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Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, gave a defense Friday of the Justice Department’s efforts to investigate and prosecute academic fraud linked to China, saying that there is no “more serious, more persistent threat to our innovation, our ideas and our economic security than the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government,” NBC News reported.
Wray spoke at the University of Michigan and answered questions from academics who believe the FBI has gone too far. Ann Chih Lin, director of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at Michigan, asked Wray about the view that the FBI was “presuming that routine academic engagement with scientific colleagues in China is evidence of a crime, or of mistaking university-sponsored collaborations and grants for money that is illicitly going into scientists’ pockets.”
Wray said, “We do not base our cases on race, ethnicity or national origin, and we haven’t.”
But he added that “the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party, is engaged in what it considers an international talent war to try to leverage and steal intellectual property and sensitive research and data from countries all over the world … And so it’s part of our responsibility to work with universities to try to help protect that information.”
