Hopefully in half a year this crops back up with more available then

And of course hoping everyone is safe and doing legal stuff

I've known ex-govvie infosec folks who get calls periodically from their contacts in government about Chinese state-sponsored spies embedded in big tech companies. It's a thing.

If this was just another "let's screw over an immigrant for saying something we didn't like", we'd have some clue as to the professor's politics. But of course, anything is possible.

Both the university, the court, and the lawyer seem to not raising any fuss yet, signaling that whatever this is, it likely all legal and severe enough to warrant absolute silence.

The employer was likely contacted far in advance for detail not available to the public, and very likely they complied and realized there are serious issues that can tarnish the university's reputation, so they erased his name from their payroll. This indicated court order and sufficient evidences for multiple parties to be concerned.

So... best guess? National security matter. Like it or not, espionage is a thing and under this administration, all foreigner, naturalized or not, are under extra scrutiny. And the US is not above applying stereotypes.

200+ lost jobs, at least one suicide, if that still not ring alarm for these Chinese-born professionals, their IQ may not match up the tenure I assume.

Prof. Green also posted about the vanishing of Prof. Wang here on HN the other day,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43518196

(That's where I first heard of it). But HN is an increasingly difficult place to discover such stories, what with the systematic flagging brigades.

I have an idea.

Many of them are basically refuges which did use their nogen to be able to escape the Chinese regime and find a home without technically being refuges at any point.

Some grew up in the US.

Many have family and children in the US, thus which very well might be US citizens.

For many they do not have a place to go, the US is their only home.

Even for thus which where involved in spying not all of them did so of their free choice. It's not a secret that China secret police is present in most countries with larger China ethnicity including the US and there had been more then one or two cases of them threatening and blackmailing ethnic Chinese people (including such with full US citizenship). Including e.g. kidnapping their children.

You hit the nail on the head. they clearly knew they shouldn't stay, but chose to remain here — most likely because they were on a secret mission

I'm genuinely surprised by the level of American delusion about what happening in the others parts of the world.

In China, their risks are much higher. Outside of the China, they would face a several times drop in their standard of living, which isn't worth tiny risk of something bad happened because of China Initiative. Especially in the case when this "something bad" most probably would be them losing their job and deported, something that your solution suggesting them to start from.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This story is on the front page and stories like it have been on the front page almost every day since last October.

It might not be a conspiracy but these stories do get removed one way or another.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43528036

Again, pure speculation, as is everything right now.

But the students do know. They are saying they can’t contact him, which is not the same as not knowing he’s on leave

This is slightly misleading. While it is true that the person with the highest probability of murdering you is your partner (at least, if you're a woman), it is more likely that the murder is a stranger to the victim than to be the spouse of the victim.

For example, in the FBI's 2011 dataset [1], of the 7076 murders by someone with a known relationship to the victim, 1295 were by a husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend. This is compared to, of course, the 2700 murders committed by acquaintances and 1481 by strangers. From this, we can see ~18% of murders are by their partners and ~60% are by someone quite a bit further flung.

The reason why both statistics are simultaneously true is that most people have only a few partners (focusing the entire risk on a small group) where as there are many thousands of people in the latter categories (creating a very diffuse risk).

So, if you were to bet one which person murdered someone, you would do well to guess one of their partners. If you had to guess if the victim knew their murderer, you should bet that they did not.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Please don't speculate from a position of ignorance.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/20/explainer-chin...

Atheists, black people, Hawaiians, Germans, Japanese- all of them have found themselves in court.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_maximum_entropy

That was known at the time of my post.

We now also know now at the time of his escape, Indiana University had terminated his Professorship. And has continued to disavow he and his wife.

I did not misuse Occam's razor, my knowledge of public facts simply exceeded yours.

In other words, they aren't the traitors, their agents are. And those agents are the ones who get tried in the media circuses we're all so familiar with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil#Ar...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_R%C3%BCmeysa_%C3%...

I am not saying it is the right thing to do, but it is a very very long way from someone being grabbed, bundled into an unmarked van by people who are never identified (either as individuals or who they work for), and turning up later dead - or never turning up at all.

Why?

As a possible explanation: Wang disappears suddenly and without warning. The university investigates and in the course of the investigation discovers that he was working as a spy for the PRC for the past 20 years while employed with them. They freak out, knowing that the current political climate (especially in their state) is one where they can't afford to become known as that school that harbored a Chinese spy, so they rush to try to keep everything under wraps.

Unfortunately, they have to report what they found to the FBI, which proceeds to very un-subtley raid Wang's homes, drawing media attention and possibly triggering the firestorm they hoped to avoid.

---

As with anything at this stage, this story is entirely supposition, but it does explain the known facts, and it explains them better than any other explanation I've seen floated in this thread.

Wikipedia has a list of imprisoned spies in the USA. It is pretty sparse, the last spy to be convicted in the USA was in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_imprisoned_spies

Searching the DOJ homepage with the search term “spy” (to see which they have showcased) gives us 209 results, including a bunch of news around the 2009 conviction. The most resent news I found was from 2022 (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/five-individuals-cha...) a very vague news which is actually more about harassing private citizen (presumably piggy-banking out of the anti-asian hate following Covid). The most resent news about actual spying against the US government was from 2020 (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-cia-officer-a...) Alexander Yuk Ching Ma. He was actually found guilty in may 2024 (so he is missing from that Wikipedia list). The DOJ article about the conviction doesn’t use the word spy, so it is missing from my search, but here it is: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-cia-officer-s....

Given the above, I think it is safe to bet that if he was arrested for being a spy, the DOJ would indeed want to showecase it. However, spies are very rare, and the likelyhood of OP’s case being a spy is very low. It is much more likely that he disappeared for other reasons.

Federal criminal court in Maryland

Whoever, it wasn’t FISC, because FISC doesn’t have jurisdiction to do any trials.

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/01/04/ge_turbine_china_...

so you're saying he vanished...?

If you're talking about the students I think you are, they're detained in Louisiana and Texas. They haven't been "disappeared" in any way.

It was a joke in a joke book, and has been taken entirely out of context by most people who use it to justify anything.

Really? So that he was abducted by aliens is also on the table and has the same probability?

Obviously there can be some prior information that makes „he was exfiltrated by Chinese intelligence services“ more likely than „he was disappeared by US intelligence services“.

I’m not saying there is, but philosophically, you don’t need to know anything more than „A person with relations to china disappeared“ to be able to determine one hypothesis as the most likely one.

I don't think anyone, least of all OP, is suggesting this is what happened.

Everything is rank speculation at this point, but if I were going to speculate I'd speculate that Wang suddenly left the country of his own volition and the employer began investigating his disappearance and stumbled on things that led to them calling in the FBI.

That's still purely speculation, but it would account for the sequence of events and the manner of investigation way better than any ideas about him being "vanished" by the US government.

Chinese exfiltration is also a conspiracy theory. In fact chinese exfiltration requires a larger conspiracy than USA disappearance. If you want to apply Occam’s Razor (which you shouldn’t), you should actually favor disappearance over exfiltration (but really you should favor no government involvement).

> There is a long series of scientists in the US that were secretly working for the Chinese government.

If that is so, can you provide me with a list. That list would actually have to be pretty long to make exfiltration the likeliest hypothesis. Like there would have to be more than a couple of dozen cases this century.

EDIT: I did quick googling to find any sources which backs your claim. This NY Post article is the strongest one (https://nypost.com/2025/02/20/us-news/us-science-labs-face-g...) it is basically a propaganda piece citing far right US politicians who claim extraordinary numbers (like 8000 scientists) without any evidence. As we know extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/14/nx-s1-5327552/trump-takes-bir...

https://immigrationimpact.com/2025/02/07/breaking-down-trump...

He was either found innocent or the charges were dropped, which is very rare.

I just want to state for the record that I didn't claim to disagree with the comment nor am I a conspiracy theorist, nor a Chinese spy... I only asked for more information (which other comments have then provided).

This whole "do your own research" attitude is not good. It's easy to make any claim whatsoever without any basis of truth in this manner. Good for you if that is enough for you but for me that is not enough, logically speaking.

If you wish to make your points without addressing my question then you can simply comment directly on the article or respond to someone else, hopefully with more relevance to their comment than your slightly unhinged responses have had to mine.

Moreover, the US Bill of Rights is an extension of the English Bill of Rights 1689 and Magna Carta (the founders were British, after all). From Britannica's introduction to the US Bill of Rights[1]:

> The Bill of Rights derives from the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689)…

Wikipedia[2] adds:

> The concepts codified in these amendments are built upon those in earlier documents, especially the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), as well as the Northwest Ordinance (1787), the English Bill of Rights (1689), and Magna Carta (1215)

Both the Virginia Declaration of rights[3] and the Northwest Ordinance incorporate concepts found in the English Bill of Rights and Magna Carta, for example:

> Mason based his initial draft on the rights of citizens described in earlier works such as the English Bill of Rights (1689) and the writings of John Locke.

And where do you think they got habeas corpus from?

And finally, in the link I shared on jus soli[4], in the second line, it states:

> Jus soli was part of the English common law

I could go on but that seems enough. Not only is your claim completely erroneous, it's also not misguided to contrast the situation to show that it's not a strange or dangerous change.

Of course, if you - or anyone - were to address my actual question then you might have the beginnings of a point.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bill-of-Rights-United-State...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Declaration_of_Rights

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

Notably, they haven't been "disappearing" people in the manner that would have to be happening here. Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow. This case is notable because no one seems to know where this man has gone.

But yes, point taken: the extrajudicial actions of ICE recently are absolutely not helping people stay calm in the face of something like this.

If you know where someone is being held (like Louisiana, for example) they weren't 'disappeared'.

And as long as we're presuming to correct each others reading comprehension, this comment was in fact in response to a comment about staying calm in the face of ICE actions.

From recent CNN publication on the matter. At this stage I have to assume you are arguing in bad faith / shilling for a fascist government. I can only hope you're being paid to do something this debased.

2) There are numerous cases of the current administration using its discretionary powers to enact its desired policies in ways that violate norms and are quite probably illegal.

3) The administration actively circumventing record-keeping requirements, likely in an attempt to avoid detection of illegal actions.

The federal government is unbelievably powerful. Because of the jobs it is expected to do, it must maintain capabilities to do many terrifying things. For that reason, the government does not get the presumption of innocence. It has to be able to prove exactly what it was up to, and where its resources are being spent.

The reason there are so many tedious and wasteful rule-making and record-keeping and due-process requirements is exactly because it would be trivial otherwise to do things like disappear law-abiding citizens off the street and cover it up.

So when someone says "I want do do crimes A, B, and C", and then you discover that they have in fact done crimes B and C, and taken steps to conceal the potential commission of crime A, it isn't a fallacy to infer that they may have committed crime A.

Immigrants are entitled to “due process”—but “due process” doesn’t mean “judicial process.” Due process is a flexible concept that depends on the nature of the legal right being asserted. Non-citizens have no constitutional right to be in the U.S. So in my view the only constitutionally required “process” is to verify whether someone is a citizen or not. And I think that can be done adequately within the executive branch.

Notably, "observed fact" is an oxymoron. You mean observation of something you then produce a statement to lossily refer to. Especially if the "fact" is bound to floating signifiers.

Most of the terms of the alleged "facts" are floating signifiers. Good luck.

You'll find a lot more success appealing directly to peoples' emotions surrounding materially clear situations. Eg it's obvious ripping contributing members of society out of their homes and expelling them from the country is bad for us. But it's the validation of peoples' immaterial fantasies of being raped by immigrants that sustains this material violence. Leaning into analysis of floating signifiers just enables this societal dysfunction.

Facts are useful, but only if they're actually factual. You haven't grounded any of your factual assertions in material analysis. Any factual analysis of "disappearing" is impossible as this inherently relies on your expectations of the potential behavior of the government when the government never attempted to provide a material basis for the justification of violence to begin with.

That is, whether or not you consider "disappearing" to be a valid concept very much relies on whether or not you thought the government attempted to treat people in good faith to begin with. I personally think you're a moron if you trust the state to do anything but look after itself.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/most-guantanamo-detainees-are-...

Anyone taken prisoner must be given an opportunity to be heard, to be able to give evidence that they aren't the right guy.

(To be clear, there's no indication the subjects of this story have been so detained)

I am not saying there is a conspiracy going on, simply pointing out a case that appears to have been forgotten and perpetrated by the 1.0 version of the current administration.

For there to be a threat there should be evidence of a threat. Your aspersions, which you are so keen on casting against anyone who doesn't share your views, are not evidence of anything but hyperbole and irrational panic.

If you cannot name a single person who is a natural born citizen that has been deported or has been threatened with deportation - or even anyone in power who has mused for a second upon deporting natural born citizens, via this legal change - then you have nothing.

If someone can show that the legal change you're warning about does not have the consequences you claim, e.g. all of Europe, then you have nothing.

You should get used to answering questions, it'll help you sharpen up your argument, that's why I ask simple questions[1]. Now, *please desist from your blatant and explicit rudeness*.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Socratic-method

Was NSF funding for the project cancelled?

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/furry-hackers-fbi-raided/

Once is happenstance, Twice is a coincidence. But I'm way more suspicious of coincidences than I was even just a few months back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43528036

As with everything, this is pure speculation, merely put forward as a possible explanation that accounts for all known facts. I've yet to see any other explanation account for the sequence and timeline.

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69741724/1/jgg-v-trump/

Source?

> How do we know it was the US government

We don't but its 100000x easier for the US government to disappear someone on US soil than it is for China to disappear someone on US soil.

Again: still bad, still inexcusable, but not the same thing as what would have to be happening here.

They were then detained for days rather then be allowed to exit the country.

As you acknowledge, the term embeds within it the premise that “the lack of enforcement of the law is also a kind of consent.” That is, illegal immigrants have America’s consent to be present in the country, because the government doesn’t try to hard to deport them. You can make that argument, but almost nobody would agree with your premise. So the term is smuggling an implicit premise that almost nobody would agree with if the premise were stated clearly (as you have done here).

Believe everyone can put together the type of events that cause sudden behavior changes like that. (Hint: money offers or family threats)

FWIW that pattern of behavior has little to do with "being a progressive" and instead reflects the cultural norm. I'd even go so far as to posit that "progressives" are more likely to point out that, no, there's really not "a racist" but a person can hold a lot of extremely racist beliefs - the same way btw as there's really not "a progressive" but a person can hold a lot of progressive beliefs. A system can be "racist" in that it can be built on and to uphold racist attitudes or beliefs but a person can't be "racist" because racism isn't an intrinsic and immutable characteristic (neither is "progressive", "Catholic", "criminal" or "Republican", to name a few examples explicitly).

But precisely because you can't actually be "a progressive" but merely hold some progressive beliefs and opinions a lot of "progressives" uphold the same harmfully essentialist views as "non-progressives" who balk at being called out for racist opinions, views or actions by insisting "I'm not racist" regardless of whether the accusation is "you're a racist" or "you said/did something racist".

"Felon" is an obviously silly example as it's just a more specific form of "convict", i.e. someone convicted of a felony crime. It's often used in an essentialist way (but of course selectively so) but the more obvious example would be "criminal" because it is often used in a way that suggests an intrinsic essence of "criminality" even in the absence of sufficient evidence to make a legal case that would result in a conviction - or even the presence of an arguable crime at all. "Criminal" is thus distinct from "convict" in that a conviction is neither necessary nor sufficient for that label to be applied.

Back when I was a libertarian they were pretty big on this argument, not progressives, as libertarians were the open borders people and progressives were off on some other cause.

There are plenty of things that they're doing that are documented that are evil. There's no need to waste energy and credibility speculating about things that aren't yet understood or documented, unless you personally have the means to investigate Wang's disappearance and shed light on what happened.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guant%C3%A1namo_Bay_files_leak

"Berlin Radio broadcast the mass-execution of Jews in Bialystok and the burning of synagogues in July 1941"

> It was only in retrospect that we learned the true horror of the Holocaust.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-the-world-discovered-the-n...

The full scale wasn't known but there was enough evidence something was going on.

I'm really not seeing much similarity between that period of history and this period. Godwin's law is probably more applicable.

> It was only in retrospect that we learned the true horror of the Holocaust.

If you think the Holocaust was just what happened in the gas chambers, I'm afraid you haven't learned the true horror of the Holocaust either.

Approximately 2.7 million Jews[0] were killed in the death camps as part of the so-called Final Solution between 1941 and 1945.

This was preceded by the so-called Euthanasia[1] campaign, which killed approximately 300,000 people deemed "life undignified for life" (mostly people with disabilities) - although the exact numbers weren't known to the public at the time, the program became so widely known following a proclamation against it by the Holy See (after Catholic authorities in Germany generally supported it) that there were actual protests agianst it in Germany.

The total number of people killed by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 in what were later considered crimes against humanity - excluding those who died from conflict, disease, etc (i.e. from WW2 or its circumstances/effects) - is approximately 17 million[2] - more than six times the number of Jews killed in the death camps alone. Of those, 6 million were Jews: 2.7 million in the death camps, about half that many additionally included among the Soviet Citizens and POWs and another 2 million non-Soviet Jews killed outside the death camps.

Note that this number doesn't include civilian victims of the war - the Nazis specifically went out of their way to carry out mass executions in Poland and elsewhere. Many of these were carried out by the Reserve Police[3], often voluntarily with no threat or punishment for refusal other than mild disciplinary action (e.g. latrine duty) and social ostracization by their colleagues for "letting them down". Many more were carried out by the Wehrmacht on their way through the Soviet Union in case you're wondering how the myth of the "innocent German soldiers" is holding up to scrutiny.

> Complacency and a lack of accountability in the moment is how these things happen, and turn good people to sloth.

True, the full extent of the Nazi mass murders was hardly fully transparent at the time. But none of this happened out of the blue and there very much was a clear and obvious escalation visible to those who cared to see it - an escalation also easily predictable at several points throughout its course, by the way, except people (including foreign governments and foreign news organizations) very much did not want to acknowledge it for a number of reason from wanting to avoid being seen as alarmist or leftist to actively supporting parts of it and just hoping that the escalation will stop at the point where the outcomes are most personally beneficial to themselves.

The problem wasn't a lack of accountability. The problem was people rationalizing their own actions by wanting to be the good guy in their personal narrative. The Reserve Police didn't volunteer to execute civilians because of a lack of oversight, it did so because not doing so when asked seemed unconscionable when the alternative would have meant reevaluating all the horrors they had participated in up to that point.

We literally have testimonies of Reserve Police officers who participated in the killings saying they did nothing wrong and actually were the real victims for being put in such an uncomfortable position of having to carry out these killings - or in one case an officer stating that he had asked his colleagues to specifically let him kill the children as long as their mothers are killed first because then he could see it as an act of mercy to kill the orphaned children.

Hierarchical institutions are designed to create a culture of obedience. Obedience is how these things happen, not complacence or lack of accountability.

[0]: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/at-the-kil...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1071011/holocaust-nazi-p...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_Police_Battalion_101

Y'all read "CCP Police stations" and your imaginations started going wild. There is no evidence nor is there even an accusation that these "police" stations are used to kidnap US citizens.

> You added the part about exfiltration

.... bro how are they going to coerce someone to leave the country "willingly" if the FBI is looking for that person? His passport is obviously going to get flagged.

And if your answer is "get him a fake passport" then congratulations, you just described exfiltration.

Spies do flee countries. People do get disappeared. The idea that China has a presence on US soil helping criminals evade the FBI is a *conspiracy theory*.

Or, threatening to annex Canada and parts of Europe. Or, opening damm because there is fire in a place where water does not go.

Something not happening in the past is not a reason for it to not happen again.

Decision-making, and its related presumptions change when the threat becomes existential.

Deceivers with resources who abuse the public trust and its presumptions towards individuals, take advantage of societies understanding, towards destructive ends, and continue doing so regardless. They corrupt the systems meant to protect and keep destructive outcome dynamics in check usually for personal or political benefit.

The entities are not entitled to the same benefit of the doubt when they have a history of malfeasance, and lack of credibility.

This is true of anti-trust, government corruption, and government in general when you consider the many other things like Tuskegee, or what happened to the Inuit women who were involuntarily sterilized following eugenics programs in the late 60s early 70s, along with other indigenous peoples under the guise of beneficial programs promoting public health.

You can see just how well fines do in curbing corruption like JPM's silver manipulation over a decade, or Egg price fixing over the past 10 years, or medical equipment providers who have defects that kill patients, and then claim they fix them falsely (in bad faith).

There is a point where you cannot presume innocence, especially with regards to non-person entities (like corporations), who will pay the fine and continue business as usual passing the cost on.

Eventually you hit a critical saturation point where the presumption and benefit of the doubt must necessarily flip.

When related systems break enough, there is a point where people realize the rule of law has failed, and consider alternatives like the brass verdict, and act on it.

These are not good things, but they happen when the dynamics to correct fail as a whole. When people start objectively finding foundational violations, it becomes and is a societal existential threat and should be treated as such.

Failure to react from that point forward then becomes opting out of continued survival, which is well beyond any considered point of absurdity.

Evil is blind to the natural destructive consequences it creates, and sometimes evil needs killing just as it did with the Nazi's.

When the rule of law can no longer fulfill the obligations under social contract, and act as a non-violent conflict resolution, the alternative is natural law and chaos, and it is something that no good person would wish on anyone.

There is no issue of people projecting bad intention into conservatives or Trump. There is opposite issue - people excusing them forever with increasingly implausible explanations.

SGS, Shadow Government Stats.

Their estimates include the "long-term discouraged worker" which was officially defined out of existence in 1994, which was coupled with the short-term discouraged worker (U6) from BLS to get a real unemployment rate.

https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-char...

Its followed reality far closer than the watered down stats and methodology the politician's have been using over the last two decades. Especially during 2008, and they don't break it down by industry. Tech right now and going back two years is being displaced massively with no metrics for optics.

I agree, lists are horrible on HN.

I said the opposite, there are literally multiple genocides going on. They make a fair bit of noise. There is lots of evidence of them if you care to look. They all have well sourced Wikipedia pages.

It isn't possible to wipe out a people and not have others quickly notice what is going on.