The China Initiative: The targeting of Chinese scientists and the subsequent brain drain

Speaker

Catherine X. Pan-Giordano

Catherine X. Pan-Giordano is a Partner and Corporate Group Head in the firm’s New York office and leads the firm’s globally recognized U.S.-China transactional practice. As a highly skilled attorney and trusted advisor, and one of the most prominent Chinese-speaking business lawyers in New York, Catherine is relied on by our clients to handle their strategic corporate transactions and to solve complex legal problems for their business. She has a strong client following among some of the world’s largest corporations, financial institutions and business leaders. She frequently serves as their chief outside legal counsel.
Catherine, together with the government grants lawyers and white-collar criminal defense lawyers at Dorsey & Whitney’s China Initiative Task Force, has successfully helped scientists, researchers, universities and research labs navigate the difficult territory of the Department of Justice’s “China Initiative” investigations and case.
Catherine serves as a member of the Firm’s Management Committee, the executive body of the Firm.

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Speaker

James Mulvenon, Ph.D.

James Mulvenon is Director of Intelligence Integration at SOS International, where he has recruited and trained a team of more than forty-five Chinese, Russian, Korean, and Farsi linguist-analysts and ten cleared software developers performing collection, analysis, and operations support for US Government and corporate customers. A Chinese linguist by training, he is a leading international expert on Chinese cyber, technology transfer, espionage, and military issues. Dr. Mulvenon received his B.A. in China Studies from the University of Michigan, studied Communist Party History at Fudan University in Shanghai, and received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation, published by ME Sharpe in 2001 under the title Soldiers of Fortune, details the rise and fall of the Chinese military’s international business empire. In 2013 he co-authored Chinese Industrial Espionage, which is the first full account of the complete range of China’s efforts to illicitly acquire foreign technology. Dr. Mulvenon contributed multiple chapters to China’s Quest for Foreign Technology: Beyond Espionage, which was published in September 2020. He is regularly invited to address senior government and commercial audiences on Chinese technology espionage and cyber topics, and his comments have appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other international media outlets.

Moderator

Bob Guterma

Bob Guterma is SupChina’s Chief Operating Officer. He lived in China for nine years, during which time he worked as an M&A-focused management consultant with Control Risks, a London-based consultancy. He later joined a venture-backed Chinese information services startup called Capvision Partners, which is now the largest primary investment research provider in China.

Since then he has held partner-level positions with digital agencies (Bantam Communications) and management consulting firms (Point86 LLC) where he has worked on large scale strategy, digital transformation, and communications projects with clients including PWC, McKinsey, Bain Capital, and more.

In between it all he co-founded and/or experimented with a number of venture-backed startups in the U.S. and Germany. He speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, conversational German, and native English, and he received a degree in Economics from Georgetown University and certificates in Chinese economic and political systems from East China Normal University in Shanghai, China.