Spy fight ensnares Chinese scholars
But many in US say they’re being racially profiled by feds wary of intellectual theft
With three patents and more than 300 research papers to his name, Xiaoxing Xi was the respected chairman of Temple University’s physics department.
That is until May 2015, when armed FBI agents burst into his home outside Philadelphia and accused him of being a spy. He was hauled away in front of his wife and young daughters, fingerprinted and stripsearched. He also was threatened with 80 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
Four months later, federal prosecutors dropped the charges after experts provided affidavits that the information Xi sent to scientists in China was widely known and publicly available on the internet. Federal authorities offered no apology, no explanation and no compensation — leaving Xi struggling to rebuild his shattered life.
Xi’s case and several others like it have sparked widespread fears that the federal government’s recent crackdown on China is leading to racial profiling of ethnic Chinese students and scholars. Xi was arrested during the Obama administration, but pressure on China over trade, technology and security has intensified under President Donald Trump, prompting federal officials to more aggressively police efforts to steal intellectual property and innovations.
The biggest fallout has been for ethnic Chinese scholars and scientists, whose numbers and influence have grown at many U.S. universities and labs.
Attorney Peter Zeidenberg, of Arent Fox in Washington, says he is defending about 20 ethnic Chinese scientists and scholars against charges related to China. His clients include Xi and Sherry Chen, who was a hydrologist with the National Weather Service when she was arrested in 2014. Five months later, federal prosecutors dropped all espionage-related charges against Chen, but she is still fighting for her job back. Both Xi and Chen are naturalized American citizens from China.
“This is the broadest attack against Chinese Americans in recent memory,” said Stewart Kwoh, executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Los Angeles, a legal defense and civil rights organization. “It’s alarming to Chinese Americans to be swept up in this tension between the U.S. and China. Their civil rights are being abridged, but the tensions are so high people aren’t finding a lot of support.”
The Committee of Concerned Scientists, an international organization of leading scientists, physicians, engineers and scholars, sent a sharply worded letter to Trump last month urging an immediate end to “the campaign of intimidation of ethnic Chinese scientists.” Committee members said they were being subjected to video surveillance and searches of their email accounts, correspondence and phone calls.
“Ethnic profiling and indiscriminate investigations of Chinese scientists have no place in our country,” the letter said. “Besides damaging the image of the United States, it is also damaging to our national security by inflicting irreparable harm on some of our best scientists and making them think about leaving the country.”
University leaders also are speaking out.
MIT President L. Rafael Reif, in a letter to the campus community last month, warned that managing Taiwanese American scientist Wen Ho Lee was indicted in 1999 on charges.
risks of academic espionage must not create a “toxic atmosphere of unfounded suspicion and fear” against ethnic Chinese researchers. He called “heartbreaking” reports from his researchers and students that they feel “unfairly scrutinized, stigmatized and on edge — because of their Chinese ethnicity alone.”
Federal officials, however, say the threat is real — and that they are colorblind in rooting it out.
Yi-Chi Shih, for example, Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., says a threat from China is real, but so are fears of profiling.
was an adjunct UCLA professor of electrical engineering. He now faces up to 219 years in federal prison after being convicted last month of conspiring to export semiconductor chips with military applications to China.
“We’re looking for behavior, not individuals,” said Michael Lauer, deputy director for extramural research at the National Institutes of Health, which has contacted 61 institutions about whether their scientists, most of them ethnic Chinese, followed all federal grant rules.
NIH officials recently said in a letter to three ethnic Chinese scientific organizations that raised civil rights concerns that they would work to avoid “overreaction, stigmatization, harassment and profiling” and “use our influence and bully pulpit as necessary to speak out against such prejudicial actions, for which there is no place in the biomedical research community.” But the NIH letter, published in Science magazine in March, said that “instances have recently come to light where certain scientists, including some with links to foreign institutions and/or governments, have violated the honorbased systems and practices of the American research enterprise.”
U.S. Rep. Judy Chu, DCalif., said she recently attended a federal intelligence briefing on Chinese threats to American universities and corporations, and agreed that concerns about Chinese efforts to steal U.S. intellectual property were legitimate. But she said the presentation failed to acknowledge the fears of racial profiling and gave the impression that “every Chinese person is evil and a spy.”
Chu said she raised those concerns with intelligence officials. She said she does the same with her colleagues in Congress during her “never-ending effort” to bird-dog growing legislative efforts to require more scrutiny of Chinese students and scholars.
The current political climate has unnerved even Leslie E. Wong, who retired this month as president of San Francisco State University. What used to be routine trips to China to attend university alumni events have become fraught with anxiety, he said.
“The paranoia started seeping in,” Wong said.
This isn’t the first time the ethnic Chinese community has been unfairly targeted during times of tension with China, said Charlie Woo, public policy chairman of the Committee of 100, a national organization of leading Chinese Americans.
In 1999, a Taiwanese American scientist, Wen Ho Lee, was indicted on charges of stealing U.S. nuclear secrets for China while working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The following year, federal prosecutors dropped all but one of the 59 charges.
As for Xi, the scientist said the false arrest has altered his life. He lost his university chairmanship and most of his nine federal research grants and contracts.
Xi is suing the federal government but faces $220,000 in legal bills.
“Everything that I worked on for 30 years could be gone,” Xi said.