Franklin Tao, a former chemical engineer at the University of Kansas, is finally a free man. After five years of legal battles, he was cleared of all convictions related to the China Initiative, a programme launched in 2018 by then-president Donald Trump to counter alleged Chinese economic espionage.
Following the court ruling on July 11, which also closed the last legal case against university academics under the controversial programme, Tao spoke publicly for the first time since his arrest.
He told reporters that he had lived every one of the 1,786 days since his initial arrest “with fear and desperation”.
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“Dr Tao is grateful that this long nightmare is finally over,” his lawyer Peter Zeidenberg said.
However, Tao’s relief – and that of many others whose lives were shattered by the China Initiative – might be short-lived. The programme, which was formally ended by the Biden administration in 2022, could be revived if Donald Trump wins the US presidential election in November.
Project 2025, a nearly 900-page report drafted by Trump’s former senior officials and seen as a blueprint for the next Republican president, explicitly recommends that his administration “restart the China Initiative”.
Over the past month, the South China Morning Post has contacted a dozen Chinese researchers working in the US to gauge their thoughts on how a potential Trump comeback might affect their lives and work. None agreed to speak, even anonymously.
David Zweig, professor emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said: “It’s a tough time to be a China-born scientist in the US. It’s tough enough now, and it will only be tougher if Trump returns to office.”
In 2019, Tao was one of the first scientists to be arrested under the China Initiative. In April 2022, he was convicted of three counts of wire fraud and one count of failure to disclose his China ties while applying for federal funding. The University of Kansas moved quickly to fire him, only for his fraud convictions to be overturned in court five months later.
Like Tao, hundreds of scientists who had collaborated with universities or institutions in China were put under investigation and left in limbo. Prominent cases include Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Gang Chen, former University of Tennessee professor Anming Hu and former Harvard professor Charles Lieber.
Nearly 90 per cent of those charged under the China Initiative were of Chinese heritage, including Chinese-Americans and immigrants from mainland China, Taiwan and Southeast Asian countries, according to an investigation by the MIT Technology Review in 2021.
Ashley Gorski, a senior staff lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Security Project, said the programme was fundamentally biased.
“It cast a broad, unjustified suspicion on scientists of Chinese descent, and led to failed prosecutions around the country,” she said.
The China Initiative was found problematic in both political and technical terms. Zeidenberg, who has represented about 50 Chinese-born scientists in the US, said most charges were quickly dropped simply because there was not enough evidence to sustain the prosecution.
Among his clients who ended up in court, no one was found guilty, he said.
The biggest problem with the China Initiative, Zeidenberg said, was that “it targeted academics who were not involved in technology theft”. Instead, it scrutinised scientists’ research integrity – a typical accusation was failure to disclose connections with China in their grant application forms.
“Many of the China Initiative prosecutions had nothing to do with espionage whatsoever,” Gorski said. Historically, false statements in grant applications would have been managed by a university or an administrative agency, rather than through federal criminal charges, she said.
The programme also faced criticisms for its lack of transparency, with basic questions, such as what constitutes a China Initiative case, remaining unanswered.
The full scope of investigations has been almost impossible to know, though a database compiled by the MIT Technology Review showed there were at least 150 defendants and 77 cases under the China Initiative.
Zeidenberg said many of his clients were investigated by the National Institutes of Health – the world’s largest and most powerful funding source for medical research. Their cases remain private and confidential, he said.
In 2015, Xiaoxing Xi, a world-leading physicist and department chair at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was unexpectedly arrested at gunpoint. Overnight, he was charged with passing sensitive technologies regarding a device known as a pocket heater to China, facing up to 80 years in prison and a US$1 million fine.
It soon became clear that the email evidence used against him was based on FBI agents’ misunderstandings of the technology. The case was dropped four months later, but Xi has lived in fear ever since.
“We managed to live through the nightmare, but it has severely debilitated my research,” Xi said. His research areas shrunk from three to one, and he was constantly worried that something might go wrong – even if he was extremely careful in his grant applications.
The China Initiative not only disrupted careers and lives, but also chilled the research collaboration and talent flow between the US and China, the world’s two largest scientific powerhouses.
A 2021 survey of nearly 2,000 scientists from 83 US universities, conducted by the Committee of 100 and the University of Arizona, found that the initiative was the overwhelming top reason for US scientists to distance themselves from collaboration with China.
Meanwhile, a growing number of Chinese-born scientists have chosen to leave the US and return to China, an exodus and “reverse brain drain” accelerated by the initiative, according to a study by Stanford University in July.
Zweig said the China Initiative was often seen as a failed programme, but it could be considered “completely successful” if its original aim was to stop the flow of American technologies to China.
The success was largely based on Section 702, he said, a statute under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which permits the US government to collect emails from non-US citizens outside the country – amounting to over a billion emails per month – and investigate communication with potential national security implications without a traditional court warrant.
“As a Chinese-born scholar in the US, you probably won’t engage with China right now. Any form of scientific exchange with the mainland could attract FBI scrutiny and investigation,” Zweig said.
In this sense, he said, the China Initiative had been effective in achieving its goals – although it had interfered in lives and research collaborations that had nothing to do with national security, including efforts by US and Chinese researchers to search for a cure for cancer.
Despite the China Initiative officially being terminated in 2022, there has been no indication that surveillance practices have changed, according to Gorski.
“We are still very concerned that Chinese-American academics are subject to disproportionate scrutiny due to bias,” she said.
William Evanina, former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Centre, recently asserted that the China Initiative had never truly ended.
During a workshop in Washington on July 16, when questioned about poor prosecution results that led to the initiative’s termination, Evanina said: “I’m just gonna be honest here. The programme’s not terminated; it never changed.”
He said the only difference since 2018 has been the programme’s name; the same organisations have continued their efforts, with the number of cases actually increasing by 25 per cent.
Xi said he was not surprised by such an admission. In fact, his case occurred during the Obama administration, indicating that the heightened scrutiny might have been bipartisan.
“The biggest difference was after the China Initiative was launched, a lot of resources were put into the programme and the Department of Justice encouraged its officials to have more cases,” he said.
The bipartisan concern of Chinese influence did exist in American politics, said Zeidenberg and Zweig.
Caroline Wagner, a science policy professor at Ohio State University, called it a “shame” that the US was once again creating “fear of the other”, similar to the fear of Japanese-Americans in the 1970s and 1980s when Japan’s rise as a major economic power was seen as a threat.
“In times of great change, people cling to their world views and perceive others as threatening,” Wagner said. “We are in another time of change. Unfortunately, China has become the focal point of fear.”
Xi, who has been suing the US government since 2017 over wrongful arrest and surveillance, said his lawsuit has entered the discovery stage, which is a slow process of evidence collection.
“You almost never win when you sue the government, but someone needs to do it,” he said. “They violated my constitutional rights, and they need to be held accountable.
“I want to put them on the stand and have them answer questions.”
Despite his experiences, Xi decided to stay in the US and continue his research, while using every opportunity to share his story with the American people. He found that most were fair-minded and horrified by what he and his family endured.
“We all agree that protecting the US is important, but that shouldn’t justify discrimination and mistreatment,” he said.
More from South China Morning Post:
- Chinese-born scientist in US tells of ‘fear and desperation’ from Trump-era convictions
- US China Initiative a ‘significant push factor’ for Chinese scientists’ exodus
- US professor Feng ‘Franklin’ Tao wins reversal of conviction in Trump-era China probe
- FBI official admits mistakes, vows to improve relations with Asian-American communities
- FBI ‘did not intend negative impact’ of prosecuting Chinese academics with ties to Beijing under Trump-era China Initiative
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