The China Initiative was a program by the United States Department of Justice to prosecute potential Chinese spies in American research and industry, in order to combat economic espionage.
It was set in motion by the Department of Justice (DOJ) under then-US President Donald Trump's first Attorney General Jeff Sessions in November 2018, with the goal of preventing industrial espionage.
The China Initiative was one of Session's last actions as the official Attorney General of the US, in which the DOJ promised aggressive pursuit of Chinese commercial theft.
"[3] Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew Olsen said the decision did not mean the DOJ was abandoning its response to the threat posed by China, but rather that it wanted to pursue that goal differently.
"[3] Although the China Initiative has officially ended, the "climate of fear and anxiety" has not dissipated and scientists are being pressured in other ways according to sources reported by the scientific journal Nature in February 2023.
Seton Hall University law professor Margaret Lewis described this as "a conflation of individual motives with a country’s policy goals" that has led to the criminalization of "China-ness.
"[8] A plurality of the indictments, representing 38% of the cases, charged academic researchers and professors with fraud for failure to disclose relationships with Chinese educational institutions.
[8] Out of 77 known China Initiative cases, 19 involved scientists suspected of having participated in the Thousand Talents Plan, and within that group, 14 were accused of violation of research integrity standards due to failure to disclose all affiliations to Chinese entities on grant documentation.
Despite his conviction, Science characterized Cheng as "the latest case to crumble under the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) China Initiative"[18] because the majority of the nine counts of defrauding the government and making false statements charged against him were overturned.
According to Jeremy Wu of the APA Justice Task Force, without a precise definition of the boundaries and scope of the China Initiative, information could be manipulated and presented so as to fit the government's narrative.
[2] The FBI agent in charge of the case, Kujtim Sadiku, did not believe that Hu was guilty of being involved with the Chinese military but gave a PowerPoint presentation to UTK administration designed to make them think he was.
"[29] Afterwards, Democratic Representatives Ted Lieu, Mondaire Jones, and Pramila Jayapal voiced concerns about Hu's prosecution and called on Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz to investigate allegations of FBI misconduct.
US District Judge Thomas A. Varlan dismissed the case, saying: "[E]ven viewing all the evidence in the light most favorable to the government, no rational jury could conclude that defendant acted with a scheme to defraud NASA.
"[31][16] Casey Arrowood, who lead the failed prosecution of Anming Hu, has been nominated by President Biden for U.S. Attorney General of the Eastern District of Tennessee.
She believed she was not given sufficient credit as a co-author of a paper he worked on, and allegedly demanded $310,000 from him due to "spiritual hurts"; when Tao refused, she threatened to counterattack and report him to the FBI as a "tech spy.
[16] Aside from public criminal prosecutions, there have also been university investigations prompted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which are considered a personnel matter and occur behind closed doors away from reporters.
NIH requested English and Mandarin copies of contracts Lu had signed with Chinese institutions, such as Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University.
According to Brian Strahl, chair of the medical school's department of biochemistry and biophysics, he was repeatedly told that UNC's NIH grants worth almost $1 billion were jeopardized if Xiong was not immediately removed.
He recalled that when he joined UCSD in 2007, his superiors "were fully aware and very supportive of the collaboration"[36] and had even offered to set up a video conference link to facilitate communication with Fudan.
In 2019, he was banned from applying for NIH funding for 2 years after UCSD decided he had violated its code of conduct by not disclosing researching support from foreign sources.
Although NIH considered the penalty to be sufficient, UCSD continued the investigation and concluded in May 2021 that Fu had violated repeatedly the code of conduct for conflicts of commitment.
More than 100 UCSD faculty members requested a lighter penalty and described the prosecution as "rigged to assure the University lawyers would win their case rather than have justice be served.
The Committee published a report in September 2021 analyzing 190 economic espionage cases since 1996, which showed that defendants with Asian names faced double the likelihood of false accusations and harsher punishments if convicted.
[20] A poll by the Committee of 100 and the University of Arizona in summer 2021 found that four out of ten scientists of Chinese descent had recently considered leaving the U.S. out of fear of government surveillance.
As a consequence of the program's "pressure on grant makers, universities and research institutions to participate in racial, ethnic and national origin profiling," they claimed, discriminatory and stigmatizing investigations were conducted on people of Chinese descent.
[8] In September 2021, American Physical Society President Sylvester James Gates said the DOJ should move away from disclosure issues and rename the China Initiative in order to allay concerns over racial profiling.
He called for the review of past cases for violations of due process and for the victims to be compensated for damage to their careers, and suggested the government give researchers a timespan in which to correct previous oversights in disclosure.
"[8] Thu Nguyen, the executive director of OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates, said fears of racial profiling drove some talented scientists to look for work back in China.
[8] In February 2022, more than 150 University of Pennsylvania faculty members addressed an open letter to Attorney General Garland, "urging the U.S. Department of Justice to overturn the 'China Initiative' which they allege disproportionately targets researchers of Chinese descent.
[8] Peter Toren, another former federal prosecutor, suggested that charging scientists with failing to report contracts or income from other sources, when they may be unaware of their obligations, might not be the best approach.