US drops case against MIT professor

The United States' Justice Department on Thursday dropped all charges against a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor accused of concealing his ties to China when seeking federal grant money.

Last week, federal prosecutors in Boston recommended dismissal of the case against Gang Chen, a mechanical engineer and nanotechnologist born in China. He was indicted a year ago on charges of failing to disclose contracts, appointments and awards from various entities in China to the US Department of Energy.

In a motion filed in the Boston federal court, the Justice Department said the decision to dismiss the case was a result of new information that the government had received about Chen's allegations.

"Having assessed the evidence as a whole in light of that information, the government can no longer meet its burden of proof at trial. Dismissal of the indictment is therefore in the interest of justice," US Attorney Rachael Rollins said.

In a statement, Zhengyu Huang, president of Chinese American organization Committee of 100, said Chinese Americans and the AAPI community have been seen as the perpetual foreigner－"strangers in our own homeland"－for too long.

"Even when cases are dismissed, many Chinese and Asian Americans have their lives, careers and health greatly affected. Our support and sympathies go to Professor Chen and his family as they work to rebuild their lives," Huang said.

"Today, we are all Gang Chen and stand united."

Solidarity displayed

Chen was indicted on the last full day of the administration of former president Donald Trump.

Following Chen's arrest, 100 faculty members at MIT said they stood in solidarity with him and condemned the allegations against him. The "allegations" showed that the complaint "represents a deep misunderstanding of how research is conducted or funded" in an academic environment, they wrote in an open letter.

The government accused Chen of receiving $29 million in foreign funding, including $19 million from the Southern University of Science and Technology in China, since 2013. But MIT was the recipient of the $29 million, and the fund "benefited the institute, the research programs of many of its faculty and its students", according to the letter.

The trial of Anming Hu, a former professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, was the first of dozens of prosecutions under the so-called China Initiative. He was charged with wire fraud and making a false statement on February 2020, and was acquitted of all charges in September.

Last month, MIT Technology Review published a report showing how far the China Initiative, launched under the Trump administration, has strayed from its claimed goal of combating economic espionage.

The report found that the Justice Department has neither officially defined the initiative nor explained what leads it to label a case as part of the initiative. It also said the initiative's focus has increasingly moved away from economic espionage and hacking cases to "research integrity" issues such as failure to fully disclose foreign affiliations on forms.