The Justice Department will soon announce changes to the China Initiative, a Trump-era effort to combat Chinese national security threats, after civil rights proponents, business groups and universities told the Biden administration that the program had fostered suspicion of Asian professors working in the United States.
Matthew G. Olsen, the head of the Justice Department's national security division, undertook a three-month evaluation of the China Initiative name.
The program that brought espionage, trade-secrets theft and cybercrime cases under a single banner has been modified as Beijing continues to use spies, cyberhacking, theft and propaganda to challenge America's standing as the world's pre-eminent economic and military.
Christopher A. Wray, the director of the F.B.I., said last month that the bureau was opening new cases every 12 hours because of its large number of investigations into Chinese efforts to steal American information and technology.
Republicans argue that changing the program would show that the Biden administration was soft on Beijing. The Senate Intelligence Committee and the White House have been told that the department's work will not be hampered.
According to the people briefed on the matter, the changes will most likely focus on the department's efforts to root out academics and researchers who lied to the government about Chinese affiliations. National security officials worry that researchers who hide foreign government ties can be more easily to share valuable information, so they wanted to deter people from hiding foreign affiliations.
Critics say that the program to combat serious national security threats encourages investigators to unfairly target Asian professors and lump financial disclosure cases with more serious crimes, like espionage and trade-secret theft, wrongly giving the impression that everyone who hid Chinese affiliations was a spy.
The China Initiative has resulted in many pleas and convictions, but many cases against academics have ended in dismissal or acquittal. Gang Chen, a mechanical engineering professor at M.I.T., had his charges dropped after the Energy Department said that his undisclosed affiliations with China would not have affected his grant application.
David H. La said that such losses fuel the Chinese propaganda machine and hurt U.S. interests.
According to people briefed on the matter, the Justice Department will treat some grant fraud cases as civil matters going forward and reserve criminal prosecution for the most egregious instances of deception.
He is expected to point out that China is not the only foreign nation that has tried to get financial and other ties to American researchers in order to get valuable information. The Justice Department will have a new process for evaluating whether a researcher has adequately disclosed foreign affiliations, which will take into account the recently released guidance from the White House.
It is not clear whether the program will be renamed or if it will investigate espionage and corporate fraud crimes committed by foreign nations. A spokesman for the Justice Department wouldn't comment.
The China Initiative gave the impression that prosecutors were more intent on cracking down on Chinese people than the Chinese government, according to various Asian American business and civil rights groups as well as the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. The cases involving researchers made that perception worse.
Ben Suarato is a spokesman for the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. The China Initiative was the wrong way to address them.
After his confirmation in October, Mr. Olsen held a series of listening sessions with congressional staff members, universities, civil rights groups and national security officials in an effort to address numerous concerns, including how the initiative might have contributed to racial profiling, according to people briefed on the meetings.
The Republican and Democratic administrations have been concerned about Beijing's attempts to steal valuable secrets from the United States. The Chinese government used talent recruitment programs to bring our knowledge and innovation back to China, according to Mr. Wray.
The National Institutes of Health warned that foreign nations had systematic programs to influence researchers and peer reviewers, and that failures by some researchers to disclose them.
President Donald J. Trump's first attorney general and a former Republican senator from Alabama were worried about those worries. According to former government officials who worked on the China Initiative, Mr. Sessions believed that some Chinese students attended American universities to gather information for Beijing.
The risks of research and academic collaboration with China were emphasized by Mr. Sessions when he unveiled the initiative.
A tense time in U.S.-China relations. The two powers are at odds as they compete for influence and technology in other countries. What to know about the main fronts in U.S.-China relations
The dominance of the Pacific. The U.S. has sought to widen its alliances in the region as China has built up its military presence. Taiwan is a democratic island that the Communist Party regards as Chinese territory. It could change the regional order if the U.S. intervenes there.
It is possible to trade. The trade war is on hold. The Biden administration has continued to protest China's economic policies and has imposed tariffs on Chinese goods.
Technology. Despite being shut out of China, many U.S. tech companies still do business there. China needs to achieve technological self-reliance according to Mr. Xi.
Mr. Sessions said in his speech that Chinese espionage is not just against traditional targets such as our defense and intelligence agencies, but against targets like research labs and universities.
The former U.S. attorneys said that Mr. Sessions and other officials made it clear that if you have a research institute or a university in your district, you will most likely have a China Initiative case.
After William P. Barr became attorney general, officials debated whether the Justice Department should give universities and academics the chance to avoid federal prosecution by identifying issues with grant applications and sharing them with the government.
Government agencies that give grants pushed back on the idea of an amnesty program, as did some prosecutors who worried that it could undermine their pending prosecutions. The idea was rejected by the Biden administration.
Current and former officials say that the work done by the Trump administration has had a deterrent effect on cases involving researchers.
Universities have put in place training programs to codify best practices and have improved their compliance programs to make sure they know which employees have taken foreign money. The agencies that make grants have increased their requirements.
Andrew Lelling was one of the strongest backers of the China Initiative when he was the U.S. attorney in Boston. He oversaw the case against Dr. Chen, as well as the successful prosecution of a chemistry professor at Harvard who hid his affiliations and payments from China.
Mr. Lelling said his thinking on the program had changed because researchers were less of a concern.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
