China Initiative whiffs, again; 'This is not an espionage case,' says judge

Feng "Franklin" Tao victimized by China Initiative

A Chinese-born professor who was accused of hiding work he did in China has avoided prison in the latest setback to the Trump-instigated China Initiative.

United States District Judge Julie Robinson on Wednesday sentenced Feng “Franklin” Tao to time served after earlier throwing out his conviction on three counts of wire fraud.

"This is not an espionage case," Robinson said. "Maybe that's what the Department of Justice thought what was going on, but that's not what was going on."

Federal prosecutors said Tao, who worked on renewable energy projects, concealed his affiliation with China’s Fuzhou University from the University of Kansas where he taught and from two federal agencies that provided grant funding for the professor’s research.

Robinson, appointed by then-President George W. Bush, sentenced Tao to time served, saying there was no evidence he shared proprietary information with anyone in China and that the chemical engineering professor did research that was "freely shared in the scientific community."

Robinson noted that Tao published 16 papers and a book since his arrest, work done from his home after KU banned him from campus. That high level of productivity is an indicator of his continued value to society, she said. She dismissed the government’s claim that Tao’s entire body of research is unreliable simply because he omitted relevant information on the required disclosure forms at KU.

In her ruling, Robinson said prosecutors had presented no evidence during the trial that Tao received any money for his work in China, which is required for a wire fraud conviction.

The judge said when the trial started, she expected to hear evidence that Tao’s alleged deceptions caused financial loss and that he shared research with China at the expense of US taxpayers and the three institutions.

Rather, the evidence showed that Tao continued fulfilling his duties to the University of Kansas while in China by working 70-hour weeks and pushing his students at Kansas to do the same.

“Dr. Tao is immensely relieved that Judge Robinson agreed that a sentence of time served was appropriate,” his lawyer, Peter Zeidenberg, said in a statement. (Tao spent one week in jail after his arrest.) “We were also gratified to hear the judge say, once again, that neither the government nor KU was defrauded or harmed, and that Dr. Tao did all of the work required of him to the complete satisfaction of these entities.”

“Our lives will never be the same as before [his arrest],” said Tao's wife, Hong Peng. “It’s hard to find the words to describe what we have been through.” 

Tao, who was born in China but immigrated to the United States in 2002, was one of several researchers, most of whom were of Chinese descent, charged under the controversial China Initiative. The initiative was widely criticized as promoting anti-Asian racism and racial profiling

Frank Wu, a legal expert and president of Queens College at the City University of New York, told Nature that he calls the China Initiative “an abysmal failure.”

Although the DOJ usually wins the vast majority of cases it brings to court, the China Initiative produced few results, with several cases dismissed for lack of evidence and other researchers who had been charged reaching plea agreements with prosecutors.

The China Initiative was terminated in February 2022 because of complaints of racial profiling and its relative ineffectiveness. “They really spent years and a lot of effort ruining a bunch of people’s lives, and they did not win very many cases,” Wu says.

“I don’t know if racism was the reason for the China Initiative, but race was part of it, and the effects are real,” he adds. “Respected scientists of Chinese background, including American citizens, feel targeted.”

Gisela Perez Kusakawa, executive director of the Asian American Scholar Forum, said Tao’s case raised concerns among Asian-American researchers that they would be targeted, particularly in an era of increasing bias against them.

She said the disclosure form Tao was convicted of filling out improperly is vague and that there should be a system to allow researchers to fix such mistakes, rather than subjecting them to federal prosecution.

“We want the public to know that Asian American scientists are contributing to this country,” Kusakawa said. “They are the very people this county needs right now for the research to continue to advance.”

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news and views from an AANHPI perspective, follow @DioknoEd on Twitter.