Who is even still working on a solution for the VMS?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Silly question, Jorge, but given your academic network, couldn't you find someone from a Chinese university to work with on it?

You over-estimate the amount of interest that the VMS can generate among serious academics. 

I personally know only one Chinese-speaking (and Cantonese-speaking) academic.  He was two years my senior as engineering student at the University of São Paulo (USP),  was my mentor when I was a student intern at the university's computing center, and my colleague for the five years I taught there. Since then he became Dean of the Math School at USP and president at a federal univ near São Paulo, and he is now retired.  He knows about the Voynich Manuscript and about my Chinese Origin theory (COT) since ~2000.  I once asked him about You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and he agreed that it sounded plausible.  He finds the VMS and the COT intriguing -- but not nearly enough to spend any time on either.

Back sometime around 2002, after I became convinced of the COT, I sent a query by email to someone I picked almost at random at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (thus a Real Academic!).  He had a quick look at the VMS and replied that he did not see anything that looked Chinese in it; it all looked European.  Well, thank you, but I knew that... 

I gave up on the VMS shortly after that because I concluded that, in order to make any further progress, one would need to be fluent on the right "Chinese" language and know how it sounded in ~1400 CE; which we know it was very different from how it sound now.  Knowledge that I did not have and did not expect to ever gain.  I had hoped that some "Chinese" linguist or paleographer would pick up the challenge, but apparently no one outside Europe and the Americas finds the VMS puzzle worth a second look.  

That was before I knew about the SBJ and found the uncanny statistical coincidences between it and the SPS.  I do hope that eventually the claim SPS = SBJ will be proved well enough that some "Chinese"-speaking scholar will take over.

All the best, --stolfi