中文
By Anthony Moretti
The United States Justice Department has made a long overdue and smart decision: It has abandoned the ridiculously shortsighted and prejudiced China Initiative.
Good news? Yes. However, we need to be cautious before we celebrate.
The policy, birthed during the Donald Trump administration, was designed to counter the "espionage" authorized by China. At least that was the rationale the administration offered in justifying the program. Jeff Sessions was the U.S. attorney general when the initiative was unveiled in 2018, and he insisted the China Initiative was necessary because China was regularly robbing the U.S. of important scientific and technological ideas. Sessions said, "This theft is not just wrong; it poses a grave threat to our national security."
What followed was nothing less than a witch hunt, with U.S. law enforcement haphazardly charging Chinese with various crimes. Please remember that many of the Chinese who were indicted had lived in the U.S. for many years, and they had never faced scrutiny for their associations with leading U.S. universities and institutes.
One case after another associated with the China Initiative ended in failure, often with the U.S. government dropping the charges. But the financial and emotional damage felt by the affected Chinese scholars could not be erased with a simple "we are sorry." Far from it.
One of the most high profile cases involved Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Gang Chen, who stood accused of not fully disclosing ties to the Chinese government.
One month ago, the U.S. abruptly quit its legal pursuit of Chen. It did so in an embarrassing fashion, acknowledging "our office has concluded that we can no longer meet our burden of proof at trial."
Chen discussed his ordeal in an editorial in the Boston Globe. "For 371 days, my family and I went through a living hell," he wrote. "I came to America from China more than 30 years ago. It is where I have chosen to raise my family and contribute my life's work. The promise of this nation is that race is not supposed to matter. But it is hard for me to look at the China Initiative and conclude that was the case."
He is absolutely right: The China Initiative was established because the president of the United States hated China, loathed its leaders and distrusted any person of Chinese ancestry, especially if he or she held an important position in the U.S.
The China Initiative is dead, but the disbanding of bad government policy does not change the reality that the disdain for China remains everywhere throughout the U.S.
In announcing the end of the initiative, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen admitted the program had created a "harmful perception" about Chinese scholars and researchers working in the U.S. Olsen also said: "By picking one country, what the China Initiative did is it created in some ways a bit of a myopic approach" toward national security.
Calling the initiative "myopic" is perhaps the nicest thing that can be said about it. It must be remembered that the policy aided the White House in its virulent anti-China and anti-Asian rhetoric. The vile language did what it was supposed to do: increased attacks against Chinese and Asians throughout the U.S. The worst example was the murder of eight people, six of them Asian women, in Atlanta last year at the hands of a White man. No one should have been surprised by that violence; overall there have been at least 9,000 anti-Asian incidents in the U.S. since 2020.
And then there is the bitter truth that the federal government is not giving up the belief that China will stop at nothing to gain access to sensitive U.S. information. At the same time the China Initiative ended, a new program was started. According to the Washington Post, the "Strategy for Countering Nation-State Threats" will be "aimed at countering espionage, cyberattacks and other threats posed by a range of countries." The aforementioned Assistant Attorney General Olsen included China among those countries.
In other words, at the end of the day, this new "strategy" may well be nothing more than the rebranding of a policy of hate.
The author is an associate professor at the Department of Communication and Organizational Leadership at Robert Morris University.
