A UC Davis cancer researcher, suspected of being a clandestine member of the Chinese military, has taken refuge at the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, according to US prosecutors.
The investigator, Juan Tang, is accused of visa fraud, accused of concealing his membership in the Chinese Communist and Military Party to apply for permission to work in a radiation oncology laboratory at UC Davis. She fled to the consulate after being interviewed by FBI agents in late June, prosecutors said.
Tang is “a fugitive from justice currently at the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco,” a Justice Department spokeswoman said Thursday.
The charges against Tang come as the United States government escalates a simmering dispute with Beijing over what it says are attempts by the Chinese government to steal secrets from the United States’ eminent investigative institutions. Consulate officials could not be reached for comment.
The State Department ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston on Wednesday. “We are setting clear expectations about how the Chinese Communist Party will behave,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters in Copenhagen, “and when they don’t, we will take steps that protect the American people, protect our security, our national security and also protect our economy and our jobs. “
It was unclear from court records whether Tang had hired an attorney. A phone number listed for the consulate was disconnected.
His case does not mark the first time that US authorities looked at the San Francisco consulate for helping investigators suspected of hiding their affiliations with the Chinese government. In June, an investigator from the University of California, San Francisco conceded that he was secretly a Chinese military officer and said he had “a designated point of contact” at the consulate, an FBI agent wrote in an affidavit.
Investigator Xin Wang has been accused of visa fraud. Chen Song, a neurology researcher at Stanford, and Kaikai Zhao, who studied machine learning and artificial intelligence as a graduate student at Indiana University, face the same charge; Both are accused of having undisclosed ties to the Chinese military.
John Brown, who heads the FBI’s Homeland Security Division, said Thursday that officers had identified visa holders in more than 25 US cities with hidden affiliations with the Chinese military.
US authorities have evidence that the Chinese government is “instructing these people to destroy evidence and [is] coordinating efforts “to get them out of the United States, Benjamin Kingsley, an assistant United States attorney, wrote in court documents.
FBI agents interviewed Tang, the UC Davis investigator, at her department in June and issued her a search warrant, confiscating her Chinese passport and various “electronic media,” wrote Steven G. Dilland, an FBI agent in Sacramento. , in an affidavit.
Agents recovered photos of Tang wearing a uniform of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force, Dilland said. They also found an application for government benefits in which Tang identified himself as a member of the Chinese Communist Party, he said.
At some point after being interviewed, Tang fled to the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, a prosecutor wrote in court documents.
Andy Fell, a UC Davis spokesman, said Tang was a visiting researcher in the radiation oncology department of the UC Davis School of Medicine. His research was funded by the China Scholarship Council, “a study-based exchange program affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education and the Xijing Hospital in China,” Fell said.
Tang left UC Davis in late June, and the school “is providing all the information requested by the authorities,” he said.
Asking a judge to disclose documents in his case, a second prosecutor, Heiko P. Coppola, said in court documents filed on July 13 that representatives of the Chinese government had approached US officials “about police activity surrounding Tang “
The State Department issued a bulletin this month, warning US citizens in China of “arbitrary application of local laws for purposes other than maintaining law and order.” US officials believe the activity “has something to do” with the Tang case, Coppola wrote.
