At the local jail, a technician taking Tao’s prints noted that there was something strange about his fingertips, as if they had been intentionally disfigured by cross-hatching. Tao repeatedly asked to call his wife, he said, but the officers acted as if they couldn’t understand his English. Peng prepared to post the deed to their new home as collateral, and to surrender her naturalization certificate and the American passports of her children, but Tao was denied bail. Mattivi claimed that he presented a flight risk. After the hearing, Tao was returned to his cell, where the prisoner in the adjacent cell looked him over. “I just saw you on TV,” he said. “You’re a K.U. professor, and a spy for China.”
There is a long-standing conflict between scientists, who see themselves as citizens of a cosmopolitan republic of unrestricted inquiry, and the state, which is likelier to assign a property value to knowledge. Benjamin Franklin held that “science must be an international pursuit” in service of the “improvement of humanity’s estate.” He never sought to monetize his inventions, and shared the fruits of his research with friends and rivals alike. But what looked to some like the magnanimous diffusion of progress looked to others like theft. During the Industrial Revolution, Britain declared the emigration of skilled artisans and the export of specialized machinery treasonous. Alexander Hamilton, unimpressed, paid bounties to anyone who could deliver British manufacturing secrets, and espionage drove the growth of the American textile industry.
Since then, it has been largely taken for granted that developing nations will find a way to free-ride on the novelties of their more advanced peers. Scholars of international relations call this the “advantage of backwardness,” and it hasn’t always been considered a bad thing. In the period between the World Wars, when the Soviet Union industrialized, American companies sent thousands of engineers to assist; in 1929, the Ford Motor Company provided for the reproduction of an entire factory, and supplied technical personnel to help the Soviets get it running. The U.S. government’s attitude was that such generosity was none of its business.
The Second World War made this mood of permissiveness obsolete. In 1950, Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist who contributed to the Manhattan Project, was arrested for sharing sensitive information with the Soviets; his betrayal allowed Joseph Stalin to learn about the atomic bomb before Harry Truman did. By 1953, more than half of all research in the U.S. was federally backed, and ninety per cent of the funding flowed from the Pentagon. With the money came unprecedented secrecy regulations and loyalty oaths. John Krige, a historian of science and technology, told me that academics accepted the compromise: “They were willing to sacrifice a certain amount of freedom to publish as long as the spigot was open.”
There was, however, collateral damage. As the historian Mario Daniels recently wrote, “In such a chilly environment, scientific internationalism appeared highly suspicious, as did the leftist political leanings that were its frequent bedfellows.” After the war, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had presided over the Manhattan Project, expressed reservations about the development of the hydrogen bomb. His enemies, referring to his associations with the Communist Party, accused him of being a spy. President Eisenhower, unconvinced, nonetheless ordered a “blank wall” erected between Oppenheimer and any nuclear secrets, and his scientific career was effectively put to rest.
Private companies were still generally left to their own devices. But in 1996 Bill Clinton signed the Economic Espionage Act, making the theft of trade secrets—an active pursuit of at least two dozen countries—a federal crime. The law was most proximately motivated by anxiety about Japan’s technological prosperity; according to one account, Japanese industrial spies occupied two complete floors of a Manhattan skyscraper. (The law also justified the continued allocation of resources to the intelligence community in the absence of an ideological adversary.) After this, the economic competitiveness of domestic firms was sacralized as a national-security priority.
By 2009, when the F.B.I. dedicated a new unit to economic espionage, concerns were focussed on China. In 2014, the Department of Justice indicted five members of China’s People’s Liberation Army—hackers with aliases like UglyGorilla and KandyGoo—for industrial cyberattacks. The next year, Xi Jinping unveiled the Made in China 2025 plan, which identified a catalogue of technologies that was broadly understood to represent an international shopping list. The consequences—for defense, economic competitiveness, and human rights—were potentially grave, and the Obama Administration’s attitude hardened in response. To educate the public, the F.B.I. produced a threat-awareness film, “The Company Man,” which renders the apparently true story of an engineer tempted by Chinese bribery in the style of after-school drama; one expects it to end with the Chinese criminals’ being forced to smoke the entire pack of cigarettes.
When Trump came to power, he was quick to ring the alarm about China, which he said was “raping our country.” In November, 2018, Sessions held a press conference to announce the China Initiative. Our innovations, he said, “can be stolen by computer hackers or carried out the door by an employee in a matter of minutes.” As a showpiece, Sessions—who would be fired by Trump six days later—unveiled an indictment alleging that spies had targeted an Idaho-based maker of semiconductors. This was the first such program to be dedicated to the actions of a single country. Trump reportedly said at the time, of people from China, “Almost every student that comes over to this country is a spy.” Tao was the first academic arrested under the Initiative.