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.

NY Times: NIH investigating 180 cases of theft of medical research for China

The National Institute of Health is investigating 180 cases involving possible theft of medical research by scientists and researchers working -- knowingly or not -- for the benefit of China, according to a report from The New York Times.

If the NIH investigations borne out, they will be turned over to government agencies such as the Department of Justice, for possible prosecution.

The NYTimes report published Tuesday (Nov. 4), repeats some of the individual cases that online news agencies, including Views From the Edge and other Asian American bloggers, have been reporting for the last few years.

“You could take a dart board with medical colleges with significant research programs and, as far as I can tell, you’d have a 50-50 chance of hitting a school with an active case,” Dr. Ross McKinney Jr., chief scientific officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, told the NYTimes.

The N.I.H. and the F.B.I. have begun a huge investigation to identify out scientists who they say are stealing biomedical research for other countries from institutions across the United States. Almost all of the incidents they uncovered and that are under investigation involve scientists of Chinese descent, including naturalized American citizens, allegedly stealing for China, reports the NYTimes.

The effort is fanning fears among the Asian American community that the aggressive government-led effort in the current tense environment over trade issues could lead to racial profiling and could be just another bargaining chip in the geopolitical wrangling between the Trump administration and the Peoples Republic of China.

“We can’t tell who is guilty or innocent, but look at the actual effect on people of Chinese descent,” said Frank Wu, a law professor at the University of California Hastings School of the Law and former president of the Committee of 100, an organization of Chinese Americans scientists, researchers and innovators in private industry as well as academic institutions. “People are living in fear. It is a question of impact rather than intent.”

“I am getting calls and emails constantly now from ethnic Chinese — even those who are U.S. citizens — who feel threatened,” he said. But few are willing to step forward with allegations of discrimination, Wu told the NYTimes.

"The US-China relationship is the world's most consequential bi-lateral relationship. We must be concerned about security concerns and condemn illegal activity, but in recent years there have been many cases of wrongful prosecution,"  said Chinese American Gary Locke, former US Ambassador to China and former U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

"Our pride in our heritage does not mean we are any less loyal or patriotic to America," Locke added.

READ the entire New York Times report here.

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Universities question FBI calls to monitor Chinese students and scholars

L. Rafael Reif, MIT  president

ASAM NEWS & VIEWS FROM THE EDGE

The FBI is stepping up their investigations against China's alleged efforts to steal US research and secrets by asking American universities to keep a close eye on Chinese students and scholars.

The public radio network, National Public Radio, reports authorities have visited at least 10 universities to make that request.

“We are being asked what processes are in place to know what labs they are working at or what information they are being exposed to,” Fred Cate, of Indiana University, said. “It’s not a question of just looking for suspicious behavior — it’s actually really targeting specific countries and the people from those countries.”

Amid the Trump Administration's request and warnings about Chinese espionage, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last week wrote an open letter to “members of the MIT community,” in support of students and scholars of Chinese descent. 

L. Rafael Reif wrote that he felt compelled to share his “dismay” over the Trump administration’s scrutiny of Chinese and Chinese American researchers and pupils due to heightened concerns about academic espionage.

“Faculty members, post-docs, research staff and students tell me that, in their dealings with government agencies, they now feel unfairly scrutinized, stigmatized and on edge – because of their Chinese ethnicity alone,” he wrote. “Nothing could be further from – or more corrosive to ­– our community’s collaborative strength and open-hearted ideals. To hear such reports from Chinese and Chinese American colleagues is heartbreaking.”

The increased emphasis comes against the backdrop of what FBI director Christopher Wray said at a speech in New York back in April.

RELATED: 'Yellow Peril' fears arise in Chinese American community

“China has pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation in any way it can from a wide array of busi­ness­es, universities and organizations,” he said to the Council on Foreign Relations, according to the South China Morning Post. “Put plainly, China seems determined to steal its way up the economic ladder at our expense.”

As AsAmNews previously reported, Xifeng Wu was recently asked to step down as director of public health for the Center for Public Health and Translational Genomics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center under suspicion of strong ties to China.

The request by the FBI has left many universities confused and uncertain. Yale University president Peter Salovey is among them.

He said he was “working with my presidential colleagues in the Association of American Universities (AAU) to urge federal agencies to clarify concerns they have about international academic exchanges. The AAU has encouraged agencies to use the tools already in place, such as export controls, while affirming the principle of open academic exchange for basic research.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists fears that scientific partnerships are being criminalized. The organization posted on its blog:

Scientists of Chinese descent are being put into an impossible situation. On the one hand, they have been encouraged for years by their research institutions in the United States to seek out relationships with their international scientific peers in order to work together and solve hard problems. The clearest example of this collaboration comes from cancer research. The NIH’s Cancer wing, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), has stressed the importance of international collaboration in order to improve cancer outcomes in the scientific literature and in the webpage of the NCI’s Cancer Moonshot program (one of the tag lines read “Cancer knows no borders”). There is even a NCI group dedicated specifically to the purpose of international research collaborations.

On the other hand, several of the FBI actions towards Chinese or Chinese-American scientists (i.e. arrests, house visits to ask about “loyalty,” and reading private emails) have been directed at cancer researchers who were carrying out perfectly reasonable scientific partnerships with oncologists in China. And through these actions, the US government may be scaring off brilliant scientists of Chinese descent from conducting research that could help find treatments for cancer.

The increased scrutiny by the government is creating a new landscape for ethnically Chinese researchers in the United States, says Frank Wu, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings, and a member of the Committee of 100, a group of prominent Chinese Americans that works to advance US–China relations. Whether the US government’s focus on foreign influence in academia is right or wrong, he says, researchers need to understand that behaviours that were once considered OK, are now questioned or banned. 

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