Techno-Nationalism

Chapter 24Techno-Nationalism on Campus

On a frigid Massachusetts morning, in January of 2020, Professor Charles Lieber, a Harvard University nano-scientist was arrested on charges that he failed to disclose his ties to China’s educational establishment. Professor Lieber had also been the chair of Harvard’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department.

He was convicted less than a year later in a U.S. court, in December 2021.

Mr. Lieber was alleged to have been a ‘Strategic Scientist’ at Wuhan University of Technology from 2012–2015, where, under China’s ‘Thousand Talents’ program, he was recruited and paid US$50,000 per month and allocated US$1.5 million to establish a research lab. The lab was tasked with applying for research patents under the name of Wuhan University of Technology.¹

The focus of the research was, allegedly, the development of nanowire-based lithium-ion batteries for high-performance electric vehicles.²

The Lieber incident was a microcosm of the twenty-first-century great-power rivalry between the U.S. and China, which has found its way onto college campuses. As part of this phenomenon, a number of trends are changing how universities conduct research, teach and, how they interact with international students, faculty and institutions.

One trend involves research-related intellectual property. Universities receiving government funding for research are being required to shield sensitive intellectual property (IP). Academics are being tasked with establishing ‘security ...