A pair of Democrats are examining the federal government’s efforts to root out suspected Chinese espionage from universities and laboratories in the United States.
Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the House Oversight Committee, and California Rep. Judy Chu asked the FBI and the National Institutes of Health to provide more information on the investigations into scientists and researchers who are suspected of passing information to China.
In separate letters to FBI Director Christopher Wray and NIH Director Francis Collins, the lawmakers said they are concerned that ethnically Chinese scientists working in the U.S. are being racially profiled.
“There are certainly authentic and legitimate cases of espionage that should be investigated,” the lawmakers wrote to Wray. “However, according to news reports, the FBI has arrested and charged many Chinese-American scientists who have turned out to be innocent.”
“These reports have created serious concern that innocent people are being swept up in this initiative,” the letter to Collins said. “The current moves have been characterized as ‘racial profiling’ and a ‘new Red Scare.’”
The lawmakers pointed to a number of cases against Chinese Americans who were acquitted or had the charges against them dropped.
“One study found that 52% of individuals charged under the Economic Espionage Act since 2009 have been of Chinese heritage,” they wrote. “But those defendants are more than twice as likely to be acquitted, or have all charges against them dropped, compared to defendants with non-Chinese names, suggesting that many individuals of Chinese heritage who were swept up in the FBI’s counterintelligence efforts were innocent and falsely accused.”
The New York Times reported in November that the FBI and the NIH are trying to root out scientists suspected of stealing biomedical research for other countries. Nearly all the incidents under investigation involved scientists of Chinese descent.
The number of arrests related to Chinese espionage cases has risen dramatically in recent years, according to U.S. officials. There were 24 arrests in the last fiscal year, an increase from 15 arrests five years earlier. There have already been 19 arrests this fiscal year, according to Justice Department statistics presented at a conference on Chinese economic espionage in early February.
Last month, Charles Lieber, chairman of Harvard University’s chemistry department and who does not have Chinese heritage, was charged with lying to the U.S. government about his alleged connections to China. He is accused of making false statements to the Defense Department and the NIH about his participation in China’s Thousand Talents Program, according to the criminal complaint.
The Thousand Talents Program is a Chinese government-run program that seeks to recruit Chinese and foreign academics and entrepreneurs to work in science and technology fields in China.
Chinese researcher Zaosong Zheng was arrested in December after allegedly trying to smuggle vials of cancer cells out of the U.S. Authorities alleged Zheng stole the vials from a laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Another Chinese national, Yanqing Ye, who was a researcher at Boston University, was accused of lying to authorities about her status as a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army.
The Justice Department began the China Initiative in 2018 to combat the espionage threat, sparking fears among researchers and students, whom China often uses to steal secrets from the U.S.
“To be clear, this is not about the Chinese people as a whole, and it sure as heck isn’t about Chinese Americans as a group,” Wray said at Chinese economic espionage conference in early February, “but it is about the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.”
The concerns about racial profiling are not unwarranted. A book published earlier this month, The Scientist and the Spy, said the FBI began collecting information on Chinese scientists and students across the U.S. at the height of the Cold War.
In 1967, FBI agents were ordered “to cull names of ethnically Chinese researchers including, implicitly, U.S. citizens from the membership records of scientific organizations,” according to the book.
