Why Trump’s anti-spyware ‘China Initiative’ is collapsing

WASHINGTON – After conducting days of surveillance, performing DNA testing on a hard drive taken from a dumpster, and researching personal emails, FBI officials became convinced the visiting UCLA researcher , Guan Lei, belonged to the Chinese military and could rob US industry. secrets.

They couldn’t find any evidence of espionage but obtained an indictment against Guan for allegedly lying about his secret connections to the People’s Liberation Army. He was charged with visa fraud, misrepresentation and destruction of evidence.

For more than eight months, the 30-year-old computer science doctoral student sat in a cell at the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles awaiting trial.

But in a sudden turnaround in late July, US officials summarily dismissed all charges. The Justice Department gave no explanation, issuing a brief statement saying it had reassessed the case, along with several others, and determined that “it is now in the interests of justice” to drop the case.

Guan was one of five similar lawsuits against Chinese researchers – all but one in California – that were dropped over a two-day period in July. Earlier this month, justice officials dismissed charges against Chinese-American researcher Qing Wang in Cleveland, accused of failing to disclose his affiliation with a Chinese university from which he had received funding. Wang had worked for the Cleveland Clinic for 21 years.

And this month, a federal judge acquitted Anming Hu, a Chinese-Canadian engineering professor in Tennessee, on charges stemming from allegations he concealed his joint university appointment in China to secure research funding from the NASA.

The seven failed prosecutions were part of the so-called China Initiative, a massive program launched in November 2018 under Donald Trump’s administration to tackle trade secret theft, hacking and economic espionage.

Michael German, a former FBI agent who is a member of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Freedom and National Security program, said recent layoffs revealed how weak many cases were.

“Clearly, the FBI and the Justice Department are under pressure to produce indictments against people with a so-called ‘connection to China’ to match political rhetoric sensationalizing the threat of espionage from the United States. Chinese government, ”he said. “Even FBI analysts seem to have felt that investigators’ efforts to link these defendants to the Chinese military were outdated. “

So what went wrong?

The problem was and remains serious. China’s history of stealing trade secrets and other valuable information that American companies have spent millions of dollars to develop has been a major stimulus for the virtual cold war that unfolded between Washington and Beijing. . This has put increasing pressure on government officials to do more to stem the flow.

While much remains unknown about the Trump-era campaign, it appears that a major issue has been its decision to focus on Chinese nationals and Chinese Americans working at major US research universities.

Not only did this approach fail to find convincing evidence of espionage – most of the charges involved making false statements to government authorities, or tax and visa evasion – but the focus on prosecuting a small number of individuals for academic fraud seemed too small. ladder to make a dent in a massive problem – the equivalent of trying to win the war on drugs by rounding up a handful of street dealers.

“What I see from the outside is that the office [FBI] and the Justice Department has almost systematically prosecuted cases for something other than economic espionage, so they don’t add much to the wealth of information about what China is trying to do. They also don’t pursue the more serious cases, ”said Mark Allen Cohen, former senior intellectual property attaché at the US Embassy in Beijing and now senior researcher at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.

Additionally, FBI tactics have struck many Asian Americans as brutal and discriminatory. The campaign came at a time when Asian Americans across the country were under attack with hate crimes.

Defending the program, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that Beijing, in its efforts to overtake the US economy, has resorted to industrial espionage using “non-traditional collectors” such as researchers and graduate students.

He told a China Initiative conference last year that the FBI had conducted around 1,000 investigations into China’s attempt to steal US-based technology. In April, the director told Congress that the office had around 2,000 open cases of economic espionage that “link to the Chinese government,” representing a 1,300% increase in recent years.

But in the nearly three years since the program’s launch, the China Initiative has only brought 12 lawsuits against people at academic institutions and secured the convictions of four people, according to Justice Department statistics provided to Los Angeles Times.

In none of these four cases has the government provided evidence of economic espionage or the theft of trade secrets or intellectual property.

In addition to academic cases, justice officials have obtained four convictions or guilty pleas in 16 prosecutions relating to cases of economic espionage and theft of trade secrets since November 2018.

Various lawmakers, academics and rights groups across the United States have called for an end to the initiative. They say the program has cast unfair suspicions on people of Chinese and Asian descent and contributed to racial profiling on campuses, chilled international research collaboration and, in the case of Hu and several others, ruined careers and personal lives.

“I think they are just determined to look for spies,” said Representative Judy Chu, D-Calif., Who, as chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, brought her concerns to President Joe Biden. .

Temple University physics professor Xiaoxing Xi was arrested at his home in Penn Valley early on May 21, 2015 and charged with being a spy for China. Four months later, the government abruptly dropped the charges against the naturalized US citizen and world-renowned superconductivity expert. Xi then sued the FBI in 2017, alleging he was targeted because of his ethnicity. This trial is still ongoing.

Justice officials said the US government must be aggressive to counter the serious economic threat posed by China.

In a statement attributed to spokesperson Wyn Hornbuckle, the department said it takes the issue of increasing hate crimes targeting Asians in America seriously and is working with communities to improve its efforts.

Biden didn’t say anything specifically about the China Initiative.

Daniel Olmos, a Silicon Valley general counsel who worked on the first case of Chinese American economic espionage to stand trial by jury, said he had seen a dramatic increase in the number of professors and Chinese-born researchers who had been targeted and advised up to 10 of them himself. In almost all of these cases, he said, individuals were fired or forced to leave.

“I just think it’s a shakedown, and the end of the game feels like getting them fired,” Olmos said of the China Initiative’s efforts at universities.

The Justice Department’s decision to dismiss the charges against Guan and four others came after internal reports from FBI analysts noted that Chinese citizens could be affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army civilian service and that , in itself, “remains an unreliable indicator of the nefarious obscuration of its army. affiliations, let alone an indicator of technology transfer activity.

In Guan’s case, FBI agents built their case after learning that Guan had received a PLA-related scholarship and discovered photos of Guan’s academic advisor in China in full military uniform.

In a late-night interview, officers repeatedly insisted on Guan when he said he wore a green uniform for about a month of military training for students at his school, the National University of Technology. defense, according to an FBI interview transcript.

At UCLA, Guan worked in a lab supervised by then math professor Wotao Yin, who told the FBI that Guan was not working on any U.S. government-funded project and that no research was worth it. worth to be undertaken.

“Guan wrote code, always from public datasets. … Guan’s code was the most advanced, if anything, people would steal Guan’s code and not the code created by others, ”Yin said, according to FBI interview notes.

Guan, who insisted he had no connection with the Chinese military, was both surprised and relieved when he was released. But before returning home, he filed with the court a response to the government’s motion to dismiss.

“It really is a terrible experience for me,” he said.