The Department of Justice announced Wednesday that the China Initiative — a controversial program accused of profiling academics of Asian descent — is coming to an end.
The China Initiative was first billed as an anti-espionage program aimed at fighting the alleged specter of intellectual property theft by foreign researchers at top American universities. But recently, scholars, lawyers and one of the original architects of the China Initiative have raised concerns that the program had drifted from its mission and was discriminating against Chinese professors.
“DOJ should revamp, and shut down, parts of the program to avoid needlessly chilling scientific and business collaborations with Chinese partners,” former Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling wrote in a Dec. 3 post on LinkedIn.
A year earlier, Lelling had announced one of the most publicly contested arrests of the China Initiative: MIT mechanical engineering professor Gang Chen. Chen, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was taken into custody and charged with grant fraud just days before Lelling left his tenure. Lelling’s office alleged that Chen lied about connections to the Chinese government while applying for a research grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Last month, Lelling’s successor announced that her office was dismissing the case against Chen, citing a lack of proof that he had violated any laws.
“Today’s dismissal is a result of that process and is in the interests of justice,” Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins said in a statement.
Chen’s defense attorney, Robert Fisher, agrees that the Justice Department program has strayed from its original mission.
“[The China Initiative] morphed over the period of a couple of years into investigating professors who have grants with federal agencies,” Fisher said.
The program tasked prosecutors and federal agents around the country to crack down on intellectual property theft. But Fisher said the program overestimated the number of Chinese spies on American soil, so U.S. Attorneys like Lelling turned to a new target.
“You’re not going to find a spy from China in every district in the U.S.,” Fisher said. “The only cases they were finding, the only cases that existed, were these grant fraud error cases.”
The hunt for grant fraud cases might have been the China Initiative's own undoing. The arrest of a prominent MIT professor angered the MIT community, with over 200 of Chen’s colleagues writing an open letter to the university’s president against the arrest. The university later paid Chen’s legal bills.
“You had a large group of very well-respected people push back, including MIT,” Fisher said. “And I think that really sent a message to the DOJ and the FBI that wow, an internationally renowned institution is backing [Chen].”
