Climate of hostility blamed for talent flight

Actions hostile to China undertaken by the United States Department of Justice, or DOJ, are driving talent away from the United States, academics and civil rights leaders told a forum on Wednesday.

Participants in the webinar took aim at the China Initiative, a US policy response to perceived threats to national security established in November 2018. The initiative was launched by then-attorney general Jeff Sessions, and has gained momentum under his successor William Barr.

By June, the FBI confirmed, about 2,000 cases related to the initiative had been opened.

"It's unprecedented to name a major DOJ initiative after a country (because) we have not had a Russia or Canada Initiative before," Margaret Lewis, a law professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, told the online meeting.

Lewis views the government approach as problematic, because it is based on ethnicity, she said, adding that prosecutions of individuals have become an increasing part of the national security strategy against China. She said that the current approach is too blunt, "ignores individuality" and is discriminatory.

"Studies have shown that the US benefited tremendously from the flow of talent from China to the United States to work on AI (artificial intelligence)," Lewis said. "If we make people afraid to come to work on AI because of potential criminal prosecutions, we also hurt the US economy. Overdeterrence has costs."

Former US energy secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning professor of physics at Stanford University, said that Chinese talent is being driven away by the actions and innuendos of the US government.

He said that one of his graduate students from China was offered a post of assistant professor, but turned it down. He quoted her as saying: "No, I don't want to be here anymore. I don't feel like it's a welcoming country. I am going back to China".

Visa problems

Chu said that Chinese students admitted to top engineering schools like Stanford or the University of California, Berkeley, aren't getting visas to the US.

Instead, those talented Chinese students are going to other countries or staying in China. They prefer to go to English-speaking schools, including graduate schools in Germany that teach in English.

"My friends in those countries in Europe and Australia said to me: 'It's terrible what's happening in your country, but we are getting much better applicants'."

A New York research institute had to end its collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in Central China, on determining the origin of the novel coronavirus because of pressure from the US administration.

Three of Chu's colleagues at Stanford had to stop their collaboration with peers in China due to tremendous pressure from the government.

Chu said that the FBI has failed to realize that no professor wants information to leak out before he or she is ready to publish.

"In collaboration, there is a strong implicit agreement of trust," he said.

Chu highlighted the great contribution of immigrants to the US in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) field, noting that about 30 to 40 percent of Nobel laureates in the US were born outside the US.

He told the webinar he is worried about lost opportunities and talent because of the China Initiative.

"It's hard to estimate what those losses are going to be," he said.

Mike German, a former FBI agent and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School, said that the DOJ has a myopic view of what's important and sometimes loses sight of the big picture.

"We are in the middle of a global pandemic. Quick exchange of scientific information is more important than ever," German said. "This kind of chilling effect can do harm not just to our nation but to every nation."