Crackdown imposed on scientists viewed as detrimental to Washington

Chinese scientists are being investigated in the US merely for their ethnicity, while postdoctoral scholars from China are returning home or going to other places where they feel welcome, according to two prominent US scientists.

The scientists also said that antiChina policies are harming the US national interest.

Steven Chu, co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics and secretary of energy during the Obama administration, said: “Many of my Chinese American colleagues feel they’re under increased and unjustified scrutiny by the US government. The Department of Justice’s China Initiative is creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation.”

The China Initiative was launched in November 2018 with the aim of investigating cases of economic espionage. The program, which has resulted in dozens of prosecutions, has been widely criticized as racial profiling against researchers with Chinese backgrounds.

Chu said a distinguished Chinese American scientist told him the situation was making it easy for him to decide where to go. “Young, brilliant” postdoctoral scholars from China, who could have academic appointments in the US, were beginning to think it is not a welcoming place, Chu said.

A professor of physics at Stanford University, Chu said he lost a postdoctoral scholar last year because she could not take the pressure of “being watched”. Such students are not only returning to China, but also looking at other countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany, which hurts the US “in immeasurable ways”, Chu said.

“I do not believe these actions (under the China Initiative) are in the best interests of the United States. We should be able to deal with the unethical behavior of individuals, companies and countries without endangering our ability to attract or retain the world’s most talented science students and professionals,” he said.

Chu’s parents were born in China and came to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during World War II. His father worked as a professor of chemical engineering at US universities for more than two decades. Chu said his father felt racial bias despite his work at the Redstone Arsenal, the Argonne National Laboratory and North American Rockwell Corp during development of the Minuteman III missile.

“Chinese immigrants have added immensely to our scientific and technological excellence. They include six first-generation and two second-generation Chinese American scientists who received Nobel prizes in physics or chemistry,” Chu said.

He added that first- or secondgeneration Chinese Americans were instrumental in founding 44 of the top 100 Fortune 500 companies listed in 2018, including the founders of Yahoo, YouTube and DoorDash.

The 2019 JASON report on research security, commissioned by the National Science Foundation in the US, showed that as of 2017, 40 percent of philosophy doctorate students in science, health and engineering were foreign, and China alone accounted for 34 percent of that total.

Randy Katz, a computer scientist and vice-chancellor for research at the University of California, Berkeley, said the China Initiative has had a chilling effect on the Chinese American research community and will have ramifications for US research enterprise for many years to come.

“I am very concerned about the recent federal investigations into foreign influence. My Berkeley Chinese American colleagues reported to me occurrences of suspended funding for researchers who had collaborated with Chinese universities,” Katz said.

He added that he was asked by the FBI to investigate a China-born faculty member for his “significant affiliation with an institute in China”.

“I performed an extensive Google search for the institute and our faculty member’s name. Other than a large number of co-authored publications, which had appeared in open literature, I found no suspicious affiliation,” Katz said.

He reported his findings to the agency, which produced a set of webpage screen images that suggested the faculty member had an affiliation with the institute in question.

“I believe the affiliation was honorific and did not suggest a conflict. The agency then requested that I investigate whether the faculty member had received funding from China for work that had already been federally funded. After extensive investigation, I concluded that the collaborative work with Chinese colleagues was independent of that performed under US sponsorship. The agency remained unconvinced,” he said.

The faculty member came under suspicion because of his extensive collaboration with Chinese researchers, but for some fields of science, the best collaborators are in China, Katz said.