Espionage or Innovation? Exploring China’s Thousand Talents Brand Era through Bibliometrics

• In Event: Foreign Interference in Higher Education

Proposal

In 2021, Charles Lieber, a renowned Harvard University professor, was convicted on multiple accounts of lying about his participation in the Thousand Talents Plan, a Chinese government program to recruit experts in various fields with generous funding and other incentives. His arrest was part of a broader US investigation into Chinese programs deemed a national security threat by the US Department of Justice (2021). Beyond the US, nations around the world have criticized these Chinese programs, arguing they abused the open international system and were active espionage (Zweig Kang, 2020). However, other stakeholders such as the Committee of 100 (2021) argued that the focus on China was tantamount to a new Red Scare, with threats overexaggerated due to rising xenophobia and anti-Chinese rhetoric. Academic research on the veracity of these espionage critiques has been limited. First, the Chinese government removed public data related to their talent recruitment initiatives. Second, the Thousand Talents Plan was just one of over 200 various similar programs in China (Author Redacted). Due to these barriers, this research labels all of these Chinese programs under the Thousand Talents Brand (TTB) umbrella—encompassing national, provincial, municipal, and institutional programs and reflecting an era defined by the flagship Thousand Talents Plan. For the study, we conduct a bibliometric analysis of the TTB from its inception in 2008 to 2020, following designs of similar studies from Lee and Haupt (2020), Kwiek, (2021), and Lee and Haupt (2021). Our data comes from two indices within the Web of Science: SCI and SSCI; the former index focuses on hard sciences while the latter on social sciences, generally. Our resulting sample included 20,008 journal articles. We find massive growth in research connected to the various programs from 2008 to 2018. However, post-2018, we find that research funded through the TTB stopped growing and suddenly dipped in 2020. We believe that these results are related to the intense pressure that manifested around the world, especially in the U.S. and other Western nations, to curb the influence of these programs due to espionage and other misconduct. We also find that research funded through TTB represented just a fraction of total research output by the nation, peaking at just under 1% in 2018. We find that the TTB funded almost no research in the social sciences relative to hard sciences. Our results reveal that the awarded funds through the TTB privileged those from elite institutions in China, focusing on top Chinese C9 League and former 985 universities for these opportunities. We also find that traditional Western powers have been favored as partners for these various projects. Some of the partners found in the research highlights the concern that scholars and other stakeholders have raised such as the U.S. Department of Energy. The results from this bibliometric analysis will not alleviate concerns from policymakers regarding espionage and technical theft levied at these Talents programs. Future research should take a more micro approach such as through interviews to further explore the critiques of the TTB.

Author

• Ryan Allen, Soka University of America