U.S. SAVANTS URGE SOLONS TO QUIZ RACIAL PROFILING IN CHINA INITIATIVE

Scientists and civil rights organizations are ramping up pressure on Congress and President Joe Biden’s administration to examine whether the US government has been unfairly targeting Chinese-American researchers in an effort to protect government-funded research from foreign influences, Jeffrey Mervis reported for Science.

This week, they asked a prominent member of Congress to hold a hearing on a US law enforcement initiative that has resulted in criminal or civil charges against prominent academic scientists engaged in work with Chinese institutions.

They see the hearing—which could occur as early as next month—as a possible first step toward satisfying a second request, directed to Biden last month, to reform or dismantle the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) China Initiative, begun in 2018.

The February 1, 2021 letter from a coalition of individuals and scientific organizations asks Representative Jamie Raskin (D–MD), who leads a civil rights oversight panel in the House of Representatives, to hold a hearing that addresses “the racial profiling and investigations of scientists and scholars of Chinese or Asian descent by the Department of Justice, the National Institutes of Health [NIH] and other science funding agencies based on misguided fears of economic espionage and intellectual property theft.”

Some of the same signers joined a January 5, 2021 letter to Biden asking him to end the China Initiative “and take further steps necessary to combat the pervasive racial bias and targeting of Asian American and Asian immigrant scientists, researchers, and students."

Opponents of the China Initiative and related government investigations have been galvanized by last month’s arrest of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineering professor Gang Chen on charges that he failed to tell the Department of Energy (DOE) about his ties to Chinese entities and didn’t report a Chinese bank account.

The charges against Chen result from a “deep misunderstanding of how research is conducted or funded at a place like MIT,” more than 200 of the researcher’s colleagues asserted in a letter to MIT President Rafael Reif.

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