ARGUMENT: Reframing the China InitiativeThe Biden Administration Should Review and Rebuild the Trump Administration’s China Initiative from the Ground Up

Published 24 February 2021

In mid-January an MIT engineering professor Gang Chen was arrested as part of the Trump administration’s China Initiative, which was launched in November 2018 as a prosecutorial response to China’s persistent, pervasive, and well-documented campaign of economic espionage and illicit knowledge transfer. The Chen case demonstrates why the initiative’s overly broad focus on China has been met with relentless criticism from academic institutions and Asian American advocacy groups.

In mid-January an MIT engineering professor Gang Chen was arrested as part of the Trump administration’s China Initiative, which was launched in November 2018 as a prosecutorial response to China’s persistent, pervasive, and well-documented campaign of economic espionage and illicit knowledge transfer. The Chen case demonstrates why the initiative’s overly broad focus on China has been met with relentless criticism from academic institutions and Asian American advocacy groups. Chen’s case centers on allegations that the well-known professor, a Chinese-born American citizen, solicited millions in research funding from the U.S. government without properly disclosing that he was simultaneously working as a talent scout and subject matter expert for the Chinese government. Elsa Kania and Joe McReynolds write in Lawfare that as the Biden administration undertakes a review of Trump’s policies on China, the initiative’s approach is overdue for rethinking and recalibration. 

They add:

The core mission [of the China Initiative] is both justified and necessary. Many of its prosecutions clearly serve the public good, including bringing charges against state-sponsored hackers for targeting American biomedical companies working on treatments for COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus. However, outright economic espionage is only one component of China’s overall innovation strategy. The Chinese government also relies heavily on modes of knowledge transfer that don’t align with traditional definitions of espionage, such as targeted start-up acquisitions and talent recruitment. Such activities are often challenging to prosecute but nevertheless can damage the U.S. national interest. In response to these expansive knowledge transfer efforts, the China Initiative has moved beyond prosecuting straightforward cases of intellectual property theft and into “gray areas,” such as Chen’s case.

Kania and McReynolds note that some of the underlying tensions accompanying the Initiative are the result of a shift over the past two decades in America’s national security strategy toward China. The optimistic, economics-first engagement of those years has given way to an acceptance of the fact that the two countries will be strategic competitors for the foreseeable future.

This sea change has been keenly felt in the sciences, where bilateral cooperation and academic engagement are both broad and deep. The U.S. top research institutions have long welcomed China’s most talented students and professors, and scientific exchanges with China receive considerable financial support from the U.S. government. Many of these scientists decide to build a new, permanent life in America; others return home to continue their scientific careers.

The U.S. scientific community thus lives between two truths in tension with one another. On the one hand, China is regarded as a “pacing threat” that is rapidly eroding American advantages in science and technology in ways that may one day upend the military balance in the Indo-Pacific. At the same time, the degree of entanglement between the two countries’ respective innovation ecosystems is unparalleled when compared to any other set of geopolitical rivals in modern history. It is hardly surprising, then, that the U.S. investigation and prosecution of cases of scientific espionage linked to or directed by Beijing has been mired in controversy for decades.

Kania and McReynolds conclude:

Going forward, the China Initiative should thus be renamed, reframed and restructured as a broader campaign to counter illicit knowledge transfer by any nation-state perpetrator, concentrating on tactics, techniques and procedures rather than a “nexus” to “China” per se.

….

In the China Initiative, questions of geopolitics and national security have collided with concerns over civil rights and academic freedom…. The Biden administration has an important mandate to guarantee that the geopolitical threats America confronts today are tackled in a manner consistent with the nation’s highest values. Doing so will not sacrifice national security—if anything, it will strengthen it.