A Chinese woman living in the United States as a visiting researcher at Stanford University was accused of lying about her ties to the Chinese military, federal prosecutors said Monday.
Song Chen, 38, is accused of obtaining a visa for false material statements, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California said in a statement.
She was arrested over the weekend and in federal custody Monday night, an office spokesperson said. A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday to address detention problems.
Song is not accused of stealing or sending any materials to China, but she is accused of lying on visa forms in 2018 to request to go to Stanford as a neurologist.
Court documents say Song replied that he had been in the Chinese military from September 2000 to June 2011, and that he worked at the “Xi Diaoyutai Hospital” in Beijing.
Federal prosecutors say they were lies, and that he was a member of the People’s Liberation Army when he entered the U.S. in 2018 and when he was here.
They say the hospital he claimed to work for “was a cover for his true employer, the PLA.”
A criminal complaint says Song is employed at a Chinese air force hospital and maintained her affiliation after 2011. Investigators believe she is part of a “civilian cadre” whose members consider themselves to be active duty military personnel.
The case was sealed in online records Monday. A phone message to an attorney who represented her in court on Monday was not immediately returned Monday night.
A Stanford representative declined to comment.
An FBI agent who wrote an affidavit in the case wrote that in an interview this month, Song “repeatedly and emphatically denied” any current affiliation with the People’s Liberation Army Air Force or the Chinese military or the Fourth Military Medical University. .
She said, according to the affidavit, that after graduating from the Fourth Military Medical University, which is described as an EPL Air Force university, she disengaged from the Chinese military.
But prosecutors said the investigative articles showed his affiliation with institutions under the air force, and that investigators who searched his computer recovered a document removed from a letter to the Chinese consulate in New York.
Song allegedly “wrote that his declared employer, Beijing Xi Diaoyutai Hospital, is a false front,” according to the US attorney’s office.
The FBI agent who wrote the affidavit in the criminal complaint wrote that the recovered letter “provides more evidence that Song works for the PLA and was here on his behalf.”
Song is an expert in myasthenia gravis, a rare disorder that causes muscle weakness. A Stanford professor told an investigator that Song’s research benefited work in his laboratory, according to the affidavit.
The charge of obtaining a visa for material misrepresentations is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
Song is only accused of lying on visa forms.
But FBI Director Chris Wray said at an event earlier this month that nearly half of the FBI’s 5,000 active counterintelligence cases are related to China.
In June, another Chinese citizen who was alleged to be a Chinese military officer was arrested in California on charges that he lied on visa applications to come to the United States as an investigator at the University of California, San Francisco, according to the Department judge.
Xin Wang, who according to federal prosecutors is a scientific investigator and EPL officer, was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport while trying to leave for China.
Federal prosecutors say the director of his lab at the military university in China ordered him to look at the layout of the lab at the University of California, San Francisco so that he could replicate it there. Wang was also accused of visa fraud.
