Dive Brief:
- A suspended University of South Florida associate professor says he spied on China and Tampa’s Chinese community for the FBI starting in 2009, Bloomberg reports.
- The FBI, in exchange for his service, helped protect him from the university’s allegations that he had faked expenses, falsified letters to get U.S. visas for Chinese scholars, and stored explicit bondage images on a university laptop.
- The instructor, Dajin Peng, also accuses the FBI of setting him up to spy by encouraging false allegations at the university.
Dive Insight:
Bloomberg devotes a 4,000-word article to the story of Peng, which presents interesting insights into how the U.S. government viewed the growing Chinese student and staff populations at U.S. colleges and universities — now totalling 275,000 students and more than 150,000 Chinese-born scientists, social scientists, and engineers. In 2009, the FBI believed that the Confucius Institutes — cultural programs managed by the Chinese government at U.S. universities — were vehicles for Chinese spying, and Peng ran the Confucius Institute at USF.