This is a pretty common strategy used by China, and I think they leverage the fact that it is so "above board" and transparent in some ways to their advantage..

This is a pretty common strategy used by China, and I think they leverage the fact that it is so "above board" and transparent in some ways to their advantage... it's easier to recruit scientists and engineers into espionage by doing so in an apparently legitimate way with the sponsorship of an academic institution. I'm not sure if it's directly applicable to this case but the whole thing in general is known as the Thousand Talents Plan and is well-publicized in China... but conflicts with intellectual property and espionage policy in many other countries and was a perennial source of embarrassment for US universities (when their faculty were found to be on the Chinese payroll and publishing their work there) five years ago or so. People are thought to often be recruited into the program while attending academic events in China, which also gives it a degree of normalcy... it's presented as academic collaboration, not espionage. My point is that "doesn't sound much like state sponsored espionage" is probably exactly why Thousand Talents found so much success for a while. It has a veneer of legitimacy and stays pretty far away from anything that has the "cloak and dagger" appearance people associate with espionage.