Theory No More, Part Six: Michigan, Microsoft, and Big Money
The final pieces to set the stage.
A crucial part of any successful enterprise is a legal apparatus to provide resiliency from outside pressure, and one that can leverage its influence over government oversight and legislation, when operating in politics.
While making over the Party, George Soros and the Democrats built their own legal arm alongside its new AI-driven political weapon, Catalist, while Soros bought up chunks in the multinational company on whose back the new Democrat infrastructure rested — Microsoft.
Along the way, the duo were investing heavily into Europe and the United Nations as well. This report below shows, “Six months after revealing the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) Soros scandal…the Council of Europe on which the ECHR depends was itself funded by the Open Society and Microsoft.”
The period between 2004 and 2014 was when former the Michigan State University professor and Thousand Talents Plan recruit, Lionel Ni, returned to Mainland China to develop Microsoft’s cloud architecture at Microsoft Research Asia. During this period, Soros and Microsoft collectively gave the ECHR two million Euros.
Jocelyn Benson
Harvard graduate and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has been one of the most active figures within the Democrat establishment for almost 20 years.
Benson was the Voting Rights Policy Coordinator at the Harvard Civil Rights Project from 2002 to 2004 when she joined John Kerry’s campaign in 2004 and created the first nationwide election protection program.
In 2006, Benson spoke at a Democratic Socialists of America event in Detroit, marking the first of a string of encounters lending to her communist influences.
George Soros began backing Benson through his Secretary of State Project resulting in her failed 2010 bid for the office.
While Benson was a professor at Wayne State University, she had abundant access to Marxist and even CCP-influenced law scholars and students.
During her tenure at Wayne Law, she founded the Michigan Center for Election Law and Administration in 2011, and also participated in at least two separate visits with Beijing-based scholars as Dean in 2013 alone.
Recall Part Five and one of Catalist’s major partners, Sierra Club.
Other members of the school’s faculty facilitated a revolving door of exchange between Wayne State and the PRC’s main academic hub as well, all while Benson was leading the charge for George Soros and the Democrats.
Meet Me in Michigan
Some of the faculty within Wayne State University were also steeped in communist ideology themselves, but Wayne Law wasn’t the entirely the source.
Prior context…
Remember back to Part Three to Yizhou Yu, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign computer science professor who was a part of an obvious intellectual property pipeline called the Zhejiang Alumni Education Foundation.
Yu went to a leading Chinese cloud computing expert (and Wayne State and Michigan State alum) named Lionel Ni’s Microsoft Research Asia for only six months in 2008 as well. TIt coincided with a Michigan State University patent listing Ni as an inventor around the time that MSU’s eLANS laboratory ceased operations as well.
Julia (Ya) Qin
Julia Qin is a graduate of both Peking University in Beijing and Harvard University.
Qin, a WTO expert and lifetime scholar at Wayne State, returned to the Mainland and Tsinghua University as a visiting professor in the summer of 2008 for five months.
When Julia Qin returned from Tsinghua, she continued in her duties at Wayne State University until 2016, but maintained a residual connection to Tsinghua University through what could likely be a Chinese talent program.
A key feature of some Chinese “Overseas Experts” plans is a three-month-per-year commitment, and usually within three-year agreements.
Peking and Tsinghua Universities are part of China’s C9 League of universities, the “Ivy League” of China. They are known pipelines of IP theft and espionage, per the FBI.
After she returned to the U.S. from her brief visiting professorship at Tsinghua in 2008, she joined the University of Michigan’s Center for Chinese Studies by 2010.
Just before her initial stint at Tsinghua, Qin was a visiting professor at U-M just before Miami Dolphins owner, Stephen M. Ross donated a University of Michigan-record $200 million for athletics and academics in September of 2013.
The eye-popping donation was followed by another $50 million just shortly thereafter.
These university donations may not seem significant in a different context away from U-M’s Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies. Kenneth Lieberthal is and was a highly esteemed professor at the Ross School of Business.
From the University of Michigan press release:
Many of Lieberthal's students are working in the U.S. State Department and embassies all over the world, said Mary Gallagher, the center's director. "We have trained some of the top Sinologists in the country who are now at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Stanford, Wisconsin, Cornell and other top institutions."
The Ross School of Business has offered an MBA/MA in Chinese Studies dual degree program through the Center for Chinese Studies since at least 2005.
Lieberthal-Rogel
Center for Chinese Studies
Take a look at the graphic below and notice a few key points:
In the “trip highlights” of a university-funded overseas trip, it notes that faculty met with politicians at the Chinese Communist Party headquarters.
Xie Yu is an Otis Dudley Duncan distinguished professor of population research, and is the director of the Peking University Thousand Talents Program.
Qiang Ren, PhD. is also a professor of population research, and was doing so in the Xinjiang, China. This is the location from where the vast majority of accusations of Chinese human rights violations originate — and many accusations arise from the very research this scholar performed.
In the highlights section in the mid-left area, U-M and Peking University hold a joint-institute and hosted the international NSF-REU Site for Chemistry in China — a life sciences program.
Also noted in the highlights is an agreement made with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where Lionel Ni was also serving as a visiting chair professor.
Xie Yu’s blurb on the right is taken from a ZUEF “Distinguished Lectures” event at Zhejiang University.
The Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies brought to Michigan a hub to unify all of Michigan’s major research institutes under one central flagship.
The “Public Ivy” School
To say that the University of Michigan is (and has long been) infiltrated by PLA-interested scientists and academicians would be a gross understatement.
Still on faculty at the University of Michigan even now is Professor Ctirad Uher, also the former Dean of the School of Physics at U-M, along with the Center for Chinese Studies’ Xie Yu, who AZKEF/ZUEF sent to Zhejiang University in October 2008 and was named an Otis Dudley Duncan Distinguished Professor at U-M.
Another notable student, Yuanchao Shu was a joint-Ph.D. student between Zhejiang University and U-M and departed immediately for (formerly Lionel Ni’s) Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing upon completion.
This pattern emerges repeatedly throughout these elite computing universities.
Wayne State’s Other Moving Pieces
Sean F. Wu
Sean F. Wu, or Wu Xiaofeng, is a former Wayne State University professor who in 2012 traveled to Zhejiang University to its campus in China to carry out a “series of academic activities” on behalf of ZUEF.
He is one of, if not the foremost authority in China on autonomous driving technology.
Xu Chengzhong
In the bottom right of the graphic above is highlighted Xu Chengzhong, who is a very highly esteemed AI and advanced computing expert.
Xu won an overseas talent award before he came to be offered a position at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, while he was still in the United States at Wayne State University. He remained there until late 2012.
Strangely enough, this investigation started with a focus on Michigan State University for many of the same red flags, or in other words, talent streams from an adversary’s military research networks having access to our most critical networks in America.
Mo’ Money
In the fall of 2016, Benson departed Wayne State University to run for Secretary of State in Michigan (and failed), and as she did, Stephen Ross donated $5 million to Wayne Law in her honor.
Mo’ Problems
Her husband was caught up in a scandal over deleted emails from his Detroit City Council email account. he was forced to tender his resignation in the wake of it, but picked up an even more lucrative position at Stephen Ross’ Related Companies.
I Dream of GENI
U-M’s computer science program was involved with every actual focal point of this series so far by only looking at this 2015 paper. There are Lionel Ni’s Microsoft Research Asia, the talent and IP pipeline of AZKEF/ZUEF, and the U.S.-sanctioned (flirty-with-the-Bidens) Iran.
The National Science Foundation began building the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) in 2006 to facilitate global research, and did with the help and partnership of Microsoft and all the usual suspects in the space, including the University of Michigan.
Immediately as GENI and the new cloud infrastructure got off the ground, CISE Assistant Director Peter A. Freeman left his post for a position with The Washington Advisory Group.
As a consultant in Washington, this effectively means he was hired to connect dots for government and academia that they may not legally be able to do themselves without enormous public scrutiny.
AZKEF One More Time
Yet to be mentioned in this series is another member of the U.S. Zhejiang University Education Foundation, Kevin Ye.
Ye was a longtime Cisco engineer with his tenure spanning over two decades with the cybersecurity firm.
If you’ll notice in the 2022 map from now-Raytheon-owned GENI, notice that there are three “CiscoGENI Racks.” (see below)
One of these Cisco racks is located at West Virginia University, and the next part in this series will address why that is extremely important to note.
Immediately after the NSF’s GENI project took off in 2006, George Soros doubled his shares in Microsoft.
Dr. Qiao Xiang was awarded a grant at Jocelyn Benson’s Wayne State University through 2015 as the lead student for, “GENI-Enabled Vehicular Sensing and Control Networking: from Experiments to Applications…”
...and Texas A&M professor Yuehua Wang was visiting Benson’s Wayne State and using GENI racks and mobile resources in 2016.
If for nothing but longevity, GENI appeared to be a very successful investment for the National Science Foundation and all of its partners.
New Era in Research
Microsoft and the National Science Foundation officially launched a series of grants together to bring people’s research — and their databases — onto the Azure cloud in 2009.
The NSF, U-M, Microsoft, GENI, and others had representation on a National Broadband Plan Workshop to offer research recommendations for the Broadband Taskforce to the FCC. His remarks are worth the read:
Here is a video, edited for time and emphasis, of the NSF’s Jeanette Wing and Microsoft’s Dan Reed’s official video announcement. The original can be found here.
Many new “testbeds” popped up in laboratories across the country with the advent of GENI, including one developed in part by Carnegie Mellon University, and AZKEF’s Yizhou Yu’s UI-UC called “Open Cirrus.”
Yizhou also went for only a few months for a stint at Lionel Ni’s Microsoft Research Asia only months before the NSF and Microsoft partnered to consolidate their cloud computing resources.
One of these testbeds offered a 2011 seminar from Hewlett-Packard Labs’ Dejan S. Milojicic, Ph.D in Atlanta, GA. Milojicic was the technical director of the project between 2007 and 2011.
In a presentation saved to the Georgia Institute of Technology website, his graphic clearly shows the network reaching into China and even Russia.
This will be very important later.
Why Microsoft and Michigan?
It may not seem that important or revelatory on its face, however the connection between Michigan and Microsoft lies in none other than Perkins Coie, whose Marc Elias has been synonymous with the Democrat juggernaut for nearly twenty years.
Elias was Lead Counsel for the Soros-funded Kerry-Edwards campaign, and Perkins Coie was representing the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2004, when Benson began her rise through the ranks of the Party.
They hired Benson in 2004 to develop the first nationwide Election Protection program for the DNC. Benson selected, recruited, and trained Voter Protection coordinators in 21 states.
The program resulted in deployment of over 17,000 trained election law attorneys — election lawyers. Marc Elias is an election lawyer.
While Elias deals in election law, it’s also important not to forget that the FBI has maintained a workspace at the Perkins Coie offices for many years now, as reported just over a year ago, which will also be relevant to the cyber part of this series later.
I didn’t forget Michigan State University and Benson’s story continues alongside it.
One more chunk of this story should do the trick, lucky number 7.
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