https://ift.tt/2vxAICu Justice Department is scrapping the name of a Trump-era initiative that was aimed at cracking down on economic espionage by Beijing but was criticized as unfairly targeting Chinese professors at American colleges because of their ethnicity.
The decision to abandon the China Initiative, announced Wednesday by the department’s top national security official, followed a monthslong review undertaken after charges that the program chilled academic collaboration and contributed to anti-Asian bias. The department also endured high-profile setbacks in individual criminal prosecutions that resulted in the last year in the dismissal of multiple criminal cases against academic researchers.
Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen said the department would “be relentless in defending our country from China,” but no longer would group its investigations and prosecutions under the China Initiative label, in part out of recognition of the threats facing the U.S. from Russia, Iran, North Korea and others beyond China.
“I’m convinced that we need a broader approach, one that looks across all of these threats and use all of our authorities to combat them,” he told reporters before a speech in which he planned to lay out the changes.
The program was established in 2018 under then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions as a way to thwart what officials said were aggressive efforts by China to steal American intellectual property and to spy on American industry and research.
Genuine concerns
Olsen told reporters he believed the initiative was prompted by genuine national security concerns. He said he did not believe investigators had targeted professors on the basis of ethnicity, but he also said he had to be responsive to concerns he heard, including from Asian American groups.
“Anything that creates the impression that the Department of Justice applies different standards based on race or ethnicity harms the department and our efforts, and it harms the public,” Olsen said.