What you have are numbers, and it is startling to see what are.”
“Whenever we ask for data, they usually don’t give it back to us. The Justice Department is “intentionally obtuse with us and will not address specific cases,” said Representative Judy Chu, a Democrat from California. Lawmakers say our findings are “startling.” Two days after MIT Technology Review requested comment from the DOJ regarding the initiative, the department made significant changes to its own list of cases. The Department of Justice does not list all cases believed to be part of the China Initiative on its webpage and has deleted others linked to the project.Although new activity appears to have slowed since Donald Trump lost the 2020 US presidential election, prosecutions and new cases continue under the Biden administration.Nearly 90% of the defendants charged under the initiative are of Chinese heritage.Many cases have little or no obvious connection to national security or the theft of trade secrets.Only about a quarter of people and institutions charged under the China Initiative have been convicted.A significant number of research integrity cases have been dropped or dismissed.The initiative’s focus increasingly has moved away from economic espionage and hacking cases to “research integrity” issues, such as failures to fully disclose foreign affiliations on forms.The DOJ has neither officially defined the China Initiative nor explained what leads it to label a case as part of the initiative.
While the threat of Chinese intellectual property theft is real, critics wonder if the China Initiative is the right way to counteract it. The DOJ has not publicly defined the initiative or answered many basic questions about it, making it difficult to understand, let alone assess or exercise oversight of it, according to many civil rights advocates, lawmakers, and scholars. To date, only about a quarter of defendants charged under the initiative have been convicted, and about half of those defendants with open charges have yet to see the inside of an American courtroom.Īlthough the program has become a top priority of US law enforcement and domestic counterintelligence efforts-and an unusual one, as the first country-specific initiative-many details have remained murky. Instead of focusing on economic espionage and national security, the initiative now appears to be an umbrella term for cases with almost any connection to China, whether they involve state-sponsored hackers, smugglers, or, increasingly, academics accused of failing to disclose all ties to China on grant-related forms. Now, an investigation by MIT Technology Review shows that the China Initiative has strayed far from its initial mission.
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