As I said, he should have been clear with his funding sources. But that's not where the outrage in this thread is coming from -- everybody here is pissed off at the very idea of scientific collaboration crossing national borders. There are comparisons being drawn between doing science and waging war. This is saddening.
I believe you are misinterpreting the sentiment. Everyone is pissed off at his dishonesty, not where and who he worked for. Rather than openly disclose his collaborations, as you and your many colleagues do, he was actively trying to cover them up, putting greed ahead of science.
On balance, your comment did gloss over the "taking money from two sources" issue, which is the point of the arrest.
If you wanted to have a conversation about maintaining scientific collaboration in the midst of great power competition, this seems like the wrong case to build off of.
Finally, I do agree that conversations about China on HN often do go south due to US nationalism.
No, my point is that it is extremely common to take money from two sources, or even more! Nobody batted an eye at this, and in fact even today nobody bats an eye, unless one of the sources is in China. In that case it becomes "luring talent" and "IP theft", with all the trappings of selectively applied moral principle.
Real IP theft would look like, say, abducting thousands of German scientists at gunpoint [0], not giving scientists grants to set up labs.
I don't disagree with this, but what I don't understand is the nationalist outrage.
Suppose a professor slacked off on their job by taking a long vacation in France. That would be wrong and deserving of punishment -- but it wouldn't have set off panic over him "selling out" the country. Yet that is what is happening.
It's also good to suspend judgement until the case works its way through the courts.
The Wen Ho Lee case is a point of reference here - he was accused of the worst kind of espionage and "convicted" after leaks in the NYT - but then the case dissolved and Lee got a big settlement.
I don't think it's "nationalist outrage". The outrage is over violating the rules, as many developers and scientists on HN have done work for the government, and followed the rules. I believe you are seeing a connection (given US government and US commenters) that simply isn't there. Correlation doesn't equal causation; that's a first rule of science.
They are all pretty low-value comments, but only one of them seems to be a nationalist criticism (or two if you count "paid millions to to assist a foreign government - which I think is political but barely nationalist).
While being literally abducted is definitely a conflict of interest that might concern a grantor, I do believe many grantors may have legitimate concerns below that threshold.
