(John Ransom, Headline USA) China experts are expressing outrage that the US Department of Justice has dropped its China Initiative that sought to root out Chinese communist spying among researchers in the US, calling the decision “inexplicable.”
“China is stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. intellectual property each year,” columnist and author Gordon Chang told Fox News in response to the announcement.
“It seems it’s become politically incorrect to go after China’s spies, so this is inexplicable in my view,” Chang added.
Has it become politically incorrect to catch #Chinese spies? Talking to @stinchfield1776 on his @newsmax show at 8:20 ET about #Biden’s Justice Department dropping the “#China Initiative.”
— Gordon G. Chang (@GordonGChang) February 24, 2022
The DOJ has said that often the program charged researchers of Chinese descent with minor administrative violations, rather than espionage, but critics of the DOJ have said that’s because convictions on those violations are easier to get than espionage convictions, reported Fox.
“That’s crap,” Chang told Fox New. “Look, the reason they went after academics on technical charges was because making an espionage or treason case was too hard.
“So what they did was they felt the best use of prosecutorial resources was to go for the easy convictions,” Chang said. “That’s not to say that these individuals were not guilty of serious crimes.”
Chang said that often the regime in Beijing puts pressure on Chinese and Chinese Americans to spy, using leverage over them with relatives in China.
The program has been under scrutiny as China has complained that it’s another example of anti-Asian racism that the communist regime said is endemic in the US, claims that were echoed by Democrats in Congress.
“The cases they brought against professors had nothing to do with spying or espionage,” Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., told Reuters. “It was simply racial profiling.”
Lieu claims that Chinese Americans are the victims most likely to find themselves targeted by the DOJ.
Despite those charges, Harvard professor Charles M. Lieber, who is not of Chinese descent, was convicted of tax fraud and lying about previous ties to the communist regime in Beijing in December, in one of the cases produced by the initiative.
“Academic researchers across the country are now painfully aware of the potential consequences of lying about foreign connections, so if the federal government was looking for deterrence, deterrence has been achieved,” said former U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Andrew E. Lelling, who originally brought forward the case against Lieber, according to the Harvard Crimson.
But FBI director Christopher Wray has said that the consequences of Chinese espionage are more than academic.
“It’s the people of the United States who are the victims of what amounts to Chinese theft on a scale so massive that it represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history,” said Wray in 2020 in a speech at the Hudson Institute.
“If you are an American adult, it is more likely than not that China has stolen your personal data,” he added, as an example.
Wray said that over half the counterintelligence cases in the US involve China.
“The government that most aggressively targets Americans of Chinese descent is China’s,” writer and China policy expert Ying Ma told Fox News.
“Unfortunately, some individuals are in fact susceptible — whether due to greed or a misplaced sense of Chinese nationalism, or both. Just look at Eileen Gu betraying the United States at the Winter Olympics.”
