Gang Chen
Four Chinese American scholars were honored recently in Washington by a civil rights group for their bravery in successfully fighting to prove their innocence after being targeted by accusations of being national security threats.
On Thursday, they received the American Courage Award from the group Asian Americans Advancing Justice, or AAJC. The award, established in 1997, honors an individual, company or organization that has shown extraordinary courage or a commitment to civil rights.
The four recipients were among a group of professors, scientists and researchers targeted by a United States government program called the China Initiative, primarily because of their ancestry rather than any suspicions of criminal activity, according to the AAJC.
The civil rights group said the recipients were treated unfairly by the government but have continued to try to rebuild their careers and rebound from the trauma that they suffered.
"For their extraordinary bravery and perseverance during the darkest times of their lives, we honor them with the American Courage Award," the AAJC said in a statement.
Xiaoxing Xi
The honorees include Gang Chen, a professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was arrested in 2021 and accused of being a spy and failing to disclose ties to Chinese institutions. The charges were later dismissed when the prosecutor's office conceded that it did not have sufficient evidence.
Also honored was Xiaoxing Xi, a physics professor at Temple University, who was targeted before the China Initiative was officially launched by the administration of former US president Donald Trump in 2018. In 2015, the FBI arrested him at his home, and he was accused of sharing confidential technology with China, although the technology had been public for years.
Award recipient Anming Hu, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee, was the first academic to face trial under the China Initiative. He was acquitted in September 2021, with the judge saying that "no rational jury could find him guilty".
Franklin Tao
Recipient Franklin Tao, who lost his tenured position at the University of Kansas because of government charges, was investigated by the FBI for alleged espionage based on anonymous tips and arrested in 2019 on unrelated charges. Each charge was dismissed for lack of evidence.
Tao called his experience "a significant prosecutorial overreach by the government, driven by racial profiling".
"After a legal battle lasting four to five years, I was fully exonerated in July 2024, with all charges found to be baseless and expunged," Tao said.
Xi, the Temple University physics professor, said in a news release from the Asian American Scholar Forum that the group of scientists and scholars were "victims of the government's discriminatory policies".
The only way to prevent this is "for everyone to speak up and fight back. This is our right and our obligation," he said.
Chen, the MIT professor, called the recognition "bittersweet "because "it brings to mind the many scientists who have been wrongfully prosecuted by our government".
Anming Hu
An analysis by Race, Racism and the Law, a US civil rights group, found that of the 148 defendants in 77 cases collected in the FBI database under the China Initiative, 130 were of Chinese heritage. Only 25 percent were convicted, according to the group, and few of the convictions were related to espionage.
Despite the wide criticism of the China Initiative, with US Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew Olsen saying it was not "the right approach to meet the threat in the coming years", the US Congress is working on legislation to reinstate the program.
Chen, the MIT professor, said: "Sadly, some politicians choose to ignore history and disregard the truth, as seen in the current push by the House to relaunch the China Initiative. We must unite and stand against this."
The US House of Representatives passed a bill on Sept 11 to reinstate the initiative. It sent the legislation to the Senate, where it was referred to the Judiciary Committee.
On Oct 1, Steven Kivelson and Peter Michelson, physics professors at Stanford University, sent a letter to top leaders of both major parties in the House and Senate to "strongly oppose" the bill.
The two professors cited the 2024 National Academy of Sciences' Consensus Study Report, which said that the influx to the US of international talent has dropped since 2018.
"The NAS consensus report concluded that the China Initiative was highly problematic, especially in its disproportionate focus on fundamental research in academia," the professors' letter said.
They urged Congress not to reinstate the China Initiative or pass new initiatives that resemble it.
