The CCP Continues to Implement the Thousand Talents Program in France

According to media reports, on March 1, the WeChat group of the Tsinghua University Alumni Association in France posted information about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s overseas recruitment of talent. The poster said that “the level of talents selected is only second to academicians,” and the main mandatory requirement is doctoral degrees. This time, talents were introduced, especially paying attention to “key areas such as advanced computer chips, supercomputers, electronic design automation software, artificial intelligence, information communication, etc.”

Tsinghua University Alumni Association in France has received two CCP overseas recruitment information within a month. The first was clearly for the “Thousand Talents Plan,” and the second focused on chips and other vital areas sanctioned or controlled by the United States. At the beginning of February, the recruitment notice said that the Thousand Talents Plan is “strictly confidential” and “does not affect overseas work and life,” and the message is “valid for more than ten years.”

It is worth noting that technologies related to computing, including microelectronics, quantum information systems, and artificial intelligence, are vital technology fields named by the United States. On October 7, 2022, the Biden administration released export control measures, making advanced technologies unavailable to Communist China. Export control is the most significant policy shift in US technology output to Communist China since the 1990s and is the most comprehensive and stringent export control measure.

In the past ten years, many American Chinese scholars who have participated in the CCP’s “Thousand Talents Plan” have been investigated and even sentenced for violating the law. Therefore, Communist China has requested government officials and recruiters not to mention the “Thousand Talents Plan” explicitly since the end of 2018. In April 2020, the term “Thousand Talents Plan” suddenly disappeared from the network of Communist China. But from here, we can still see that the CCP has not stopped the Thousand Talents Plan.