China Initiative

Based on Wikipedia: China Initiative

The Spy Hunt That Wasn't

In 2018, the United States government launched a program to catch Chinese spies stealing American secrets. By 2022, it had ruined the careers of hundreds of scientists, contributed to a suicide, helped fuel a wave of anti-Asian violence, and caught almost no actual spies.

This is the story of the China Initiative.

The program's fundamental problem was simple: it was looking for something that mostly wasn't there. Of the roughly fifty cases the Department of Justice publicly pursued under the initiative, only three even alleged that secrets had actually been passed to Chinese agents. Most cases instead targeted scientists for paperwork violations—failing to properly disclose funding sources or affiliations on grant applications. These weren't cloak-and-dagger espionage operations. They were administrative oversights, often made by researchers who didn't fully understand the Byzantine disclosure requirements on American grant forms.

But the FBI and Department of Justice treated them like national security threats anyway.

Origins: Fear in the Trade War Era

The China Initiative emerged in November 2018, during the Trump administration's escalating trade war with China. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced it in one of his final acts before leaving office, promising "aggressive pursuit of Chinese commercial theft." The theory was straightforward: China was sending researchers and students to American universities and companies to steal technological innovations. The solution would be equally straightforward: prosecute anyone with ties to Chinese institutions.

There was a kernel of legitimate concern here. China does engage in economic espionage, as do many nations. The Chinese government's Thousand Talents Program actively recruits researchers with knowledge of cutting-edge technologies. Some participants in that program have genuinely violated laws about technology transfer or conflicts of interest.

But the China Initiative didn't carefully distinguish between actual espionage and bureaucratic paperwork problems. It painted with the broadest possible brush.

The Typical China Initiative Case

Here's what a typical China Initiative prosecution actually looked like: A professor at an American university had some affiliation with a Chinese institution—perhaps a visiting professorship, a consulting arrangement, or participation in a talent recruitment program. When applying for federal grants, they failed to fully disclose this relationship. Maybe they didn't understand the requirements. Maybe they forgot. Maybe the forms were confusing. Maybe their university never told them they needed to report it.

The FBI would investigate. Sometimes for years. In the case of Anming Hu, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Tennessee, agents surveilled him and his family for twenty-one months. They found no evidence of espionage. They prosecuted him anyway, for fraud and making false statements.

The charges weren't about stealing secrets. They were about not checking the right boxes on the right forms.

The Numbers Tell the Story

A Bloomberg News analysis of the program's fifty public indictments painted a damning picture. Thirty-eight percent of cases—the largest category—charged researchers with fraud for failing to disclose relationships with Chinese institutions. Not one of these researchers was found to have actually spied for China. Nearly half of those cases were eventually dropped.

About twenty percent of cases involved export control violations or sanctions issues. A smaller percentage concerned computer intrusions attributed to China. Only about one-fifth of indictments even alleged economic espionage, and most of those remained unresolved when the program ended.

The most revealing statistic: of twenty-eight prosecutions brought under the initiative, only eight resulted in convictions or guilty pleas. Of those convicted, only four were professors of Chinese descent. None were convicted of espionage or theft of trade secrets.

As one legal scholar at the University of California, Berkeley put it: "The government is settling for charges that have little to do with technology."

Anming Hu: The Case That Showed Everything

If you want to understand what went wrong with the China Initiative, look at Anming Hu.

Hu was an associate professor of mechanical, aerospace, and biomedical engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The FBI investigated him for nearly two years, watching his every move. They found nothing suggesting he had transferred any technology or secrets to China. But they prosecuted him anyway, on charges of fraud and making false statements related to his work with a Chinese university.

The first trial ended in a hung jury. The second ended in full acquittal. But what came out during those trials was far more disturbing than the original charges.

The FBI agent in charge, Kujtim Sadiku, didn't actually believe Hu was guilty of involvement with the Chinese military. But he created a PowerPoint presentation designed to make the university administration think otherwise. According to Hu's defense attorney, Sadiku "wanted a case badly enough that he went forward with questionable evidence."

The FBI obtained Hu's university documents without a warrant. They had no legal authority to take records from his personnel files. The agent leading the case later admitted he wasn't even familiar with many of the grant policies Hu was accused of violating.

The university cooperated fully with the investigation—hiding it from Hu, suspending him without pay the moment he was arrested, and providing his documents without requiring proper legal process.

One of the jurors in the first trial called it "the most ridiculous case" they had encountered. They described the charges as the result of "a series of plausible errors" by Hu, "a lack of support from the university, and ruthless ambition on behalf of the FBI."

When the judge finally dismissed the case, he wrote that "even viewing all the evidence in the light most favorable to the government, no rational jury could conclude that defendant acted with a scheme to defraud NASA."

Hu was vindicated. But he had lost years of his career. His research team shrank. He no longer takes on researchers or students from China—the risk is simply too great. He believes he would have progressed much further in his field had he not been caught up in the investigation.

Gang Chen and the MIT Pushback

Gang Chen's case showed something else: what happens when an institution actually stands behind its people.

Chen was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the world's most prestigious research universities. Federal prosecutors accused him of failing to disclose contracts, appointments, and awards from Chinese entities while accepting Department of Energy grants.

But MIT pushed back. Hard.

One hundred seventy faculty members signed a letter to MIT's president refuting the allegations against Chen. They pointed out that the contract in question wasn't a secret arrangement between Chen and China—it was a formal agreement between MIT itself and the Southern University of Science and Technology in China, worth twenty-five million dollars over five years. MIT knew about it. MIT negotiated it. MIT paid Chen's legal defense.

In January 2022, prosecutors recommended dropping all charges, and the court dismissed the case.

Chen was free. But like Hu, he remains afraid. He says he fears the government could use grant application forms against him again, the same way they did before. He's switched research topics to something with less obvious commercial applications. He avoids contact with researchers and students from China.

"The government has not done enough" to allay concerns, Chen told reporters. "It has only intensified."

The Human Cost

Statistics tell part of the story. Individual lives tell the rest.

An estimated two hundred fifty scientists lost their jobs because of the China Initiative. Many more had their careers derailed in ways that don't show up in any database. The climate of suspicion made it harder for researchers of Chinese descent to get federal funding, to collaborate with international colleagues, to do the kind of open scientific work that drives innovation.

Jane Ying Wu, a researcher at Northwestern University, died by suicide. Reports indicate her death was caused by the impact of a China Initiative investigation.

The prosecutions also contributed to something broader and uglier: a wave of violence against Asian Americans. Incidents of anti-Asian hate crimes rose sharply from 2019 to 2020, fueled partly by pandemic-related xenophobia but also by government rhetoric that portrayed Chinese people in America as potential threats.

Civil rights groups criticized the program as racially biased from the start. The very name—the "China Initiative"—suggested that an entire nationality was suspect. And the pattern of prosecutions bore this out: researchers were targeted not for what they had done, but for who they were connected to.

Xiaoxing Xi and the Cleared Who Can't Move On

Xiaoxing Xi was a physics professor at Temple University when the FBI arrested him in 2015, before the China Initiative formally began but in the same spirit. Agents accused him of sharing sensitive technology with China. The charges were eventually dropped—it turned out the FBI had misunderstood the physics involved. The diagrams Xi shared weren't secret weapons technology. They were openly published scientific knowledge.

Xi was never convicted of anything. But the arrest devastated his career. He sought damages for the harm he suffered, but his claims were dismissed in March 2022. Now he spends much of his time raising awareness about anti-Asian sentiment and following the cases of other scientists caught in similar situations.

His research team is smaller than it was before. The suspicion never fully goes away.

Why So Few Spies?

The China Initiative's defenders argued that espionage cases are simply harder to prove and take longer to investigate. Andrew Lelling, a former federal prosecutor in Boston, explained that the large number of disclosure-violation cases reflected the difficulty of building espionage cases, not the absence of espionage.

This is probably partly true. Spy cases are genuinely hard. But it doesn't explain the pattern of collapsed prosecutions, acquittals, and dropped charges. If these researchers were actually spies, or even plausible spies, more cases should have stuck.

What the evidence suggests instead is that the FBI cast an enormous net based largely on ethnicity and institutional affiliations, then scrambled to find charges that would stick. When they couldn't prove espionage—which was almost always—they settled for paperwork violations. And even those often couldn't withstand scrutiny in court.

The Economist, surveying the wreckage in 2024, called the China Initiative "a largely unsuccessful attempt to root out Chinese spies from industry and academia."

The End—Sort Of

On February 23, 2022, the Department of Justice announced it was ending the China Initiative. The official reason was "perceptions that it unfairly painted Chinese Americans and United States residents of Chinese origin as disloyal."

Perceptions. Not the reality that the program had failed. Not the acquittals and dropped charges. Not the ruined careers and the suicide. Perceptions.

The Assistant Attorney General for National Security, Matthew Olsen, was careful to note that ending the initiative didn't mean abandoning concerns about Chinese espionage. The DOJ would continue pursuing those threats, just under a different framework. Cases already in progress would continue.

But the official end changed less than it might seem.

The Chill That Remains

A year after the program officially ended, the scientific journal Nature reported that the "climate of fear and anxiety" among Chinese American scientists had not dissipated. Universities had become more active in "assisting investigations and pursuing potential wrongdoing." Scientists of Chinese descent still faced heightened scrutiny when applying for grants or collaborating with international colleagues.

Jenny Lee, a social scientist at the University of Arizona, observed that the end of the China Initiative provided "the illusion that scientists of Chinese descent would receive a reprieve from scrutiny." But the "chilling effect" remained. The government continued adopting policies that perpetuated the narrative that scientists from China were potential spies.

A survey published in February 2023 found a link between fear of racial profiling and a desire among scientists to leave America and return to China.

Which brings us to perhaps the initiative's most ironic consequence.

The Brain Drain to China

The China Initiative was supposed to protect American technological advantages from Chinese espionage. Instead, it may have accelerated the transfer of talent to China.

Facing investigation, prosecution, or simply a hostile climate, many influential Chinese American scientists decided to leave. They took their knowledge, their skills, and their research programs with them—often directly to Chinese institutions that welcomed them with open arms.

This is what security scholars call a "self-defeating policy." By treating an entire demographic as suspect, the United States pushed away exactly the people it needed to maintain its technological edge. The scientists who left weren't spies. They were people who had chosen to build their careers in America and were now choosing to build them elsewhere.

China didn't need to steal American innovation through espionage. It just needed to wait for America to drive its own scientists away.

Revival Attempts

The story isn't over. In September 2024, the House of Representatives passed two bills that critics describe as reviving the China Initiative under a different name. These bills were part of "China Week," a Republican-led effort to advance legislation focused on perceived Chinese threats.

The underlying concerns about Chinese espionage haven't disappeared, and neither has the political appetite for aggressive responses. Future administrations may well resurrect similar programs, potentially repeating the same mistakes.

What Went Wrong

The China Initiative failed for several interconnected reasons.

First, it conflated different threats. There's a meaningful difference between a foreign government directing an agent to steal specific secrets and a researcher who fails to properly disclose a visiting professorship on a grant application. By treating both as national security threats, the program wasted resources on minor violations while failing to catch actual spies.

Second, it relied on ethnic profiling. The program's very name announced that Chinese people were the target. This made it both legally vulnerable and practically counterproductive—alienating the scientific community while creating enormous political and diplomatic costs.

Third, it lacked transparency and clear definitions. The DOJ never precisely defined what constituted a "China Initiative case." Cases were added and removed from the program's webpage seemingly at random. One investigation into a turtle-smuggling ring was apparently included by mistake. This sloppiness made it impossible to evaluate the program's actual scope or effectiveness.

Fourth, it prioritized quantity over quality. The FBI opened thousands of investigations, creating pressure to bring cases even when the evidence was weak. Prosecutors pursued charges they knew wouldn't lead to espionage convictions, settling for administrative violations that could be chalked up as wins in internal metrics.

Finally, it ignored the costs of false accusations. Every researcher wrongly targeted—every career destroyed, every team disbanded, every scientist driven to leave the country—represented a loss not just for the individual but for American science. The program's architects apparently never calculated whether catching a few actual spies was worth destroying the careers of hundreds of innocent people.

The Deeper Problem

The China Initiative reveals something troubling about how governments respond to diffuse, long-term threats.

Chinese espionage is real. Economic competition between the United States and China is real. The desire to protect American technological advantages is understandable. But translating these legitimate concerns into effective policy is enormously difficult.

The temptation is always to do something visible. Arrest people. Announce crackdowns. Show that you're taking the threat seriously. But visible action isn't the same as effective action. A program that prosecutes hundreds of researchers for paperwork violations while catching almost no actual spies isn't protecting national security. It's security theater—a performance of toughness that makes the underlying problem worse.

Real counterintelligence requires careful targeting, reliable evidence, and proportionate responses. It means distinguishing between people who are actually threats and people who just happen to have the wrong ethnic background or institutional affiliations. It means accepting that you can't catch every spy, and that trying to do so will cause more harm than it prevents.

The China Initiative did none of these things. And the scientists who lost their careers, their research programs, and in one case their life, paid the price for that failure.

A Question of Trust

Perhaps the deepest damage was to trust itself.

Scientific research depends on openness—sharing findings, collaborating across borders, building on each other's work. It also depends on trust between researchers and the institutions that fund and employ them. The China Initiative poisoned both.

Chinese American scientists learned that their universities might secretly cooperate with FBI investigations. They learned that paperwork errors could become federal crimes. They learned that being cleared of charges didn't mean being free of consequences. They learned that the country where they had built their careers viewed them with suspicion.

That lesson won't be unlearned quickly. The next generation of Chinese students considering American universities will think twice. The researchers who might have immigrated will go elsewhere. The collaborations that might have happened won't.

The China Initiative ended in 2022. Its effects will linger for decades.