China Initiative called harmful to US economy

The China Initiative initiated by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) is driving away talent from the US, said academic and civil rights leaders at a webinar Wednesday.

The initiative, which aims to counter national security threats related to China, was launched in November 2018 by then-attorney general Jeff Sessions and has gained momentum under current Attorney General William Barr. By June of this year, the FBI confirmed, there were about 2,000 cases related to the initiative.

"It's unprecedented to name a major DOJ initiative after a country (because) we have not had a Russia or Canada Initiative before," said Margaret Lewis, a law professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, during the webinar.

Lewis views the government approach as problematic, because she said that it is based on ethnicity and increasingly individual prosecutions that have become part of the national security strategy against China. She said that the current approach is too blunt, ignores individuality and is discriminatory.

"Studies have shown that the US benefited tremendously from the flow of talent from China to the United States to work on AI (artificial intelligence). If we make people afraid to come to work on AI because of potential criminal prosecutions, we also hurt the US economy. Overdeterrence has costs," said Lewis.

Former US secretary of energy Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning professor of physics at Stanford University, said that Chinese talent is being driven away by the actions and innuendos of the US government.

He said, for example, that one of his graduate students from China was offered an American assistant professorship, but she refused. He quoted her as saying: "‘No, I don't want to be here anymore. I don't feel like it's a welcoming country. I am going back to China.'"

Chu said that Chinese students admitted to top engineering schools like Stanford or the University of California, Berkeley, aren't getting visas to the US.

Instead, those talented Chinese students are going to other countries or staying in China. They prefer to go to English-speaking schools, including graduate schools in Germany that teach in English.

"My friends in those countries in Europe and Australia said to me: ‘It's terrible what's happening in your country, but we are getting much better applicants.'"

Chu also cited other incidents.

A New York research institute had to end its collaboration with China's Wuhan Institute of Virology on finding the origin of the novel coronavirus because of pressure from the Trump administration.

Three of Chu's colleagues at Stanford had to stop their collaboration with China due to tremendous pressure from the government.

Chu said that the FBI has failed to realize that no professor wants information to leak out before they are ready to publish. "In collaboration, there is strong implicit agreement of trust. Once that trust breaks down once or twice — sorry, I am not talking to you anymore. There is a self-policing incentive not to let information get out," Chu said.

Chu emphasized the great contribution of immigrants to the US in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) field, noting that about 30 or 40 percent of Nobel laureates in the US were born outside the US.

He said he is worried about lost opportunities and talent because of the China Initiative.

"It's hard to estimate what those losses are going to be. You can estimate by looking back in time at the last three decades. Most of the technological things — industrial secrets or technical innovations — that the US is afraid to lose to China, are made by Chinese over the last three or four decades. This is a little scary. You really want to shut this off?" he asked.

Mike German, a former FBI agent and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School, said that the DOJ has a myopic view of what's important and sometimes loses the big picture.

"We are in the middle of a global pandemic. Quick exchange of scientific information is more important than ever. This kind of chilling effect can do harm not just to our nation but to every nation," German said.