The FBI’s China Initiative aimed to nab industrial spies. It ended up prosecuting academics and casting a pall over decades of engineering research collaborations.
By Mark Matthews
In the FBI video “Made in Beijing—the Plan for Global Market Domination,” the narrator warns viewers that “the Chinese Communist Party will pull out all the stops to obtain technology from the West.” The threat extends even to academia, with members used to help the party “meet one of their top strategic goals: modernizing the military.” In the footage that follows, an FBI sting operation takes down a Chinese-backed conspiracy to steal and mass-produce a Houston firm’s formula for syntactic foam, a buoyancy material used in offshore drilling and warships.
The story is compelling but doesn’t conclusively tie Western academia to a Chinese military threat. Lead conspirator Shan Shi, a structural engineer identified in the documentary as a “former professor from Texas A&M,” had been an adjunct professor-lecturer, but his work at the school predated the crime. “A&M had nothing to do with any of it,” an FBI official tells Prism. A jury found Shi guilty of conspiracy to steal trade secrets but cleared him of economic espionage—that is, of intending or knowing that the offense would benefit China. As to the stolen secrets’ value, they involved “relatively pedestrian technology that the Court felt Dr. Shi could have developed lawfully had he chosen to do so,” federal judge Christopher Cooper wrote.
During its now-ended China Initiative, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) challenged all 93 US attorneys and 56 FBI field offices to undertake time-consuming probes for evidence of the People’s Republic “stealing its way up the economic ladder” toward global dominance. “Today, we see Chinese espionage not just taking place against traditional targets like our defense and intelligence agencies, but against targets like research labs and universities,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said when he introduced the campaign on November 1, 2018. At first, the initiative drew little protest on Capitol Hill, where politicians of both parties had come to see China as both an economic competitor and a strategic threat.
Three and a half years later, the China Initiative is known less for catching spies than for a mixed record of prosecuting academic scientists and engineers charged with hiding temporary or part-time work at Chinese institutions and companies. Together with Trump administration measures restricting visas for Chinese students and researchers, the effort sent a chill through academe and threatened to choke the productive collaborations begun with the 1979 US-China pact on science and technology approved under President Jimmy Carter and Chinese Communist Party Secretary Deng Xiaoping.
‘Non-Traditional Collectors’
“At the outset,” the DOJ stated in late 2020, “the Department identified academia as one of our most vulnerable sectors, because its traditions of openness, and the importance of international exchanges to the free flow of ideas, leave it vulnerable to [People’s Republic of China] exploitation.” Officials saw China exploiting US universities to cultivate “non-traditional collectors” of intellectual property among professors, postdocs, and graduate students. Yet of the convictions and guilty pleas won by prosecutors against academics, just two cases involved theft of trade secrets. None alleged espionage, although an Air War College professor admitted to lying about his relationship with a Chinese official who was seeking sensitive information. Science editor-in-chief H. Holden Thorp observed: “There is scant evidence that the amount of illegal activity turned up was worth the heartache and expense of running the initiative.”
One has to look deep into Cold War history to find such a concerted nationwide effort by law enforcement to ferret out academic wrongdoing associated with a single perceived threat to national security. That most of the academics caught up in the China Initiative were of Chinese heritage triggered a backlash among Asian American groups and politicians. They cited past injustices against Chinese researchers, such as Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee. Charged in 1999 with stealing nuclear documents on behalf of China and placed in solitary confinement for nine months, he ended up pleading guilty to a single count of mishandling data, drawing an apology from a federal judge and winning $1.6 million from the government and media organizations in a civil suit. More recently, federal prosecutors in 2015 abruptly dropped an espionage case against Temple University physicist Xiaoxing Xi that was based on investigators’ faulty grasp of the science.
In a September 2021 letter signed by hundreds of academics across the country, Stanford University faculty wrote that the China Initiative “is harming the United States’ research and technology competitiveness and it is fueling biases that, in turn, raise concerns about racial profiling.” DOJ has denied acting out of ethnic bias. Matthew Olsen, who inherited the China Initiative as the Biden administration’s assistant attorney general for national security, said in a February appearance at George Mason University that he believed “the department’s actions have been driven by genuine national security concerns.” Still, he concluded that the initiative “helped give rise to a harmful perception” that DOJ set a different standard for China-related prosecutions “or that we in some way view people with racial, ethnic, or familial ties to China differently.” After a review, in February DOJ dropped the China Initiative moniker and renewed its original emphasis on economic espionage and trade-secret theft. [See “Farewell to the China Initiative”].
Still, by the time of Olsen’s decision, the China Initiative had become so controversial that federal prosecutors in two cases sought to bar any mention of it in court, anticipating that defense lawyers would use it to generate sympathy for academics caught in a dragnet.
R&D Wanted
It’s not hard to see why the FBI and DOJ went looking for spies among US academics who work with China, given the research demanded to fulfill Beijing’s ambitious technology goals. In the coming years, China aims to advance quantum communication and biotechnology, transform manufacturing in 10 sectors, become the world leader in artificial intelligence, and promote Chinese standards globally.
And certain Chinese universities have been involved in actual trade-secret theft and economic espionage. Harbin Engineering University, among the Seven Sons of National Defense institutions with close ties to the country’s military and defense industry, “was one of the main sponsors” of Shan Shi’s trade-secret scheme, according to an FBI official, and the entity responsible for developing a Chinese syntactic foam manufacturing capability. Shi also helped negotiate a memorandum of understanding between Texas A&M’s engineering department and Harbin Engineering that A&M later canceled, the official says. Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, another of the Seven Sons, figured in the case of Chinese intelligence officer Yanjun Xu, convicted in 2021 in the attempted theft of composite aircraft engine fan technology from GE Aviation. Xu exchanged information with the university and invited a GE Aviation employee to speak there, according to court documents.
One pending China Initiative case has a national security tie-in, although no espionage is alleged. Gee-Kung Chang is accused of fraudulently obtaining student visas for Chinese graduate researchers who then went to work, not in his optical networking lab at Georgia Tech, but for ZTE USA in New Jersey. A Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, Chang has pleaded not guilty and been placed on administrative leave as a professor of electrical and computer engineering. ZTE USA is a subsidiary of ZTE, the telecommunications giant partially owned by the Chinese government, which has been fined in the past for violating sanctions against Iran and North Korea. In 2020, the company was deemed a national security threat by the Federal Communications Commission—making sales in the United States more difficult. MIT cut off collaboration with ZTE in 2019, citing ongoing government investigations.
Talent Scouts
One red flag that prompted DOJ’s scrutiny was US researchers’ participation in China’s financially generous national and provincial talent plans. The Justice Department viewed these “as a vehicle to recruit individuals with access to US government-funded research to work in the interest of the Chinese Communist Party,” its 2020 report said. Allison Lerner, inspector general at the National Science Foundation, speaking of foreign talent plans generally, says they can pressure US researchers into unethical and possibly criminal behavior. Some contracts give a foreign government control over a researcher’s intellectual property, even if that government didn’t fund the research behind it; restrict what topics are researched, where, and with whom; and impose “significant penalties” for violations. Researchers may also be pressed to recruit other faculty members, employ certain graduate students, and acknowledge the foreign institution first in publications, Lerner told ASEE’s Research Leadership Institute in March.
In the case of Harvard chemist and nanotechnology pioneer Charles Lieber, participation in a foreign talent plan led to DOJ’s highest-profile conviction of an academic in a China Initiative case. In December 2021, a Boston jury found Lieber, who also held an appointment at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, guilty of lying to investigators about his participation in a Chinese talent program and receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars that he failed to report to Harvard and the Internal Revenue Service. He is appealing the verdict.
Whatever red flags led the FBI to another defendant, Anming Hu, proved not to mean much. But investigators apparently didn’t view absence of evidence as evidence of absence, as the late Donald Rumsfeld might put it. The case against the University of Tennessee Knoxville associate professor “was based on suspicions of economic espionage that were ultimately deemed unfounded,” US District Court Judge Thomas Varlan wrote in dismissing it after the jury deadlocked. Lead investigator Kujtim Sadiku believed Hu’s denial of involvement in a talent program but still continued his investigation, the judge wrote. Hu has since been reinstated, with tenure, in UTK’s mechanical, aerospace, and biomedical engineering department and given $300,000 to restart his research lab.
Incentive to Publish
Investigators’ lack of success in uncovering espionage at universities shouldn’t come as a surprise, veteran researchers argue. That’s because the aim of most federally funded basic research is to generate results that warrant open publication. “I do think the investigators don’t have a lot of depth and knowledge about how academic collaborations operate,” says Philip Krein, an emeritus professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and founding executive dean of the engineering institute jointly operated by UIUC and China’s Zhejiang University. “Innocent information exchanges might begin to raise eyebrows.”
But before results are achieved, researchers tend to be protective of their methods and data. “No professor, including Nobel laureates, wants stuff leaking out before they’re ready to publish,” says Stanford professor Steven Chu, secretary of energy in the Barack Obama administration and corecipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics. Speaking in a 2020 webinar sponsored by critics of the China Initiative, he added, “With collaborators, there is a strong agreement of trust. And once that trust breaks down—and I’ve had it happen to me once or twice—I said ‘sorry, I’m not talking to you anymore.’” Researchers have strong incentives, he says, to self-police and “not to let this thing get out. And I don’t think that’s well understood.”
A frequent criticism of the China Initiative is that instead of trade-secret theft or economic espionage, it criminalized academic misconduct, such as omissions on documents or false reporting, that ordinarily would be resolved between grant agencies and universities. John Demers, who led the China Initiative until mid-2021 as an assistant attorney general, retorts, “Are those administrative violations? I don’t know. I mean, those go to the core of integrity of an academic institution.” During the December 2020 Aspen Cyber Summit, Demers said, “An academic institution is all about disclosing sources of funding so that people who are reading your research can figure out how to read that research. And that’s true regardless of whether your funding is coming from the alcohol and beverage industry or… the Chinese government.”
Such violations carry stiff penalties. A faculty member’s deceit, documented in emails or texts, can bring 20 years in jail and a $250,000 fine for wire fraud. Lying to a federal agent about a matter relevant to a case carries a sentence of up to five years. Willful failure to report a foreign bank account can earn a fine of $250,000 and up to five years in jail. The penalty for failing to report income can be 5 to 25 percent of the tax owed.
Cascading Effects
In many cases, failure to disclose was “seen as a high enough bar for the Department of Justice to go after [people],” says Allen DiPalma, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Office of Trade Compliance. Stressing that he was speaking for himself, not the school, he emphasizes the cases’ “chilling effect,” on Asians who wondered, “‘Well if they’re going after these people for things other than espionage, will they come after me?’”
An accumulation of data bears out this effect: A national survey of scientists at top US schools by University of Arizona researchers and the Committee of 100, an organization of prominent Asian Americans, found that half the respondents of Chinese heritage are anxious about US government surveillance and a sizable number report difficulty getting research funding. Surveys by the Asian American Scholar Forum and the American Physical Society raise the prospect of a brain drain of Chinese scientists and engineers leaving US schools or not coming to the country in the first place.
“We do know of outstanding young Chinese scientists, in various fields, who have decided to pursue their careers in other countries that they view as being more welcoming,” says Richard Lester, MIT’s associate provost overseeing international activities. Some top-rated science and engineering students who previously would have applied to US graduate schools are instead choosing to stay in China, adds the nuclear engineer.
Where investigators haven’t found espionage, they have nonetheless infused China Initiative cases with suggestions of a national security threat. An example was the indictment of Feng “Franklin” Tao, the first academic to be charged after the initiative was announced.
A jury on April 8 convicted Tao, a former associate professor of chemistry and chemical and petroleum engineering at the University of Kansas, of wire fraud and making a false statement in connection with failure to disclose his participation in a Chinese talent-recruitment program and acceptance of a full-time position at China’s Fuzhou University. But Tao’s indictment suggested he was engaged in a darker scheme. As the charges were read to a federal grand jury in Topeka, a member of the panel wondered aloud: “So is he being charged with double-dipping or espionage?” Assistant US Attorney Anthony Mattivi skirted the query: “Well, if you’ll give us a little time, we’ll work our way through the rest of the indictment. Okay? Any other questions?” Presiding Judge Julie Robinson, noting that parts of the indictment could mislead trial jurors into thinking the case was about economic espionage or theft of trade secrets and not fraud, warned prosecutors not to “color the trial with national security overtones.”
In at least one case, the China Initiative’s impact went beyond a wrecked career and imprisonment to cast doubt on years of peer-reviewed research by an esteemed scientist. That’s what befell Song Guo Zheng, a former Ohio State University biomedical professor, who is now serving a 37-month prison term after pleading guilty in November 2020 to one false-statements count for lying on grant applications. An expert on autoimmune diseases, Zheng was arrested boarding a flight to China after learning he had been targeted by investigators. Authorities said that, for years, he hid his participation in Chinese talent recruitment programs and affiliations with at least five research institutions in China. As Zheng awaited sentencing, the National Institutes of Health weighed in to say that his lack of candor and unreported conflicts of interest in China called into question the validity, scientific integrity, and objectivity of his research. Michael Lauer, NIH deputy director for extramural research, said a detailed review would be needed “to identify potential falsification, fabrication, or plagiarism.” In addition to the jail term, Zheng has been ordered to pay more than $3.8 million in restitution.
The most recent China Initiative trial resulted in a mixed jury verdict. Mingqing Xiao, an applied math professor at Southern Illinois University–Carbondale, was convicted on four counts of failing to report a Chinese bank account on his tax return and to the US Treasury but was found innocent of grand-fraud charges. His lawyers called the outcome “a complete rebuke of the Department of Justice’s China Initiative,” Science reports, and plan to appeal Xiao’s tax conviction.
Theme and Variations
The initiative has exposed stark differences in how universities respond to the prosecution of faculty members. MIT paid Gang Chen’s legal expenses throughout the two years that the mechanical engineering professor spent under a cloud, starting in January 2020 after his interrogation at Boston Logan Airport. A year later, on the eve of President Biden’s inauguration—which would bring in a new team at Justice—a federal grand jury indicted Chen on wire fraud charges in connection with alleged failure to report ongoing affiliations with Chinese institutions when he applied for and obtained a Department of Energy research grant. He was also accused of failing to file a foreign bank account report and of making a false statement in a tax return. In early 2022, a newly-appointed US attorney in Massachusetts dropped the case. DOJ’s abrupt shift came when prosecutors learned that at the time Chen applied for the DOE grant, the department did not require disclosure of his Chinese connections. Other evidentiary problems contributed to the reversal, according to press reports. Exonerated, Chen expressed public gratitude to MIT leaders and President Rafael Reif, who, he said, “supported me morally and financially,” and to his faculty colleagues.
Zhengdong Cheng, a former professor of chemical engineering at Texas A&M, had a different experience. Summoned home in August 2020 from A&M’s Qatar campus, where he had been working for a year because his adopted son was denied entry into the United States, Cheng arrived at College Station’s small airport to find federal agents waiting. Alongside an FBI agent was a NASA investigator, brought in because Cheng’s alleged work with Chinese institutions on soft condensed matter physics ran afoul of a law barring the space agency from funding any “bilateral participation, collaboration, or coordination with China or any Chinese-owned company or entity.”
Investigators had “coordinated Cheng’s return with Texas A&M University officials,” according to a defense court filing that cited agent testimony. They also had obtained an arrest warrant, reserved a conference room to question Cheng, and set up an adjacent room to conduct computer forensics. A transcript of Cheng’s interrogation quotes him as saying his dean, whom he doesn’t name but refers to as “she,” had “arranged this trip for me,” bringing him back from Qatar. He appears to be referring to M. Katherine Banks, then dean of engineering and now president of the university.
A Texas A&M System spokesman declined to comment on the university’s role in Cheng’s arrest while the case is pending. But FBI Houston Special Agent in Charge Perrye K. Turner had effusive praise for the school after Cheng was detained: “We are grateful to TAMU, TAMU System, and TAMU Engineering Experiment Station for providing significant assistance through their partnership with us throughout this case.” Charged with multiple counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, and false statements, Cheng, a naturalized US citizen, awaits the outcome of plea negotiations between his lawyers and prosecutors. Held in jail for more than a year as a flight risk, Cheng is now in home detention.
Texas A&M’s strong relationship with the FBI owes much to Kevin Gamache, a soft-spoken retired Air Force colonel with a PhD in water management and hydrological science. As chief research security officer and assistant vice chancellor for national security strategic initiatives, he is a recognized national leader in academic security. His office protects TAMU’s sprawling system of 11 universities and eight state agencies. Few schools match Texas A&M’s institutional ties to the US defense establishment.
Before many other schools knew of a “foreign influence” concern, “the A&M system really started getting involved in this effort on a national level,” Gamache tells Prism. Over the next few years, he and his team put together “a pretty robust open-source vetting process” using Dimensions, an artificial-intelligence package that claims to offer “the most comprehensive collection of linked data in a single platform; from grants, publications, datasets and clinical trials to patents and policy documents” and allows users to “follow research from funding through output to impact.” The software tells Gamache and his team “who our faculty are collaborating with, who’s funding those collaborators, and what organization they’re associated with. And then we’re able to take that information and do the crosswalk between [that and] what has been reported through our disclosure process.” That way, they know which scholars have unreported foreign collaborators and funding sources.
In one discovery, reported by the Wall Street Journal, the A&M team found that more than 100 faculty members were involved with a Chinese talent-recruitment program, even though only five had disclosed it. Gamache won’t discuss Zhengdong Cheng’s case, but the fact that just one faculty member faced a serious criminal charge suggests that Texas A&M found ways to resolve others’ failure to report their China connections.
By acting early or following up on FBI alerts, some universities have been able to clear up discrepancies in faculty reporting and take their own action against offenders, thus sparing researchers a wrenching federal probe. “My predecessor and I both, as presidents, sent out messages to the faculty saying it’s important that you disclose any foreign funding, including China, so that any conflicts can be managed,” says Tom Katsouleas, who stepped down in 2021 as president of the University of Connecticut and is now a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the school. “We had a number of faculty who were very supportive and compliant with this,” he tells Prism. “And in one case there was a concern that they were receiving funding from a government agency in the US and the Chinese for essentially the same research proposal.” That led to “a severe sanction for that faculty member,” action that “superseded anything from the funding agency.” When faculty members self-reported, “typically there was no sanction. There was simply a conflict-of-interest management strategy set up.”
Still on the Lookout
Ending the China Initiative doesn’t mean DOJ has pulled back from probes of academic misconduct. The department will continue to bring conflict-of-interest cases, provided they have a bearing on national and economic security and show evidence of fraud and concealment, Olsen said in an appearance at George Mason University.
In a sign of continued FBI scrutiny of academics, UIUC’s engineering faculty and staff received an alert from their dean eight days after Olsen spoke. The message noted that the FBI had sought to interview some faculty members and researchers about their international collaborations. It urged faculty to have a representative of the legal staff or the office of the vice chancellor for research accompany them to any FBI interview. Dean Rashid Bashir tells Prism he sent the alert “to alleviate the concerns that some have experienced after being contacted by the FBI,” and also because of a request from UIUC’s legal office “to be kept informed about these meetings.” Bashir adds: “In general our approach is to support our faculty and staff to help them make national and global impact. [We] urge our faculty and staff to be transparent and report all international engagements so we can help and protect them, and to cooperate with the Justice Department and State Department guidelines when available.”
UIUC’s joint institute with Zhejiang fits a tradition dating from the early 1900s, when the University of Illinois encouraged Chinese students to come to the United States. An early alumnus, Tsin Chuang, went on to design a number of Tsinghua University buildings in Beijing. Another, meteorologist and geologist Coching Chu, led and expanded what became Zhejiang University from 1936 to 1949.
One positive development since the China Initiative began is a growth in faculty compliance with disclosure requirements. “In general, we have seen a tremendous uptick in disclosure information by our faculty,” says Pitt’s DiPalma. “There’s an awareness factor there because of what’s happening, where people want to do the right thing. They are asking questions, they are submitting things out of the abundance of caution.” Yet in a possible sign of a chilling effect from the China Initiative, Chinese academics are “increasing their collaborations with other countries at a higher rate than their collaborations with the US,” says John Haupt, a researcher at the University of Arizona who studies international science partnerships.
Meanwhile, some Chinese researchers, unable to secure US visas, are going elsewhere. In one example, a graduate student recruited by John Paul Helveston, an assistant professor of engineering management and systems engineering at George Washington University, was denied a visa because her fellowship was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Helveston tells Prism. She went to Canada instead. Such fellowships only go to “incredibly impressive students,” Helveston says. “These students are the ones you want coming here.” Durable US-Chinese academic bonds may be fraying. Besides ending its MOU with Harbin University of Engineering, Texas A&M is also cutting ties dating from the 1990s with China’s Ocean University as part of what A&M calls “our rigorous, ongoing review and collaboration with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Meanwhile, the FBI’s “Made in Beijing” documentary is slowly getting attention, with more than 57,000 views after about two months on YouTube.
Mark Matthews, Prism’s former editor, is a book author and freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
Design by Francis Igot
Farewell to the China Initiative
By Beryl Lieff Benderly
Almost from its start, the China Initiative sparked controversy. The Justice Department program aimed to counter what then Attorney General Jeff Sessions described as economic espionage sponsored by the Chinese government, focused on theft of intellectual property and technology trade secrets. But a string of failed prosecutions of academic researchers and growing claims by Asians and Asian Americans of racial profiling led to its demise. Earlier this year, the Biden administration began a two-pronged approach to repair the resulting PR damage and loss of trust. In a February 23 speech, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen announced the end of the initiative as it had been known. He rebranded ongoing efforts as a “strategy for countering nation-state threats” from adversaries such as Russia, Iran, and North Korea as well as “the evolving, significant threat that the government of China poses.”
In addition, on January 4 the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) published guidance for research agencies to clarify the requirements and methods for federal funding applicants to disclose information about themselves and their financial and professional ties. Many of the China Initiative criminal cases had arisen not from spying but from applicants’ failures to correctly report conflicts of interest or commitment, often involving participation in the Chinese government’s “talent” programs, which can provide lucrative opportunities for scientists and engineers in other countries to also work in China. In perhaps the China Initiative’s highest-profile success, a jury convicted Harvard chemistry professor Charles Lieber of lying about his financial ties to Wuhan University of Technology [see “Campus Insecurity”]. In other cases, however, researchers—primarily of Chinese origin—were investigated or prosecuted for what they claimed were innocent errors, omissions, or misinterpretations of complicated and obscure disclosure forms and requirements.
The new guidance therefore calls on federal research agencies to standardize both the personal and financial information that grant applicants must disclose—including any participation in foreign or foreign-sponsored programs—and the forms they must use to make the disclosures. It also calls for a standard and permanent means of identifying individual researchers to avoid confusion caused by similar names or inaccurate information. And it advises, but does not require, that granting agencies accomplish this by adopting so-called digital persistent identifiers (DPIs). If used, however, DPIs must be free of cost to researchers and interoperable among agencies.
Researchers who fail to meet disclosure requirements, the guidance stresses, should face sanctions including civil and criminal penalties, disqualification from future grants, or other administrative actions as suited to the nature and severity of the violations and the violator’s intent. Researchers must also be able to correct honest errors without fear of punishment, it adds. Agencies are urged to share information with other organizations about researchers who have violated or are suspected of violating disclosure rules. Critics argue, however, that this might unfairly penalize individuals who later turn out to be innocent.
Importantly, the guidance requires that all research entities receiving more than $50 million in federal funding must establish a research security plan encompassing cybersecurity, foreign travel security, training on research security and—where appropriate—export control regulations.
In an accompanying announcement, Eric Lander, then director of OSTP, emphasized the urgency of preserving a scientific culture that encourages international collaboration. “If policies to address [research security] significantly diminish our superpower of attracting global scientific talent,” he wrote, “or if they fuel xenophobia against Asian Americans, we will have done more damage to ourselves than any competitor or adversary could.” Discrimination against any racial, ethnic, or other group therefore will not be tolerated, Lander added.
“[I]n light of the issues associated with xenophobia” during the China Initiative, Emily Weinstein of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology told Prism, the guidance is “an important and necessary step in clarifying [the government’s] position on research security and integrity.” But, the research fellow added, because the guidance includes no enforcement capabilities or regulations, at present “it is merely symbolic.”
Even so, some observers view the changes as significant. Said Gisela P. Kusakawa, of the civil rights organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), in a statement, “We commend the assistant attorney general eliminating the China Initiative rubric, which has deeply harmed the Asian American and immigrant community [and] instill[ed] fear…, particularly for researchers and scientists of Chinese descent.” But, the assistant director of the AAJC’s Anti-Racial Profiling Project continued, undoing the initiative’s damage will require collaboration with other federal agencies, a process in which the guidance will “play an important role.” In addition, it will “take some time.”
Beryl Lieff Benderly is a Washington-based freelance writer and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.