The case of a Chinese military lieutenant coming to Boston University to conduct research is raising red flags on China using American universities to spy on the U.S., despite Beijing's denials, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Yanqing Ye has been indicted for lying on her U.S. visa application, concealing her Chinese military status in an act as an agent of a foreign government, according to the report.
She was at B.U. from 2017-2019, but is now wanted by the FBI, which believes she is back in China, per the Journal.
Ye applied to work with Boston University physicist Eugene Stanley, who is researching machine learning and artificial intelligence.
"I'm not interested at all in politics," Stanley, 78, told the Journal. "I'm a scientist.
"If a person anywhere in the world wants to come to my group, and they have the money to come, I say why not?"
Well, when the work is done with a member of the China's People's Liberation Army, or PLA, is a good reason "why not," according to Australian Strategic Policy Institute's Alex Joske.
"Helping a rival military develop its expertise and technology isn't in the national interest," Joske told the paper, having found China's military sponsored more than 2,500 studying abroad over a decade, "at times without their host schools' knowledge of their military affiliation," the Journal reported.
For its part, B.U. relies on the State Department to vet international student's visas.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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