
On January 20, 2021 — almost one year exactly after the high-profile arrest of Harvard University’s Charles Lieber — the Department of Justice announced the indictment of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor, this time rocking the PhDs on the other end of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Gang Chen, a tenured mechanical engineering professor at MIT, was accused, among other things, of failing to disclose $19 million that he had received from a Chinese university.1MIT said that the $19 million went not to Chen but to MIT, see here At first glance, the case had striking similarities to Lieber’s: like Lieber, Chen was known for his work on nanotechnology, a field, which was identified in China’s 2016 Five-Year Plan as a priority, that manipulates infinitesimal matter — such as atoms or individual molecules — for industrial purposes. While Lieber was working on “nanowires” — which can be used both in the brain to repair human neurons or in semiconductors to make chips even smaller — Chen’s focus was on nanoengineered materials and thermal heat transfer; think, energy-saving technology. Both men had done work with the U.S. government, and by allegedly failing to disclose their ties to and funding from Chinese universities, both men were accused of being complicit in China’s large-scale technology transfer and theft of American intellectual property — theft that the U.S. government says costs taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
Chen’s indictment fell under the “China Initiative” — the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) three-year-old program designed to stop China’s economic espionage, hacking and tech transfer — but reaction to it was noticeably different from other cases, including Lieber’s. Almost immediately, Chen’s arrest elicited outrage throughout the MIT community. The 57-year-old, who was born in China and is now a naturalized U.S. citizen, had taught at the university since 2001 and enjoyed a reputation as a friendly, accessible professor — one known, in particular, for hosting Thanksgiving dinners for his students. While the arrest of Lieber stunned the Harvard community and prompted plenty of questions, it also served to prepare Chen’s colleagues to take action.

“If we don’t protest this case,” Yoel Fink, a materials science professor at MIT, recalls predicting at an all-hands faculty meeting in the aftermath of the arrest of Lieber at Harvard, “it will come knocking at our door.”
According to Fink, he and Chen weren’t particularly close — they’d had, Fink guesses, perhaps a dozen conversations throughout their time at MIT — but Fink was increasingly alarmed by U.S. government pressure on American academics suspected of spying for China. Chen’s arrest proved to be the last straw. Within three days, Fink had recruited dozens of MIT colleagues to collaborate on an open letter, addressed to the university’s president, L. Rafael Reif, protesting Chen’s arrest.2President Reif wrote his own open letter on the issue and MIT’s collaboration with a Chinese university here. The letter stated that Chen’s 2018 funding from SUSTech, the Chinese university, had gone directly to MIT — not Chen. A separate letter, sent by academics at universities across the country, said the grant application Chen had submitted to the U.S. Department of Energy had asked for, among other things, a two-page “biographical sketch” of Chen’s work, not his full curriculum vitae — a 123-page document easily found online, which includes numerous references to Chinese funding.
With Chen’s case still pending, Chen and MIT declined to comment on the record for this story. But Fink says it seemed obvious that Chen had no intention of concealing a nefarious relationship with a Chinese school. “Criminal justice is about criminal intent,” he says. “It’s not about mistakes.”3Fink and MIT professor Yasheng Huang also published this essay about the Gang Chen case in the MIT Technology Review
Many of his colleagues agreed. By January 21, Fink’s letter had close to 200 signatures. And shortly after Chen’s arrest, MIT told its faculty that the university would fund Chen’s legal defense, a sign of its strong support. The public outcry over Chen, combined with the acquittal of Anming Hu, another China Initiative target, some months later, seemed to mark a turning point for American universities, which have begun to publicly question the merits of the China Initiative.
“In many cases, the China Initiative hasn’t found anything. And they’ve treated these people outrageously,” says Madelyn Ross, who until recently was the executive director of the China Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “We looked ridiculous to the world with the way we were acting, and the hyperbole that the FBI and DoJ were spouting.”
The perceived failures of the China Initiative are also calling into question larger assumptions about the nature of U.S.-China competition.
“There’s an underlying assumption in Washington among politicians of both parties that any improvement in China’s scientific and research capacity to innovate is bad for the United States,” says Mary Gallagher, a professor of political science and director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. “But that puts universities in a difficult position because we almost exclusively operate on open access.”
Universities across the country are now demanding a reckoning with the China Initiative in the name of preserving that open access. In September, 177 faculty members at Stanford University published an open letter of their own, addressed to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, arguing that the China Initiative should be terminated. The letter has since been co-signed by hundreds of professors at schools like UC Berkeley, Temple University and Princeton University.
Opponents of the China Initiative claim that, rather than identifying national security threats, the DoJ has instead arrested scientists for routine administrative violations. In the three years since the program launched, an investigation by MIT Technology Review found that the DoJ has secured indictments against some 20 U.S.-based academics — only one of whom was formally accused of stealing secrets.4Readers can also download the spreadsheet the MIT Technology Review created to see a list of China Initiative cases and the details. See here. Like Gang Chen, others detained under the initiative have been charged with grant fraud, lying on tax forms and failing to disclose affiliations with Chinese institutions. So far, only four have pleaded guilty or been convicted.
While the consequences of these arrests are catastrophic for the individuals accused, the academic community says the damage goes far beyond personal lives. Stanford’s open letter argues that the China Initiative has induced a “chilling effect,” not only cooling vital academic exchange between the United States and China but, because many of the cases have targeted Asian Americans, deterring talented Chinese scholars from pursuing their careers in the United States — an essential part of why American universities enjoy such sterling international reputations in the first place.
“It’s completely myopic: We’re focusing entirely on the costs without discussing the benefit of the situation, which is that China’s best and brightest are coming here,” says Rory Truex, assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. “By amping up China’s threat to U.S. campuses, we’ll create a situation where China’s best and brightest go to Europe or even stay at Tsinghua or Fudan universities — and what better way to accelerate China’s technological rise?”
By amping up China’s threat to U.S. campuses, we’ll create a situation where China’s best and brightest go to Europe or even stay at Tsinghua or Fudan universities — and what better way to accelerate China’s technological rise?
Rory Truex, assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University
Supporters of the China Initiative don’t dispute that the arrests have induced a chilling effect; given the ongoing and well-documented national security threats of economic espionage from China, instilling more caution and due diligence was part of the goal. They also argue that American universities have failed to monitor their ties with Chinese universities that strengthen an authoritarian government and work closely with China’s People’s Liberation Army.5Last week, an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal asked, “Is MIT’s research helping the Chinese military?” But as the Initiative has drifted to focus less on obvious issues of national security and more on issues of “research integrity,” even Andrew Lelling, a former U.S. attorney and a key architect of the Initiative, has said the DoJ should “revamp, and shut down, parts of the program, to avoid needlessly chilling scientific and business collaborations with Chinese partners.”
“The academic aspect of the China Initiative has all but run its course,” Lelling tells The Wire. “Because look what’s happened here: Every major research institution is aware of the problem now, and what the stakes are, and that’s because the government has made them aware.”
Still, the China Initiative has been successful in highlighting how widespread grant fraud and non-disclosures are in the academic community — an issue that many say is more serious than simple clerical errors. “We can only maintain the openness of the system when everyone plays by the rules,” Rebecca Spyke Keiser, Chief of Research Security Strategy and Policy at National Science Foundation (NSF), a U.S. government grant-making agency, said during a 2020 presentation to the University of Virginia. Keiser won’t comment specifically on the China Initiative, but she has made clear that any chill felt among researchers is hopefully only a short-term consequence in pursuit of a much larger goal: saving scientific international collaboration.
Indeed, while the China Initiative has borne the brunt of the public outcry, agencies across the U.S. government — from the NSF to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to others — say the open academic system needs better protections in order to survive. Many have updated disclosure processes to help researchers understand best practices, and many universities have taken it upon themselves to revamp policies and institute new guidelines to avoid undue foreign influence. The motivation, they say, is to preserve the integrity of the research process.
The big question now is if continuing to arrest professors for flawed paperwork helps to achieve that.
‘A WIN-WIN ENTERPRISE’
In the fall of 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Vannevar Bush, an engineer and head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Development, for advice on how to transition America’s wartime scientific engine to a sustainable enterprise in the years to come. According to science historian William A. Blanpied, Bush’s subsequent report, Science: The Endless Frontier, established the then-novel precedent that the U.S. government had “the right and responsibility to support self-directed research by academic scientists.”
“We must proceed with caution in carrying over the methods which work in wartime to the very different conditions of peace,” wrote Bush. “We must remove the rigid controls which we have had to impose, and recover freedom of inquiry and that healthy competitive scientific spirit so necessary for expansion of the frontiers of scientific knowledge.”

While the report focused mainly on developing America’s domestic scientific capacity, it also called for “the government to provide an active role in promoting the international flow in scientific information.” The integral part that Albert Einstein and other immigrants played in the American victory in World War II provided ample evidence that attracting global talent could be a significant source of national strength.
This openness-as-advantage argument enjoyed widespread consensus, but the onset of the Cold War rapidly introduced a xenophobic element. In 1955, for instance, at the height of the country’s “red scare,” President Dwight Eisenhower deported Qian Xuesen, a celebrated rocket scientist at the California Institute of Technology, due to his attendance at Communist Party meetings in the U.S. many years before. Qian subsequently became a national hero for helping launch China’s nuclear weapons and space programs. Wang Zuoyue, a historian at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, says Sinophobia at American universities during the Maoist period grew so intense that, “out of necessity, Chinese faculty in the U.S. kept a low profile,” and spoke only English to one another in order to avoid suspicion.

The threat of Communists, particularly from the Soviet Union, stealing secrets from universities led to another Vannevar Bush-esque study in 1982. Led this time by the National Science Foundation, the study6It was backed by the Department of Defense and chaired by Dale Corson, a nuclear physicist. concluded that, in spite of this risk of intellectual property transfer, maintaining an open atmosphere at universities remained crucial.
“[Government controls] can also be seen to weaken both military and economic capacities by restricting the mutually beneficial interaction of scientific investigators, inhibiting the flow of research results into military and civilian technology, and lessening the capacity of universities to train advanced researchers,” the report said. “Finally, the imposition of such controls may well erode important educational and cultural values.”
This hands-off sentiment continued, relatively unchallenged, until only recently. After 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was seemingly no down-side to America’s open academic framework. Disclosures about funding and potential conflicts of interest, while always required, hardly felt like a national security concern and were seen by many researchers as an afterthought.
Even as Chinese students started enrolling at American universities in increasing numbers over the next few decades, the U.S. government, operating under a bipartisan policy of engagement with China, saw the surge in foreign students as a largely positive development. Between 2010 and 2019, according to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors report, the number of Chinese students in the United States more than tripled, from 120,000 to 372,000 — and now represents more than a third of the total population of international students in the country. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of Chinese students — more than 90 percent — choose to stay in the U.S. following the completion of their degrees, pursuing promising careers in both academia and industry.
“There was very much a notion for several decades that this was a win-win enterprise in terms of trade, investment, and education,” says Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The idea was that the Chinese would come here, they’d help fund American universities, a lot of Chinese would stay and become part of our research enterprise, some would go back with warmer feelings toward the United States, and this would deepen economic collaboration between the two countries. All of that, of course, is now up for grabs.”
THE CHANGING CALCULUS
The tide began to turn in 2009 with the realization that China often utilizes “non-traditional collectors,” or individuals outside of traditional intelligence services, to do its bidding. In that year, the FBI established the first economic espionage unit and, in 2010, successfully convicted its first case: a Chinese-American Boeing employee, Dongfan “Greg” Chung, who was found to be squirreling away top secret plans in his attic to pass along to his Chinese contacts at the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC).
Also around this time, China amended its Thousand Talents program — which aimed to reverse China’s brain drain by recruiting top university talent — to offer a part-time option. Before this, despite Chinese universities offering starting salaries often three or four times as high as they are in the U.S. to foreign researchers, very few chose to live and work in China full-time. But the part-time option proved wildly popular, especially for academics with summers off: William Hannas, lead analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) and co-author of China’s Quest for Foreign Technology, estimates that more than 10,000 foreign researchers and scientists have been involved, at one point or another, with Thousand Talents.

The U.S. was aware of Thousand Talents, but still cautiously hands-off: The FBI, for instance, talked to Zhang Shoucheng, the Stanford physicist who killed himself in 2018 amid increasing scrutiny over his China connections, about his involvement in Thousand Talents around 2010 but didn’t interrogate him.
Observers say that the U.S. government started looking more closely at the open-ended atmosphere of academic research as the calculus of risk and reward began to change. Around 2015, for example, it was becoming clear that China was emerging as a “near peer” competitor militarily as well as a formidable challenger to the U.S. economically. But things really came to a head in 2018. In June of that year, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing originally entitled “Thousand Talents: China’s Campaign to Infiltrate and Exploit U.S. Academia.” And that October, a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that dozens of Chinese military and defense-industrial scientists and engineers had used false credentials to study abroad and conduct research in sensitive defense-related technology areas. On November 1, then- U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the China Initiative.
While the goal of the initiative was to “identify priority Chinese trade theft cases,” Sessions also said that Chinese espionage “is not just taking place against traditional targets . . . but against targets like research labs and universities, and we see Chinese propaganda disseminated on our campuses.”
As part of the initiative’s roll out, the U.S. government dispatched FBI agents and U.S. attorneys to universities across the country. It was, in part, an outreach mission, designed to help faculty understand the new threat from China — as well as what was, and wasn’t, acceptable under the DoJ’s new rules. But it wasn’t until the arrests started happening, some observers say, that the severity of the situation sank in.
“The last two years have been a wake-up call to the academic community about the importance of good disclosure, conflict of interest, and conflict of commitment practices,” says Princeton’s Truex.
While critics of the China Initiative lament the fact that academics have been the sacrificial lambs in getting this message across, Andrew Lelling, the key architect of the China Initiative, maintains it was a necessary step.
“There is still a policy question of how much collaboration we should allow with the Chinese,” he says. “But before we can tackle that question, we need to know how much collaboration we actually have with the Chinese. The China Initiative efforts on the academic side have gone a long way to increasing transparency in that area. Now we have a better picture — and that was the point.”
‘THE FREEDOM TO OPERATE’

Both the U.S. government and American universities agree on the virtue of increased transparency. But determining precisely what information should be disclosed, what the punishment for noncompliance should be, and who should decide is far more difficult.
“The issue here is whether non-disclosure is a crime, or if it is a matter of what we call ‘academic integrity,’” says Yasheng Huang, a professor of global economics and management at MIT and a vocal critic of the U.S. government’s current approach. “These cases should be subject to administrative actions by funding agencies and universities. There are certainly problems here, and these problems should be corrected. But whether or not people should go to jail over them is a separate issue.”
There are growing calls to dismantle the China Initiative. First, observers say that because of inadequate language skills and subject matter expertise, the FBI and DoJ are woefully inept at handling these cases.
Last February, for instance, the DoJ announced the arrest of Anming Hu, a naturalized Canadian who served as a professor in the department of mechanical, aerospace and biomedical engineering at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Hu, who’d been recruited to the university in 2013 and had done work for NASA, was accused on six counts of wire fraud and of making false disclosures. The university fired him immediately. During his trial in 2021, his FBI agent, Kutjim Sadiku, acknowledged that he had used Google Translate on a form in order to implicate Hu with the Chinese military. After an initial jury deadlocked, Hu was acquitted in September and recently, his old university offered to reinstate him — but not before he endured an ordeal that tarnished his reputation and left his family’s finances in desperate shape.
Sadiku’s admission that he had used Google Translate to build a case against Hu not only reinforced the perception that the DoJ lacks expertise but also that the FBI is overzealous in its pursuit of ‘academic integrity’ cases while ignoring more serious national security concerns.
“When the Justice Department creates something like the China Initiative, it sends a message to every FBI office and every U.S. attorney that they have to have cases to fit that frame,” says Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now at NYU’s Brennan Center of Justice. “There are 12,000 FBI agents in the world. That’s not a lot, and now you have 10 to 20 agents wasting their time prosecuting some Chinese-American scientist because he doesn’t fill out a form.”
There are 12,000 FBI agents in the world. That’s not a lot, and now you have 10 to 20 agents wasting their time prosecuting some Chinese-American scientist because he doesn’t fill out a form.
Michael German, a former FBI agent, now at NYU’s Brennan Center of Justice
Moreover, while the DoJ touts its more successful cases — such as an Ohio State University professor who pled guilty to using more than $4 million in NIH grants to help China develop expertise in rheumatology and immunology — observers say these few wins don’t make up for the atmosphere of fear that the China Initiative has created. As Emily Weinstein, a research analyst at CSET, notes, simply “labeling it the ‘China Initiative’ has stoked the fire of racism and xenophobia.”
“There are many prospective Chinese students who do not want to come to the United States because they see the atmosphere here as hostile and not welcoming,” says Xiaoxing Xi, a Temple University professor whose own elaborate arrest, in 2015, attracted widespread condemnation. The FBI accused Xi of sharing the design of a pocket heater used in superconductor research with Chinese colleagues, but then dropped all the charges when experts in the field pointed out that the shared designs were for something else entirely and not a restricted technology.
“If you try to guard your toothbrushes and diamonds with equal vigor, you’re going to lose fewer toothbrushes and more diamonds,” notes Claude Canizares, a professor of experimental physics at MIT.
The Biden administration has taken small steps to try and temper the Initiative. In recent months, it has made moves to develop clearer guidelines for disclosing external ties, saying that the federal government would have a consistent policy for oversight and enforcement. And in January, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Justice was weighing an amnesty program for researchers to declare past receipt of foreign funding.
If you try to guard your toothbrushes and diamonds with equal vigor, you’re going to lose fewer toothbrushes and more diamonds.
Claude Canizares, a professor of experimental physics at MIT
“We need policies and processes that are clear and uniform,” Eric Lander, President Biden’s science advisor, wrote in a memo published in early August, “so that well-intentioned researchers can easily and properly comply, and those with dishonest or malicious intent have little excuse for their actions.”
Improvements to disclosure and greater knowledge among university administrators will certainly help. But even if it were possible for the government to construct a system that ensured perfect compliance from academics and rooted out academic fraud, the policy question that Lelling referred to remains: How much exchange should the U.S. have with China?
Donald Trump’s administration, notably, suggested that the answer was close to zero: In 2018, Politico reported that President Trump told a donor that “almost every student” from China was a spy. It was also revealed that year that Trump endorsed a plan devised by his hardline anti-immigrant adviser Stephen Miller to block Chinese students from studying in the U.S. altogether. (They were apparently talked out of it by Terry Branstad, Trump’s U.S. ambassador to China.)
This view was extreme — observers say the vast majority of Chinese students are studying in the U.S. for legitimate reasons — but many say the threat that motivated it remains real. Anna Puglisi, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s CSET and co-author of China’s Quest for Foreign Technology, notes that the Chinese government is capable of exerting pressure on even the most well-intentioned Chinese students once they’re abroad.
“We can’t even begin to imagine the kind of pressure the Chinese government can bring to bear on its own citizens, both internally and externally,” she says. “They don’t have the option of not doing what the Chinese government asks of them. Look at Jack Ma. He’s a billionaire, right? And they can put pressure on him. How is some graduate student or postdoc or visiting professor going to resist?”
Still, observers say that any U.S. government efforts that end up — either intentionally or unintentionally — curbing Chinese interest in U.S. universities could backfire.
“I think the ability of the United States to attract and retain foreign talent, including Chinese talent, is perhaps the biggest asymmetric advantage that the U.S. has over China,” says Remco Zwetsloot, a research fellow at Georgetown’s CSET.
This view is why, ultimately, many academics say the U.S. may have to tolerate a certain amount of intellectual property theft in order to maintain the openness in its university system that, since Vannevar Bush’s time, has been integral to the country’s economic superiority. As Chen awaits trial, Fink, his MIT colleague, notes that scientific progress and global research, by their nature, are messy.
“We need to be out there,” says Fink. “We need to be taking risks. We need to be collaborating. We need to be making mistakes, and we need to be correcting those mistakes. We need the freedom to operate.”

Matt Schiavenza is assistant director of content at Asia Society and senior editor of Asia Society Magazine. His work has been published in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Fortune, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications. He is based in New York City. @MattSchiavenza