The Biden administration has called an end to the Trump-era prosecutions of US researchers with ties to China, affirming failure in a campaign of widespread arrests, abandoned prosecutions and purposeful racial profiling.
More than a year into office, the administration outlined the decision through the Justice Department’s top national security prosecutor, Matthew Olsen, who insisted that the campaign had been based on some level of genuine strategic concern.
“But by grouping cases under the China Initiative rubric,” Mr Olsen said in a speech at George Mason University, “we helped give rise to a harmful perception that the department applies a lower standard to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct related to that country, or that we in some way view people with racial, ethnic or familial ties to China differently.”
The Trump administration began its crackdown on Chinese research ties in late 2018, largely citing errors in standard disclosure forms to accuse and often arrest hundreds of scientists. Almost none of the cases involved direct evidence of espionage.
Critics of the Trump-era campaign largely welcomed the decision, although with some lingering scepticism over the administration’s ultimate direction on US-China research ties. The administration has dropped a series of prosecutions in the case, but also persisted with others, including a failed retrial for Anming Hu of the University of Tennessee.
The Association of American Universities, the lead group of US research institutions, said that it “appreciates the announcement” from the Justice Department and awaits further progress on steps to safely promote scientific openness and international collaboration.
The Committee of 100, a group of prominent Chinese American leaders, credited Mr Olsen with offering a “thoughtful approach to re-examine and revise the policy”. Yet, the group noted, “much more work needs to be done to ensure that all cases being prosecuted are based solely on evidence and not on perception.”
Holden Thorp, former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and current editor-in-chief of Science magazine, was especially sceptical. Just ahead of Mr Olsen’s announcement, Dr Thorp had planned a two-part package in his journals in which he and a prominent target of the crackdown – Gang Chen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – produced articles castigating both the Trump and Biden administrations for the policy.
After Mr Olsen spoke, Dr Thorp said that he and Professor Chen were still moving ahead with their articles with no substantial modification. “They’re changing the name,” Dr Thorp said of the China Initiative, “but if they still have 2,000 cases open, it doesn’t really change anything.”
In his Science magazine article, Professor Chen credited MIT and numerous scholars for standing up for him, but said that many other institutional leaders failed the moral test of the moment.
Outside MIT, the Chinese-born professor of power engineering wrote, US “universities have mostly remained silent”, harming themselves in the process. “The talent loss and terror lobbed upon faculty are weakening their institutions, supporting harmful bias, and ruining lives,” he said.
Professor Chen, who was detained at Boston’s Logan Airport in January 2020 and arrested a year later during a raid on his home, was one of hundreds caught up in the Trump crusade over alleged paperwork discrepancies. The Justice Department dropped all charges against him last month.
Mr Olsen, a graduate of Harvard Law School, said he began reassessing the approach as soon as he rejoined the Justice Department in November as assistant attorney general for the national security division. “The department is committed to protecting the civil rights of everyone in our country,” he said in remarks prepared for the George Mason University event. “But this erosion of trust in the department can impair our national security by alienating us from the people we serve, including the very communities the [Chinese] government targets as victims.”
Along with reassessing prosecutions, the Biden administration has been working to clarify and synchronise the rules and systems for reporting foreign research collaborations.
The only significant conviction from the China Initiative involved that of Charles Lieber, former chairman of chemistry at Harvard, who admitted he did try to hide payments he received during his work in China.
Professor Chen, in his Science magazine article, faulted federal grant agencies along with US universities for eagerly joining the Trump initiative and not acknowledging its excesses. By numbers, the US National Institutes of Health was the most aggressive federal funding agency in terms of supporting the Trump initiative, opening investigations into dozens of its grant recipients and scaring many into leaving their institutions, even as the overall crackdown focused on paperwork and rarely found espionage.
The NIH’s deputy director for extramural research, Michael Lauer, has said that he was pursuing genuine fraud but acknowledged steering his investigative efforts mainly towards scientists working with China.
Dr Thorp said Dr Lauer’s behaviour and that of the NIH overall, as well as that of many US universities, in going along with the Trump campaign, seemed to have been driven mainly by a fear of losing money by angering members of Congress.
“Doing what it takes to get the money has been the doctrine for 75 years,” Dr Thorp said.
