6G expert G.K. Chang counts costs after winning 4-year fight in China Initiative case
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As the Georgia Institute of Technology chair professor – a pioneer in the networks behind 5G and 6G – prepped for lectures and set up a thesis defence for a PhD student, a thunderous knock at the door shattered the quiet.
On the other side were nine US federal agents – seven from the FBI and two from Homeland Security. They stormed in, handcuffed Chang – who was about 74 at the time – and began searching every room, drawer and cupboard in his home in Smyrna, a suburb outside Atlanta.
It was not until his first court appearance that Chang learned he had been indicted on 10 felony counts; accused of abusing a research visa programme known as J-1 by bringing Chinese scholars to Georgia Tech and allegedly having them work instead for the
Chinese telecoms company ZTE
Chang's reputation imploded. Colleagues and friends drifted away. 'I forced myself to stay sharp mentally and physically,' Chang recalled.
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Four years later, the case quietly fell apart. A judge dismissed nine wire fraud charges in 2024 for lack of evidence. The final visa fraud charge was dropped this April, clearing Chang's name.
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Wikimedia Commons For the past few years, authorities have been successful in strong-arming the largest websites into monitoring their own content to make sure that anything erotic is significantly toned down, to the extent that boys' love fiction has disappeared from all of those sites, even if the genre can still be found hidden in other categories. However, there is little that the Chinese government can do to prevent aspiring Chinese erotica authors from publishing their writings on websites outside its jurisdiction. Problems can arise for boys' love writers when they get paid for their writing, and those payments are then remitted back into the country. The recent arrests, for example, appear to have involved women who had published their work on the Haitang portal in Taiwan and had received income from those works. Haitang is known for publishing much more explicit boys' love fiction than what can be found on websites in mainland China. 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That's what happened back in 2018, when a woman writing under the pseudonym Tianyi and her publisher were sentenced to more than 10 years in prison for fairly minor profits made on the sale of a printed novel deemed to be 'obscene' by authorities in Anhui province. The case drew a lot of criticism in China. Western media was also all over it. But what Western media failed to notice was that, only one month later, an appeals court hearing was held. Because of the huge attention the case had received inside China, the hearing was livestreamed and watched by more than 2 million people, but seemingly not by a single Western journalist. They saw the prosecutor admit that procedural mistakes had been made in the original trial and ask the judge to remand the case back to the lower court. Chinese media widely reported this turn of events. But after that, there was silence. Was the sentence changed? Did Tianyi and her publisher ever go to prison? We don't know. 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