In 2013, Chinese national and marine biologist Shuren Qin invested the requisite minimum of $500,000 to qualify for the EB-5 “immigrant investor program”, which admits foreign investors who are supposed to create U.S. jobs. In November 2014, with a State Department-approved EB-5 visa in hand, the 41-year-old entrepreneur entered the United States with his wife and two young children and settled in Wellesley, Mass., under the program’s conditional permanent residency provision and began running his nine-year-old China-based marine products company, LinkOcean Technologies, LTD.
ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations launched an undercover sting operation against Qin in April 2017 after receiving a tip from the U.S. Defense Security Service when he contacted an American manufacturer of undersea drones.
By June 2018, Qin was arrested and stood federally indicted for having used LinkOcean Technologies throughout 2015 and 2016 to fraudulently funnel export-controlled anti-submarine warfare equipment, such as the undersea drones and underwater listening devices that the U.S. Navy uses, to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the Navy South China Sea Fleet Troop 91388, the PLA Naval Submarine Academy, and other Chinese research institutions that support the Chinese naval warfare branches.
Some of those end-users of the export-controlled equipment Qin sought to funnel included the National University of Defense Technology, the PLA University of Science and Technology, and the Northwestern Polytechnical University, all of which support the Chinese military’s development.
An analysis of court records shows that U.S. State Department EB-5 visa adjudicators in the Bureau of Consular Affairs based in China missed early and easily detectable opportunities to discover Qin’s connection to the Chinese military, which would have deepened a vetting investigation that almost certainly would have uncovered a long client list of Chinese government proxies. In turn, Qin would have been disqualified from receiving an EB-5 visa and damaging U.S. security for 29 months from the time he entered the United States in November 2014 through April 2017, when ICE investigators discovered what he was doing. The clue for State Department adjudicators in China was that LinkOcean Technologies’ public-facing website listed the Chinese military as one of its customers, court records show.
Qin did not remove that customer from his website until 2017, when Customs and Border Protection officers questioned him at an airport as he returned from China and he became aware that he was under investigation, court records show.
The resulting national security damage was significant. Prosecutors said that from 2015 to 2016, Qin exported 78 hydrophones, devices that can be used to monitor sound underwater, to Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU).
Prosecutors said that because of national security risks, the U.S. Commerce Department requires an export license to be obtained to ship U.S. goods to NWPU, which works with the People’s Liberation Army to advance its military capabilities.
Prosecutors said in a sentencing memorandum that Qin’s efforts to illegally smuggle the equipment to Chinese military proxies, usually by elaborately concealing the end users to evade U.S. export and national security controls, “deliberately endangered U.S. national security”. “The national security risks associated with the defendant’s conduct are manifest. The defendant willfully ignored these risks — not to mention federal law — in order to further his business interests and satisfy a ‘VIP’ customer,” that being the Chinese navy.
Ultimately, Qin pleaded guilty in April 2021 to conspiring to violate U.S. export regulations on his purchases in 2015 and 2016 of dual-use equipment, such as the underwater listening devices that can be used to counter enemy submarines in potential conflict zones like the South China Sea, the U.S. government said in court documents. A judge sentenced him to two years in prison.