Should Donald Trump make his return to the White House, a controversial program to counter Chinese espionage — one that Democrats argued was fueled by racial profiling — could be revived.
The China Initiative, scrapped under Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, was a national security program meant to prosecute perceived theft of trade secrets by Chinese government agents. The Biden administration shut it down amid concerns that the program was leading to too many unresolved cases and false convictions and that the initiative was established on racial bias.
Now, the program has resurfaced in a partisan fight in Congress as top House Republicans aim to launch it again.
“We’d like to bring it back,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul told NOTUS. “I met with the attorney general’s office, and I asked him, ‘Why’d you end the China Initiative? Espionage isn’t gone.’”
NOTUS interviewed nine House Republicans on the program. Several, including Reps. Joe Wilson, Greg Murphy, Chip Roy, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Byron Donalds, said they didn’t know specifics about the previous iteration of the initiative but still wanted it reinstated. Two others on the House Foreign Relations Committee, Reps. Keith Self and Young Kim, declined to comment.
Democratic lawmakers in the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus led the effort in 2022 to push the Biden-Harris administration to end the initiative. A series of press conferences and meetings with law enforcement officials questioning the program’s effectiveness ultimately led to the decision. DOJ Assistant Attorney General Matt Olsen said then that he concluded that fighting national security threats “demands a broader approach” and that the China Initiative was “not the right approach.”
The U.S. government has identified several incidents of Chinese economic espionage or influence peddling in recent years. In 2021, former Harvard professor Charles Lieber was found guilty of hiding ties to a Chinese recruitment program designed to attract high-level scientific talent. Years of FBI intelligence also led the Trump administration to shut down China’s consulate in Houston in 2020, which U.S. officials said was being used to steal medical research and attempt to infiltrate oil and natural gas industries.
That said, prosecutors also fell short of proving any espionage in a number of cases. Those cases and incidents of false convictions have devastatingly altered the lives of those accused.
“While we want to stop American secrets from being stolen, we also know that Chinese American researchers cannot be the sole scapegoats for the FBI,” Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Chair Rep. Judy Chu said at a press conference this week.
An investigation by Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that 90% of the defendants charged under the initiative were of Chinese heritage. It also found that only about a quarter of people and institutions charged under the initiative were convicted, with a significant number of cases dropped or dismissed with no connection to national security threats or theft of trade secrets. Chinese-born and Chinese American scientific researchers and scholars were largely the targets of the anti-espionage program.
Republicans still think the China Initiative, or something like it, is necessary as the country remains one of the United States’ biggest adversaries, regardless of concerns about racial profiling.
“It doesn’t matter what color the skin is; espionage is espionage,” McCaul said about CAPAC calls to keep the program shut down. “I think that’s going a little too far. The fact is that the [Chinese Communist Party] has a very active espionage program in the United States.”
Other members, including Roy, Greene and Donalds, agreed.
“I certainly am for reinvigorating that kind of activity at DOJ,” Roy, of the House Freedom Caucus, told NOTUS. “We’ve got to get our law enforcement back to being law enforcement. Stop putting American people in jail for exercising free speech at abortion clinics, and go root out Chinese comms trying to engage in espionage.”
Some members are already attempting to pass the China Initiative. A bill introduced in March 2023 by Texas Rep. Lance Gooden to revive the program under the new name “CCP Initiative” was sent to markup in the House Judiciary Committee in May this year. Republicans in the Commerce, Justice, Science Subcommittee want to mandate the reestablishment of the China Initiative as part of the fiscal year 2025 bill.
Chu told NOTUS that she warns congressional leadership weekly in her caucus meetings about these attempts by Republicans. In a press conference this week, Chu invited a victim who was wrongfully tried under the China Initiative to speak about how his arrest and allegations of him being a spy turned his life upside down.
Former University of Kansas chemist Feng “Franklin” Tao was fired after failing to disclose connections to Fuzhou University in China, where he had been visiting and hoped to land a job. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver voted in July to overturn the conviction after five years. Tao said his family’s financial stability and his reputation suffered insurmountably from the ordeal. He now looks to regain his position at the University of Kansas.
Chu also warns that others will suffer the same fate, with anti-Chinese sentiment on the rise as we move closer to elections and toward a potential Trump-Vance White House.
“This rhetoric is only going to escalate moving forward,” Chu said. “I mean, I don’t know if this program is in Project 2025, but what we see clearly from it is that they’re already thinking about what they would do if they came back in power.”
Despite Chu’s warnings, supporters of a program like the China Initiative are convinced that the national security threat posed by the country warrants the effort to look into suspicions.
“We’re literally in what I think is a cold war in China,” another Freedom Caucus member Rep. Greg Murphy told NOTUS. “If we turn our head to everything that is either suspicious or that we feel aids them because we’re afraid to offend, we’re damning our nation.”
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Calen Razor is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.