also signed a resolution for collaboration with Lionel Ni’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University, but even more astonishing, they visited with a member of the Chinese Communist Party State Council at the Party’s headquarters in Beijing.
Two of the newest members from MSU and Wayne State completed a circuit of talent and research from the entire state of Michigan back to Beijing by way of Shanghai, but only in this one, tiny thread of a connection.
AZKEF Continues Talent Pipeline
After sending UC-San Diego’s Shu Chien to Zhejiang in June of 2005, AZKEF turned up the heat on their research-sharing pipeline over the next decade.
AZKEF got the band back together in 2015 for another round with Shu Chien, but this time including former AZKEF President, Zhu Cheng.
The image below is a Google translation.
He was joined by members of most of China’s elite science institutions during the day.
Elsewhere in China, Hunter Biden was wrapping up the $35 million Metabiota investment through Rosemont Seneca Technologies.
Not Only Zhejiang and Peking
Fudan University issued a 2006 call for papers from Shanghai, China, only the program committee chair was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Fudan is also one of the C9 League. Former MSU professor Lionel Ni happened to be a guest professor at the university at the time.
Highlighted below are other universities with representation on the program committee which includes members from departments that appear repeatedly throughout the academic networks in this series, and specifically, overlap most of the leadership of AZKEF throughout the years.
Back In the U.S
In April of 2006, six American weather satellites were launched in coordination with Taiwan in April of 2006. This came also at the time which the NSF had just opened its Beijing office.
The Air Force and Office of Naval Research also supported MSU and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering eLANS lab.
More curious is Lionel Ni’s involvement with Taiwan’s science community in these same fields (see Complete Vitae for more).
Add all of this together with his Boeing deal that was just around the corner after these huge leaps in developments.
“Honorary” titles are often given resulting from years of work, or contributing other great benefits to a group. Dr. Ni Mingshuan received his bachelor’s degree at National Taiwan University in 1973.
Using only this one clip of “Lionel” Ni Mingshuan’s 55-page curriculum vitae shows he was in all of the right places in China at all of the right times…every time.
AI Is Older Than You’d Think
The same eLANS and CITeR research financiers put on a 2006 conference on “Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence.”
Sponsors included NSF, Office of Naval Research, Microsoft Research, Boeing, Google, and DARPA.
The government and corporate sponsors of the 2006 conference establishes continuity throughout MSU’s academic programs of being backed by the same principal advanced computing agenda.
I posted a cheat sheet of sorts while researching this stuff. You can view (almost) all of MSU’s Computer Science and Engineering grant announcements between 2006 and 2022 here:
Soon, NSF and USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah would send the department into overdrive while sharing scientists with America’s openly stated adversary.
eLANS → CITeR
After ten years active, MSU’s Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department saw a shift in their government funding being redirected away from eLANS and into the Center for Identification Technology Research, or CITeR.
In 2006, Lionel Ni was collaborating with Michigan State University’s eLANS laboratory from his full-time employer, HKUST in Hong Kong.
As the lab wound down, another lab in the department began ramping up - CITeR — and many of the sponsors would also follow.
This marked shift at MSU from advanced networking into biometrics created an interesting scenario when considering the parallel National Science Foundation funding into building out biometric surveillance through PREDICT, and had already been two years into pre-development with Shi Zhengli as of 2006.
Talent Pipeline
Under Lionel Ni’s direction, a member of the Zhejiang University Education Foundation USA, or ZUEF-USA, named Yu Yizhou was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, but for only one month in 2008.
Recall back to Part Three and the Zhejiang-Hangzhou talent exchange program of 2009, just as Ni got the new, AI-powered phase of his own business, Interstellar Network, off the ground.
This also coincided with the new round of Chinese government talent programs, many aimed at overseas academicians (more here), as well as Obama giving Interpol special privileges within the United States’ borders, and classifying all foreign government communications through Executive Orders (more here).
Editor’s note: To pretend that the United States’ and Chinese governments, both, were not privy to initiatives set forth by the United States Congress and the National People’s Congress, respectively, would be the essence of believing in a conspiracy theory.
These agencies and their leadership meticulously plan every objective for years in advance, together, in both respective governments.
NSF Further Merges With Private Sector
In 2009, the NSF began awarding “CLuE” awards to promote academic use of cluster computing resources on Google cloud, and originally awarded 14 schools with the funding, most of which directly overlapped the academic networks laid out before within AZKEF and ZUEF.
Google in China
Here is a video from 2009 posted to YouTube claiming to be from inside the headquarters. Regardless of if it is, the very first clip clearly shows the Google headquarters in Raycom Infotech Park.
Compared against all other (sparse) reporting, even the 2018 Google office fire from the Raycom science park that DailyMail.co.uk picked up, the details in the video check out.
Interestingly, Google had a brush up with the Chinese government in 2010 over its search engine routing to Hong Kong instead of its headquarters in Beijing — on a China Telecom backbone, mind you.
Google was an SVB Angel investment from 2004 that grew into a powerhouse and cozied up within Beijing’s Zongguancun District, nearby the NSF office, at Raycom Infotech Park by 2008.
Microsoft in China
Just one year later in 2010, NSF and Microsoft teamed up to provide Azure cloud services for free to American universities and awarded Zhejiang University alumni and USC PhD. Yiying Tong a half-million dollar NSF CAREER award (about $100,000 per year) within weeks of each other.
At the very same time, Microsoft was launching the same service in Beijing after discussion in 2010 about the very same programs being implemented in China.
2011 brought thirteen universities Microsoft’s Azure cloud services to share their data freely amongst their schools and departments, for research purposes.
Among them were the usual universities, the targeted institutions of AZKEF/ZUEF, the Zhejiang University-run group: Cornell, Buffalo, UC-SD, University of Michigan, University of Southern California, UT-Austin, and the University of Washington.
Kelia Xia
2012 was the first in a series of Yiying Tong’s publications with Kelin Xia, who apparently was an exchange PhD. student from a Chinese Academy of Sciences program in Wuhan.
It also came along with a string of NIH patent applications elsewhere for, “Catalytic delivery nanosubstrates (CDNS) for highly efficient delivery of biomolecules,” and, “Multilayered magnetic micelle compositions and methods for their use.”
Nevermind that Xia’s projects were the actual union of both the USAID viral surveillance program launched with deep participation from the Chinese government and the Pentagon-propped Big Data computing research programs at Michigan State.
Working Toward Government-Monopolized Research?
In July of 2011, former Gates Foundation Director, Rajiv Shah’s USAID announced they would begin bankrolling the NSF in 2012 in what effectively put the U.S. State Department in the middle of cutting edge domestic research projects as an international development agency.
At the Gates Foundation, Shah was in charge of agricultural projects as well as vaccine programs.
Of the NSF-USAID partnership, then-NSF Director Subra Suresh had enthusiastic words to say of the program.
This was a lazy way to transition into Subra Suresh, and I wanted to make sure you’re awake.
Subra Suresh
Subra Suresh was named Director of the National Science Foundation in 2010. He served until 2013 when he left to become the Dean of Carnegie Mellon University.
Recall back throughout the last two articles, the abundant intersections of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese talent programs, lectures, etc., and superimpose them here.
It’s fairly easy to imagine where this heads.
USAID in 2013 funded Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance for $2 million and soon after, he and Shi Zhengli published an article about bat coronaviruses jumping from animals to humans.
Suresh to Carnegie Mellon University
After leading the NSF and allocating millions to MSU between 2010 and 2013, and for the exact same programs discussed here, no less, Suresh went on to Carnegie Mellon who also hosted the CERT Division of DHS’ CISA.
Suresh had OK’d the funding of biometric research at Michigan State already, himself. CITeR is a laboratory funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Pentagon.
After Suresh’s arrival at CMU, who operated CERT, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report highlighted the ineffectiveness of the government’s first line of defense against cyberintrusions — the ALBERT system, part of a security platform called EINSTEIN.
(I touched on this before here)
Suresh was inducted into the Chinese Academy of Sciences following his stint as Director of the NSF, and while overseeing the university tasked with the entire nation’s cybersecurity — and failing at it.
The U.S. government inevitably pushed forward in response.
After Suresh’s departure from the NSF in 2013, the Foundation launched another round of PEER funding to 39 global projects, but by leveraging U.S. “counterparts” as a taxpayer-funded international aid agency.
Recap
So far in this story, a vast, well-connected network of high-level Chinese talent in America has been operating what looks an awful lot like a research transfer portal.
Oddly enough, a handful of 10-20 American universities, and 10-20 Chinese (Hong Kong included) universities all have intersecting patterns of collaboration and talent exchange.
Worse yet, the American taxpayer funded a very large portion of the research and scientists active in these circles.
Anil Jain, Michigan State University, and…
Michigan State University enjoyed at least 20 academic agreements for cooperation with Beijing between 2005 and 2022 (for purposes of this story). These ran through various Chinese universities, but all were supported by the central Chinese government.
Anil Jain and his colleagues reported on their study on latent fingerprint matching and sent it to the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, later published in December of 2014.
Jain’s collaborator was a student from Zhejiang University and the paper appears to possibly been a product of Jain’s time at Tsinghua University, judging by the thanks.
3-Letter Tramps
As I’ve covered before, an MSU professor and a scientist utilized by the FBI, DOJ, DHS, and Pentagon, Anil Jain, spent three years at Tsinghua University in Beijing beginning in 2009.
It coincided with a Chinese foreign experts plan and met all of its criteria, reaching a pinnacle ten years later in 2019, when Jain was elected as a foreign member to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Michigan State University has worked in some way with three of the C9 League, and three of China’s “Seven Sons of National Defence,” while working on American national security projects that contributed to Covid and vaccine programs, and undoubtedly led to the unsettling amount of Chinese intrusions into American cyberspace.
Only two of the three Seven Sons are actually pictured above. The third is Beijing Institute of Technology.
MSU artificial intelligence expert Jiliang Tang is a graduate of Beijing Institute of Technology, achieving a Masters in 2010 before spending five years at Arizona State University.
His PhD student, now headed for Emory University, is Zhejiang University graduate, Wei Jin.
That is still not all.
A second of Tang’s PhD. students is a Zhejiang University graduate.
Not to be naturally suspicious at this point, but why is this normal at a university performing critical, national security-sensitive research?
If the FBI is concerned about Thousand Talents Programs, why do they make it look so much like they’re using them?
Like I say all the time:
The U.S. Government isn’t worried about China’s incursions because we built everything together.
For one of the final times in the series, I can finally say:
This is still just laying the foundation of something even larger.
There is still another lab at MSU that raises even more questions than answers about the state of our national security infrastructure.
