Tang Juan, a researcher who said she was focusing on biology, "was a fugitive from justice until last night," a senior Justice Department official said, but has now been charged in Sacramento and is expected to make an appearance in court later today.
US officials made the announcement just hours before Washington's deadline for Beijing to shutter its consulate in Houston, a move that triggered China to retaliate Friday by demanding the US close its consulate in Chengdu.
Prosecutors earlier this week said that Tang concealed her connection to the country's military in her visa application, but investigators "discovered photographs of her in the uniform of the Civilian Cadre of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA)" and that she had been employed as a researcher at the Fourth Military Medical University.
During an interview with FBI agents on June 20, "Tang denied serving in the Chinese military, claimed she did not know the meaning of the insignia on her uniform, and that wearing a military uniform was required for attendance at FMMU because it was a military school," attorneys wrote in a July 20 court filing.
The US officials also said Friday that China's Houston consulate was implicated in a fraud investigation at a Texas research institution. They charged that consulate officials "were directly involved in communications with researchers and guided them on what information to collect."
Nationwide network
The activities in Houston "are a microcosm, we believe, of a broader network of individuals in more than 25 cities that network is supported through the consulates here," the Justice Department official said. "Consulates have been giving individuals in that network guidance on how to evade [and] obstruct our investigation. And you can infer from that the ability to task that [a] network of associates nationwide."
The officials spoke a day after a speech by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that recast the US-China relationship in starkly competitive terms, telling an audience at the Nixon Library that "securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party is the mission of our time and America is perfectly positioned to lead it."
Referring to Chinese President Xi Jinping, Pompeo said: "We must admit our truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come, that if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won't get it done," he said. "We must not continue it and we must not return to it."
This story is breaking and will be updated.
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