Konnech, The Cloud, & 3-Letter Tramps
How a historical documentation of Konnech effortlessly turned into a numbing portrait of a crippled United States national security apparatus
A world-class microelectronics innovator and high-demand target, (Lionel) Ni Mingxuan specializes in parallel processing, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, RFID applications, and has been a pioneer in the field for decades.
He led global development through his many tenures on elite CCP and U.S. research foundations and programs.
Concurrently, Eugene Yu was building and developing products for Konnech in America through his own company. Konnech was a continuation of Lionel Ni’s CC&T Technologies by way of LJ Connection.
Since Konnech’s conception in 2001, Ni Ming-shuan (Lionel Ni) has owned a 25% stake in Interstellar (Hangzhou) Network Technology [ 星际（杭州）网络科技有限公司 ], based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China.
He was also in business with Eugene Yu in Okemos, Michigan until around the time of Jinhua Yulian’s founding in Jinhua, Zhejiang in 2005.
The Interstellar Network
Make sure you have installed to your browser a translation extension, or another easy way to translate Chinese websites before you tackle the sauce in this piece!
Shown within the qcc.com Interstellar listing above is an English name, ebanswers. Ebanswers was the chosen English name associated with Interstellar (Hangzhou) Network Technology, or 星际（杭州）网络科技有限公司, in 2001.
The English translation of the Chinese characters representing Interstellar also sometimes returns StarWorld, Star Cloud, as well as an occasional Nebula listing. This is only a translation issue from Chinese characters into English through different translation tools in different scenarios.
The most commonly returning “Interstellar” moniker will be used for the purposes here unless shown otherwise in screenshots.
“StarWorld (Hangzhou) Network Technology Co., Ltd. is a U.S. funded enterprise, founded in 2000, headquartered in Hangzhou, China, with a research and development center in Michigan, USA.” (Google Translate)
After poking around in archives, a 2001 Interstellar “About” page laid out the picture in great clarity:
This directly links Eugene Yu with Konnech and their PBX servers to a Mainland company owned by Lionel Ni, that also claimed to be an extension of CC&T Technologies in 2001.
Ebanswers’ current page states:
“StarWorld is an American-funded software enterprise, headquartered in Hangzhou, founded in February 2000, with a wholly-owned management consulting company in China, multiple branches, and a research and development center in Michigan, USA.”
As if more corroboration was necessary, above is Konnech’s self-stated predecessor, LJ Connection partnered with ebanswers — an e-CRM family of products — all the way back in 2001. It would seem that in the case of Konnech, Interstellar is a “trusted partner.”
In a 2006 “About” section, ebanswers.com rattles off a list of its notable achievements, the first in nearly everything telecommunication-related for the CCP-held Mainland. “CRM” is Customer Relationship Management.
Above, in ebanswers’ “System Value” page, notice that Interstellar offers an “automobile service brand.” Eugene Yu’s LinkedIn page shows his degree in “Internal Combustion Engine Design” at Zhejiang University. Interstellar (Hangzhou), Jinhua Yulian Network Technology, 金华宇联网络科技有限公司, and Jinhua Hongzheng Network Technology, 金华市宏正网络科技公司, ere or are also located in nearby Jinhua, Zhejiang Province:
As all successful companies eventually do, Interstellar branched out, with each new entity focused on individual applications of marketable services that utilized the same basic framework. 56iq was listed on the Interstellar qcc.com listing, so let’s follow the natural trail.
56iq.com
56iq (Interstellar) provides “digital signage” services, facilitating advertisement and kiosk displays for industries ranging from banks, government, schools, stores, hotels, and restaurants.
The above archived image is a June 5, 2010 version of 56iq.com that naturally reads like a page from an Interstellar site. Interstellar/56iq says their R&D facility is in the U.S., that they were “founded in 2000,” and that they are a, “U.S.-funded enterprise.”
The Interstellar Beijing link in the footer of 56iq.com, directs to adone.com.cn. by visiting this page, the footer reveals that this conglomerate of companies is on a shared cloud network.
Singiv.com
The “Interstellar Wuhan” tab links to this site, singiv.com. Singi is clearly a government (and deeper into their link trees, medical) administration solution that, again, offers the same CRM features as previous instances of Lionel Ni developments’ applications.
Exploring the site a bit with a page translator, these features include identity management (centralized record tracking), GPS tracking, security keys, ESG management, biometrics, medical records, government documents, etc.
Within the Wuhan Interstellar site, on the footer is found the full English translation of the company name.
Wuhan Interstellar Interactive Intelligent Technology
This company, Wuhan Interstellar Interactive Intelligent Technology (武汉星际互动智能技术有限公司) returned a qcc.com listing as well. This is the registered name to the company offering Singi products.
After a bit more strategic digging through translated webpages came this revealing bit of insight into the Wuhan government’s plans and current implementation for the Mainland’s largest artificial intelligence data center. From the Wuhan government itself on October 21, 2022:
“Half of a year” from the outset of construction in September of 2021 suggests a completion date of the “Wuhan Cloud” to be around March of 2022.
These passages indicate that all of Wuhan’s cloud networks have recently been unified onto a single network. Consider that Interstellar Beijing’s website itself announced that its business operates from a shared cloud network — assumedly the Interstellar network — with some sort of hub in Wuhan.
This discovery warranted seeking out potential companies that may have been set up to facilitate an Interstellar cloud datacenter in Wuhan. Two Interstellar listings returned in the “East Lake High-Tech Zone,” an area directly mentioned in the official Wuhan government report.
One listing was filed in April of 2019, and one on March 22, 2022. Without direct access to Mainland China internet, knowing which or how many of these companies physically house Interstellar’s cloud servers is nearly impossible.
Claims were made from True The Vote event, “The Pit,” that the data, eventually purportedly given to the FBI and cooperatively investigated together, had been found on servers in Wuhan.
As of 2022, Wuhan has 482 companies listed in the Wuhan Artificial Intelligence Enterprise Database.
Coffee Break
It’s crucial to retain the knowledge of Lionel Ni’s parallel university and research career.
Ni Ming-shuan left Michigan State in June of 2003. From there, he moved into serving as:
Head Professor at Hong Kong University School of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2002,
Honorary President of the South China Institute of Software Engineering in 2004,
Guest Research Fellow at Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2004,
Overseas Assessor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2004,
Director of the WebEx/HKUST Information Technology Institute in 2004,
Director of HKUST China Ministry of Education/Microsoft Research Asia IT Key Lab in 2004,
and Guest Professor at Fudan University in 2004.
These are only his academic roles immediately after leaving from Michigan State in 2002/2003. Also found in Part Two of the Konnech history, Lionel Ni’s Complete Vitae can be viewed here.
Michigan State University
Konnech’s PollChief story starts at Michigan State and currently ends at Michigan State with Konnech’s new brick-and-mortar partnership with MSU.
EMPOWER
In 2004, Lionel Ni wrote a Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) paper on his EMPOWER project from a grant awarded to him, and that had just run out at Michigan State prior to the paper’s publishing.
The equipment to build out the concepts written about in 2004 is exact in description to the hardware developed by Ni, onboard Konnech’s PBX servers — the “internet emulator” (from The LJ Konnech-tion).
11 days following the budget term, Lionel Ni and Eugene Yu are found in business filings together. 30 days after the EMPOWER budget expired, two papers were published at the National Science Foundation-sanctioned IEEE Infocom 2003 Conference on Computer Communications in San Francisco.
You can find all of Lionel Ni’s publications from Hong Kong UST here.
From The Man In The Box, this funding period expired as Lionel Ni was departing his tenure for Hong Kong and Mainland China full-time. It was also as he and Eugene Yu were involved at Engino Technologies together.
The reported annual revenue of a tech pioneer’s tech private company listed on a dnb.com listing for Engino Technologies was randomly proximal to the grant amount.
ChineseBrief
Immediately following the NSF grant, Konnech was tapped to build ChineseBrief in 2006 for the Michigan State University Confucius Institute. It was based from Konnech’s BestBrief platform, as was SchoolBrief, covered in It’s Not Just PollChief.
Not only that, but it was funded by Jonathan Choi, Chairman of the Sun Wah Group who was also the economic advisor to the President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Announced on January 30, 2004:
It is strongly encouraged to read about the Chairman of the Sun Wah Group, Jonathan Choi.
Konnech, themselves said this in their public statement pertaining to a provably frivolous defamation suit against True The Vote:
Jinhua Yulian was born in 2005 to build K-12 software that became SchoolBrief, which was in turn employed through Konnech at Michigan State’s Confucius Institute.
This is corroborated in the truth of Detroit Public Schools having websites located at Jinhua Yulian/Jinhua Konnech’s yu-lian.cn, as I’ve covered in It’s Not Just PollChief.
The SchoolBrief platform was by design created to harvest sensitive government data and manage it. The platform was built by cutting-edge, CCP-sanctioned research programs through Michigan State’s Confucius Institute.
Yong Zhao
Yong Zhao appeared also on the Confucius Institute ChineseBrief project’s front page as a professor at MSU, and the Executive Director of the MSU Confucius Institute. He was also listed as the contact on the Sun Wah Group research grant.
Yong Zhao is also connected to interesting people and places after his career at MSU, including Kansas University and Connie Schmidt — a state that’s now home to yet another quiet election controversy.
Yong Zhao’s full background on his personal website here
Anil Jain
Anil Jain began receiving Army research grants at the same time that Konnech became inextricably linked with Michigan State University. From there, Michigan State’s biometrics program not only expanded, but eventually became a premiere biometrics research facility for United States agencies, themselves.
In 2010, the MSU Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Anil Jain, was awarded grants for projects from several government agencies.
In 2013, a Microsoft Research research gift to Ni Ming-shuan’s old university department for motion gestures rang a bell from others’ work highlighting patents that crossed paths with Konnech companies along the way.
Over the year following this interesting transaction, Konnech was selling the rights to their Abvote platform to Votem and Jinhua Hongzheng was being established in Mainland China.
The research gift above wouldn’t have been noticeable had it not been for Konnech’s prior patents, covered in depth by other citizen journalists. Notice the dates on the Shao Guojun patents (both are assigned to Konnech-related entities), listed in the caption along with a link to view the full listing.
The research gift for unlocking with simple gestures was from Microsoft Research, 5 months after Konnech’s 2013 publication of “Device and method for selection of options by motion gestures” — US20130104090A1 — or later, US8949745B2.
Keep in mind, Lionel Ni had one foot out of the door from his extensive decade-long tenure as Director of Microsoft Research Asia’s Key IT Lab at the time of the MSU Microsoft Research grant.
His hands would have been all over the very same intellectual property.
Needing highlighting is the flurry of activity in 2019 from both the U.S. and Mainland branches of the Konnech family tree.
It just so happens that Konnech’s entire business model relies on tapping into government and personal records.
It also just so happens that an original co-founder of Konnech built the backbone of an entire string of Mainland companies that harvests and capitalizes on government and personal records, which is now connected to all of Wuhan’s cloud — the largest in the Mainland — and is a stated Communist Party A.I. database.
Around one week later, the FBI ITSELF was on-site at Michigan State for an “Academic Alliance Conference.”
Later, in December of 2019, Anil Jain, was awarded a membership within the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
After Konnech’s completion of the BestBrief and PollChief platform, Lionel Ni was awarded multiple senior positions at the CAS in the same fashion.
Ni was also named Provost of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology — his long-time research base — in 2019.
To note, Wuhan Interstellar Interactive Network Technology was incorporated at exactly the same time that the Wuhan government announced the “One Cloud” construction complete in March of 2022.
All of this coincided with Konnech’s migration into Michigan State’s facilities and Lionel Ni-adjacent openings of new devoted cloud centers.
Final Thoughts
Regardless of whether our national security apparatus were previously aware of the issue, or even engaged, they have refused to so much as acknowledge their involvement in, or proximity to the situation.
In regards to elections, the cybersecurity aspect has been brought into question continuously for over a decade.
There is no reasonable way else to interpret repeated willful inaction and ignorance to cybersecurity and its pertinence to our national sovereignty than as a complete and utter lack of respect for, and a betrayal to the American public.
I leave with a “feature” that kept popping up during this.
Why is it that so many “centers,” sprawling of power, money, and global influence are obsessed with a master plan for 2030? Another coincidence?
Is this what the CCP are working toward through endless networks of research grants and donations funneling to American companies and institutions?
It sure does sound a lot like the World Economic Forum.
Wow! You weren’t kidding. There is a lot to digest here, but full of info we all need to realize what may be going on. Thank you.
Wow, I’m speechless and now more determined than ever we have to stop them