- The Justice Department is shifting its approach to countering China's economic espionage and trade secret theft.
- The so-called "China Initiative" drew criticism from civil rights groups and the academic community.
- A top Biden appointee said the current threat landscape demands a "broader approach."
The Justice Department is ending the so-called "China Initiative," a Trump-era effort to combat Chinese national security threats — one that civil rights advocates, business groups, and universities criticized as fomenting anti-Asian bias and stifling scientific research.
In a speech Wednesday, a top Justice Department official said the Chinese government "stands apart" from other nation-state actors in the threat it presents. But, following a three-month review, the Justice Department determined that "this initiative is not the right approach."
"Instead, the current threat landscape demands a broader approach," said Assistant Attorney General Matt Olsen, the Senate-confirmed head of the Justice Department's national security division, during a speech at George Mason University.
By grouping cases under the "China Initiative" banner, Olsen added, the Justice Department had fostered the harmful perception that it views "people with racial, ethnic, or familial ties to China differently."
Olsen's comments come at a time when anti-Asian violence is spiking across the United States. Washington, DC, had the nation's highest anti-Asian hate crime rate in 2021, according to a recent study from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
The Justice Department launched the China Initiative in 2018 under the leadership of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former Republican senator from Alabama who framed the enforcement push as an effort to address the growing threat of Chinese espionage and trade secret theft.
Sessions, who garnered a reputation as an immigration hardliner in the Senate, emphasized in a speech that the Chinese government was targeting not only US defense and intelligence agencies but also research labs and universities.
"We are here today to say: enough is enough," Sessions said in November 2018, a week before former President Donald Trump fired him. "We're not going to take it anymore."
In the years that followed, the Justice Department brought prosecutions against academics and researchers alleging that they lied to the US government about their Chinese affiliations. The Justice Department scored some victories in court, winning a conviction as recently as December against a Harvard University chemistry professor who was accused of lying to the US government about his participation in the Chinese government's Thousand Talents program.
But another case ended in an acquittal. The Justice Department has dropped several other cases, including the prosecution of Gang Chen, an Massachusetts Institute of Technology mechanical engineering professor who was accused of hiding his China ties.
Prosecutors in that case withdrew charges after the US Energy Department said his undisclosed affiliations with China would not have affected the agency's review of a grant application he filed in 2017. That high-profile setback and others fueled accusations that the Justice Department was pursuing racist and overzealous prosecutions.
Olsen on Wednesday said the Justice Department would not retreat entirely from cases involving the academic and research community. But he said the Justice Department's national security division will take an "active supervisory role" over such cases to assess the strength of the evidence, "as well as the nexus to our national or economic security."
He raised the prospect of treating some grant fraud cases as civil matters in the future.
"Make no mistake, we will be relentless in defending our country from China. The department will continue to prioritize and aggressively counter the actions of the [Chinese] government that harm our people and our institutions," Olsen said. "But our review convinced us that a new approach is needed to tackle the most severe threats from a range of hostile nation-states."