Almost every major government in the world has condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — except for China, which has instead given its tacit approval.
On the very same day Russia began its China-approved invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration announced that it was abandoning the China Initiative, the Department of Justice’s comprehensive response to spying and intellectual property theft by China in the United States. Apparently, acknowledging the fact that the Chinese government is systematically trying to steal American technology made the Biden administration uncomfortable.
“By grouping cases under the China Initiative rubric,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew Olsen said Wednesday, “We helped give rise to a harmful perception that the department 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.”
Olsen later admitted that there was actually no evidence of “bias or prejudice” in the China Initiative, only complaints from China’s government and activist groups. But this tepid pushback, apparently, was enough to convince the Biden administration to abandon a program that was serving a vital purpose.
Announced by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2018, the China Initiative equipped federal prosecutors around the country with intelligence materials to help them identify nontraditional trade secret theft cases, particularly from potential threats at labs, universities, and defense industrial base firms. These additional resources and intelligence were needed to combat the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents program, which uses Chinese nationals in strategic U.S. institutions to steal new technology for both economic and military supremacy.
Earlier this year, FBI Director Christopher Wray admitted that China’s espionage campaign has “reached a new level — more brazen, more damaging than ever before. And it’s vital — vital — that all of us focus on that threat together.”
Instead of meeting China’s unparalleled espionage campaign with a reciprocally strong and unparalleled counterespionage campaign, Olsen announced that the Biden Justice Department would use “a broader approach” that approached threats from Russia, Iran, and other countries the same. Even worse, Olsen went on to say the Biden administration would pursue some of these cases as civil, rather than criminal, matters.
In sum, the Biden administration has ended the China Initiative just because a few people called it racist, even though his Justice Department admits that the program was not racist. This shows that the Biden administration is more concerned with pleasing the whims of woke activists than it is with defending the nation from genuine threats and foreign tyrants. America’s adversaries in Moscow and Beijing have noticed.
