The Biden Justice Department announced Wednesday that it would pull the plug on a Trump-era initiative aimed at cracking down on China’s economic espionage following a year of criticism from some fellow Democrats, hundreds of university professors, left-wing activists, and the Chinese Communist Party itself.
The China Initiative, which also sought to address the broader national security threat posed by China, could have been perceived as racist, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen said. While he acknowledged that China poses an “evolving, significant threat,” Olsen said the previous administration did not take “the right approach.”
“By grouping cases under the China Initiative rubric, we helped give rise to a harmful perception that the Department of Justice 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,” he said.
PRO-CHINA GROUP ADVISED BY KEY BIDEN PICKS COMPARED DOJ’S CHINA INITIATIVE TO ‘McCARTHYISM’
Olsen said he never saw any indication that any enforcement decision the DOJ made was based on bias. But he said the “mere perception” of those possibilities undermined the program.
The about-face comes after many Republicans had already accused Attorney General Merrick Garland of softening the enforcement of the initiative, which is part of the department’s National Security Division. Olsen, who recently announced the creation of a new domestic terrorism unit, began a review of the China Initiative in November and announced the results of his review during a speech at George Mason University’s National Security Institute.
The China Initiative, started by the Trump DOJ in 2018, attempted to shine a light on the CCP’s coordinated and multifaceted efforts to steal research and technology from the United States, with a particular focus on rooting out academics who concealed their ties to China.
Despite setbacks in some cases, numerous people have been convicted through the China Initiative, including Harvard professor Charles Lieber, who was found guilty in December of all federal charges related to concealing his ties to a Chinese university and the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents Program while receiving U.S. government funding, in what was seen as a big win for the initiative.
But the Justice Department also dropped a sizable case against Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Gang Chen in January after it had accused him of hiding millions of dollars in contracts with China while he was getting paid to do research for the U.S. government. Chen was arrested a year ago and charged with wire fraud, failing to file a foreign bank account report, and making a false statement in a tax return in connection with undisclosed contracts from “various entities in the People’s Republic of China to the U.S. Department of Energy.” The Justice Department filed a dismissal “in the interests of justice.”
In a similar reversal, the DOJ dropped a half-dozen cases against Chinese military researchers in July after it had accused them of lying on their visas. A DOJ spokesman said that move also was “in the interest of justice.”
Simon Saw-Teong Ang, a former University of Arkansas-Fayetteville professor who had received millions of dollars in grant research money from the U.S. government, including $500,000 from NASA, was arrested in 2020 for working as the director of the school’s High Density Electronics Center while allegedly being a secret participant in China’s Thousand Talents Program. He pleaded guilty to one count of making a false statement to the FBI about the existence of patents for his inventions in China the day after the Chen case was dropped.
Garland was asked about the China Initiative in October, and he called the CCP a “serious threat” in relation to intellectual property, espionage, cyberattacks, and ransomware.
“We need to protect the country against this, and we will, and we are making cases in that regard,” Garland told the Senate. “The other thing that always has to be remembered is that we never investigate or prosecute based on ethnic identity or on what country a person is from.”
The CCP has attacked the China Initiative relentlessly, including when Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian contended in January that it “is nothing but a clumsy tool used by anti-China forces in the U.S. to abuse the national security concept to suppress and contain China.” The CCP has also seized on U.S.-based efforts by professors and activists to end it.
The left-wing Brennan Center for Justice published a January piece on “Why Ending the Justice Department’s ‘China Initiative’ is Vital to U.S. Security.”
A group of Yale faculty members released a January letter to Garland, following up on one Stanford professors sent in September, saying they opposed the DOJ’s China Initiative. The Yale faculty members warned Garland that the initiative is tantamount to racial profiling and was “harming” America’s “research and technology competitiveness and fueling biases.”
Also last month, an activist group, United Chinese Americans, held a protest outside the DOJ calling for an end to the initiative. Haipei Shue, the group’s president, held a virtual panel discussion after the protest, saying his goal was to “stop the China Initiative as we know it.” Two Democratic members of Congress, Reps. Judy Chu and Ted Lieu, also spoke on the panel about their opposition to the DOJ’s efforts.
The U.S. Heartland China Association, a pro-China business group that counted two key Biden administration picks as strategic advisers, also likened the DOJ’s China Initiative to “McCarthyism” in a panel discussion in November. The panel trashing the DOJ’s efforts to combat Chinese espionage was led by Shue.
“We have heard concerns from the civil rights community that the ‘China Initiative’ has fueled a narrative of intolerance and bias. To many, that narrative suggests that the Justice Department treats people from China or of Chinese descent differently. The rise in anti-Asian hate crime and hate incidents only serves to heighten these concerns,” Olsen said Wednesday. “We have heard that these prosecutions, and the public narrative around those cases, can lead to a chilling atmosphere for scientists and scholars that damages the scientific enterprise in the United States.”
A group of Republican senators called on Garland in May to not implement an “amnesty program” they said the Justice Department was considering under which researchers at U.S. colleges and universities could disclose past foreign funding, including from China, without fear of prosecution.
Olsen said Wednesday that in evaluating cases related to academic integrity and research security moving forward, the DOJ’s NSD would work with the FBI to scrutinize “whether criminal prosecution is warranted or whether civil or administrative remedies are more appropriate.” He also said that the White House Office of Science and Technology “released new guidance to federal funding agencies that included procedures to correct inaccurate or incomplete prior disclosures about connections” and that “where individuals voluntarily correct prior material omissions and resolve related administrative inquiries, this will counsel against a criminal prosecution.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray said this month that the growing economic and national security threat posed by the CCP is graver than ever, likening the danger to a more technologically sophisticated Soviet Union, arguing that “there is just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, our innovation, and our economic security than China.”
The FBI director said the bureau has more than 2,000 active investigations focused on the Chinese government attempting to steal U.S. information and technology, revealing the FBI is opening new China-linked counterintelligence operations every 12 hours.
Republican Sen. Marco Rubio earlier this month called on nearly two dozen U.S. universities to end their partnerships with Chinese universities assisting the CCP’s military-industrial complex.
