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A security firm called Strider Technologies published a report this week that said China paid leading scientists at America’s Los Alamos National Laboratory hefty sums of money to conduct research for the Chinese Communist government, including research with military applications that could threaten U.S. national security.
The report, titled The Los Alamos Club: How the People’s Republic of China Recruited Leading Scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory to Advance its Military Programs, offered a rather straightforward answer to its titular question — China recruited those scientists by offering them up to a million dollars each, and at least 154 of them accepted.
The Strider report is an extraordinarily detailed look at a problem that has been discussed at length in recent years, China’s extremely aggressive “talent recruitment” programs. The People’s Republic of China puts a great deal of effort into recruiting talented foreigners to serve its purposes, often without emigrating to China or leaving the positions they hold in free nations. Often, but not always, these recruitment programs target foreign citizens of Chinese heritage.
The most notorious of these initiatives is called the Thousand Talents Program (TTP). Many of the scientists in the Strider report were involved in TTP or its youth wing.