Axed China Initiative’s racial profiling legacy haunts scientists in US
- Controversial
policy targeting academics of Chinese heritage was shut down last year
but those affected say the scrutiny has never stopped
- Studies
confirm that many still feel under suspicion, with fear and anxiety
hampering their research, while some are returning to China
Illustration: Henry Wong
Physicist Xiaoxing Xi’s life changed forever when a team of armed FBI agents burst into his home in Philadelphia and rounded up his family at gunpoint.
Xi was arrested and charged with sharing sensitive US company technology on May 21, 2015 – three years before the Donald Trump administration launched its controversial China Initiative targeting scientists in the US for perceived connections with Beijing.
The charges against Xi – who was accused of trying to transfer information to China about the design of a pocket heater – were dropped four months later, but not before he lost his position as chairman of the physics department at the Philadelphia-based Temple University.
During the FBI’s investigation, Xi was also not allowed to appear on campus, apply for research grants or talk to his students, even privately.
“That’s a very traumatic experience,” Xi said. “Normally as a scientist, one would not expect such things to happen, so it was very shocking and there was no sign anything like that was about to happen. It was a very dramatic experience.”
Xi said the US government’s case was based on four emails sent from his Temple University address that had nothing to do with the pocket heater.
Instead, the messages were about academic collaborations based on Xi’s widely published research, a fact confirmed by affidavits provided by leading experts in his field.
Xi’s ordeal took place under former president Barack Obama, but the Trump administration’s initiative vastly broadened the scope of later investigations into scientists of Chinese heritage in the US.
About 150 academic scientists were openly investigated and two dozen hit with criminal charges before the initiative was eliminated by the justice department in February 2022.
But the scrutiny has never stopped and there is little sign that the Joe Biden administration is doing enough to repair the damage, scientists of Chinese heritage have told researchers.
The China Initiative, touted as a response to “economic espionage” by Beijing, was heavily criticised at the time as “unconstitutional” by the American Civil Liberties Union, which said it was based on racial profiling because it “singled out scientists based on their race, ethnicity or national origin”.
A lasting impact of the initiative is the widespread fear still reported by many scientists with Chinese heritage, according to a study by researchers from Princeton University, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The study, published last month in the National Academy of Sciences peer-reviewed journal PNAS, found general feelings of fear and anxiety had led many of the scientists to consider leaving the US or refrain from applying for federal grants.
More than 70 per cent of the 1,304 respondents to an online survey run by the researchers from December 2021 to March 2022 said they did not feel safe as an academic researcher of Chinese origin in the US.
The same survey found 65 per cent were worried about collaborations with China, while 45 per cent of respondents who said they had received federal funding in the past preferred to avoid applying for grants. A total of 61 per cent said they had thought about leaving the US.
Xi said he understood “perfectly” the fear expressed by the survey’s respondents. “The fear, from my perspective, [is that] everything I do every day could be twisted by the government to charge me. Psychologically, that’s a very scary thing. It’s making my life very stressful.”
Before he became a target for the FBI, Xi’s research was funded by nine federal grants and he had 15 people on his team. Today, Xi receives one grant for a much smaller focus of study, with just one researcher to help him.
“I had a broader research field at that time, but now it’s just one subject. A lot of research I was doing at that time I’m not doing right now,” Xi said. He added that he now does everything very carefully “so as not to get into trouble”.
MIT mechanical engineering professor Gang Chen – who was arrested in January 2021 under the China Initiative and had his charges dismissed one year later – said he was afraid to apply for federal grants because of anxieties around being racially profiled.
“Basically, I’m done with federal funding,” Chen told NBC Asian America in August. He has also shifted from nanotechnologies with obvious commercial applications to more fundamental research, according to the February edition of Nature.
Another study, published in March by The Review of Higher Education, found a “consistent and statistically significant pattern” of racial profiling of Chinese and other Asian scientists.
The researchers, from the University of Arizona, surveyed about 2,000 scientists from the top US research universities and concluded that concerns about racial profiling remained, despite the end of the China Initiative.
“Chinese scientists in the US continue to be investigated as criminals, not based on espionage but oftentimes reduced to tax-related charges,” the researchers said.
Lead author Jenny Lee said there was no sign of “any governmental action to undo the harmful effects” of the China Initiative.
Universities in the US are also in the difficult position of keeping up with disclosure guidelines while continuing to support their scientists in overseas collaborations, according to Lee.
“So institutions are taking on a rather conservative approach, as if the China Initiative is still in effect and they still need to closely monitor conflicts of interest.”
The study found that 42 per cent of Chinese scientists feel racially profiled by the US government, compared to 4.7 per cent of non-Asian scientists. The researchers also identified a significant relationship between feeling racially profiled and considering leaving the country.
“To everyday scientists who were seeing these charges on [news] front pages, that gave them a different view of their work, where it wasn’t just about research. It was also high-risk research in ways they didn’t think about before,” Lee said.
“Many actually believe that it would be less risky to work in China, even under the Chinese Communist Party, than to work in the United States which values academic freedom.”
One Chinese-American scientist who recently returned to China, because of the initiative’s impact, said the aim of the initiative had been to create fear among scientists, as part of a US effort to contain China’s scientific progress.
“[The US] has achieved its purpose. US-based scientists are coming back to China and those in China are afraid to go back to the US,” said the scientist, who requested anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity. “It’s happening every day.”
But some experts argue that cutting off relations with Chinese academia undermines Washington’s intention of competing and winning a technology race against Beijing.
The US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine warned last year that the approach is likely to “damage and slow the rate of innovation” in the United States more than it will constrain the advances made by other countries.
“In today’s interdependent, global innovation system, the greatest threat is that the US will inadvertently weaken its innovation ecosystem while other countries continue to emulate the actions that have historically yielded US advantage in technology development and commercialisation,” its 2022 report said.
For the anonymous scientist now back in China, there is already evidence that “the US has huge, strategic concerns”.
“China has many talents and funding now. In those high-quality journals, about one-third of the authors are Chinese researchers,” he said.
At the same time, research grants in the US have failed to keep up with rising costs, remaining broadly unchanged for the past 30 years. A grant that once funded the running of a lab can only provide one researcher now, the scientist said.
China, which has been the largest producer of scientific papers since 2017, recently surpassed the US on another milestone, according to Japan’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy.
A report published by the institute last year showed China was responsible for more of the top 1 per cent of the world’s most frequently cited research between 2018 and 2020 than any other country.
Junming Huang, an associate research scholar at Princeton University and co-author of the PNAS study, said the US should “continue to welcome and attract Chinese scientists to maintain [its] global leadership in science and technology in the long run”.
“A key lesson we can learn from the China Initiative is we cannot apply a broad brush to solve problems and apply policies. We need surgical precision and data-based solutions that offer genuine steps moving forward to tackle specific problems,” he said.
Despite the challenges reported by scientists of Chinese heritage in the US, not everyone is returning to China.
A PhD candidate at the University of Washington, who asked for anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, said she would not be going back to China any time soon.
The researcher said it was her personal interest to explore cutting-edge technologies and their diverse directions. “From this point of view, I think the US and Europe remain the most open places at the moment.”
Meanwhile, Xi’s efforts to seek redress from the courts for his experience continues.
A lawsuit filed against the lead FBI agent and others in 2017, alleging that they “made knowingly or recklessly false statements” to support their investigation and prosecution was dismissed by a district court in 2021.
Xi appealed the decision last year and in May the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled his case had been wrongfully dismissed. Xi and his family are waiting to see if the US government will appeal the ruling and move the case forward, he said.
In written testimony presented in 2021, Xi said that “whether the US and China are in a cold war or hot war, it is wrong for law enforcement to profile Chinese scientists based on where they come from”.
“All Chinese professors, scientists and students are not non-traditional collectors, or spies, for China,” he said.
Speaking to the South China Morning Post last week, Xi said the China Initiative had been based on the assumption that Chinese scientists were “suspected of spying for China”.
“That’s the fundamental reason for all these cases and all the investigations that have happened … In a sense, ‘presumed guilty until proven innocent’. This condition has not changed,” he said.
Additional reporting by Richard Zhang