Republicans are pushing for a new law that would revive the Justice Department’s China Initiative, which was scuttled by the Biden administration, and they are seeking to rebrand it as a “CCP Initiative” aimed squarely at the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.
The DOJ announced in February that it would pull the plug on the 2018 initiative aimed at cracking down on China’s economic espionage following a year of criticism from fellow Democrats, hundreds of university professors, left-wing activists, and the CCP itself.
GOP senators introduced the Protect America’s Innovation and Economic Security from CCP Act amid a growing Republican pushback against the DOJ’s decision to toss the Trump-era, China-focused effort in favor of a more nebulous effort aimed at “nation-state threats.” The new legislation was co-sponsored by Sens. Rick Scott, Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Bill Hagerty, Marsha Blackburn, and Mike Braun.
Scott, who led the charge on the new legislation, said: “It is unconscionable that the Biden administration ended the DOJ’s efforts to hold Communist China accountable for U.S. trade secret theft and economic espionage.”
He added: “I’m proud to lead this bill to reestablish the CCP Initiative, which will again be dedicated to protecting the United States’s intellectual property and our academic institutions from spying and interference by one of our greatest adversaries.”
Rubio lamented that the DOJ “canceled the China Initiative because a band of woke activists smeared it as racist and xenophobic.” The senator gave a speech late last month arguing that a key point in combating the China challenge is bringing back DOJ’s China focus.
Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, who runs the DOJ’s National Security Division, said in February that he decided to end the China Initiative.
“We helped give rise to a harmful perception that the Department of Justice applies a lower standard to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct related to that country or that we in some way view people with racial, ethnic, or familial ties to China differently,” he said, even as he acknowledged that China poses an “evolving, significant threat.”
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The new bill said the CCP Initiative would seek to “curb spying” by the CCP in the United States, and the goals would be to “identify priority trade secret theft cases” and “develop an enforcement strategy concerning nontraditional collectors, including researchers in labs, universities, and the defense industrial base, that are being coopted.” The legislation said the initiative’s investigations and prosecutions “shall be set as priority and not based on discretion.”
Olsen defended his decision to end the initiative on the National Security Law podcast for Lawfare in late March.
“What I then determined is that having a China Initiative in light of the range of nation-states that were posing real challenges to us didn’t make sense, and it was a bit myopic when you think of — I mean, look what’s happening with Russia right now, right? That’s an obvious point,” Olsen said. “But it’s not just Russia either. It’s Iran. It’s North Korea. It’s other countries. … And I didn’t think it made sense to have a strategy that just called out one country.”
The China Initiative was shut down in February, sandwiched between the DOJ unveiling a domestic terrorism unit in January and announcing a special task force to target Russian oligarchs in March.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said in February that the growing economic and national security threat posed by the CCP is graver than ever. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said in March that the CCP remains the “absolutely unparalleled” long-term priority for the intelligence community.
Rep. Ted Lieu called the China Initiative a “xenophobic program” in a comment to Politico last week, while Rep. Judy Chu said, ”Reviving this program as the CCP Initiative will do nothing to curb the national security threats we face, but will only continue to encourage profiling of Chinese researchers, stymie the collaborative nature of our country’s research enterprise, and perpetuate anti-Asian hate.” Olsen did not unearth evidence of this disputed racism in the initiative.
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The CCP has attacked the China Initiative and has seized on U.S.-based efforts by professors and activists to end it.
The initiative attempted to shine a light on the CCP’s coordinated efforts to steal research and technology from the U.S., with a particular focus on rooting out academics who concealed their ties to China. Numerous people have been convicted through it, including Harvard professor Charles Lieber, who was found guilty in December of all federal charges related to concealing his ties to a Chinese university and the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents Program while receiving U.S. government funding.
