Zhang Shoucheng Was Being Touted for a Nobel Prize in Physics; Why Did He Kill Himself? By Stephen Mosher.
On Nov. 20 President Trump’s trade advisor, Robert Lighthizer, issued an exhaustive report on China’s efforts to beg, borrow, and steal U.S. intellectual property.
Eleven days later, on Dec. 1, Stanford University Professor Zhang Shoucheng, who had been collaborating with the Beijing regime’s drive to dominate hi-tech under its “Made in China 2025” plan, killed himself.
Zhang’s family has issued a statement saying that there is absolutely no connection between the two events, while suggesting that Zheng simply took his own life during a fit of depression.
Now I have no doubt that the Chinese-born professor was depressed. He had good reason to be. After all, Lighthizer’s report had singled out the company he had founded and chaired, Silicon Valley-based Danhua Capital, for criticism. Danhua, the report said, was illustrative of the “web of entities” created by China “to invest in high-technology U.S. startups … to further the industrial policy goals of the Chinese government.”
You see, Danhua Capital was bankrolled almost entirely by the Chinese government—to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. …
Zhang’s assignment, as described on the ZDG website, was to identify “original and disruptive technologies developed at Stanford … and guide those projects back to ZDG in Beijing to commercialize.” In other words, Danhua Capital was a technology harvesting scheme. …
Freedom matters:
While the state-run media delights in pointing out that eight Chinese have won Nobel prizes in the sciences, it invariably fails to mention that all were U.S. citizens, either by birth or naturalization, when they won their prizes. It also fails to mention that their ground-breaking research was conducted in the U.S., not in China. These truths are inconvenient because they suggest that it was the freedom of thought and action that they enjoyed in America, rather than their ethnicity, that was the critical factor.
hat-tip David Archibald
