Axe falls on race-tinged investigations

The US Justice Department said on Wednesday that it is ending its "China Initiative" following calls by academic and civil rights groups to rescind the program because it has chilled academic collaboration with China and fueled racism against Asians.

The decision was a result of a three-month evaluation undertaken by Matthew Olsen, head of the department's national security division, following a widespread outcry against the program.

"By grouping cases under the China Initiative rubric, we helped give rise to a harmful perception that the department applies a lower standard to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct related to that country－or that we in some way view people with racial, ethnic or familial ties to China differently," Olsen said in a speech at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

He said the initiative, which was created by the Department of Justice to tackle purported economic espionage in the United States, was "myopic", chilled scientific research and created the perception that the department applied different standards to people of Chinese ethnicity. Olsen also said he had to be responsive to the concerns he had heard, including from Asian American groups.

Commenting on the issue, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a daily news briefing on Thursday that the so-called China Initiative, birthed during the former US administration, should have been abolished long ago.

"The essence of this plan is a tool for the anti-China forces in the United States to generalize the concept of national security and to contain China, which aggravates the racial discrimination domestically, and causes serious harm to Asian groups in the United States," she added.

Jenny Lee, a professor and dean's fellow for the Internationalization Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona, said on Twitter: "The DOJ's 'China Initiative' is finally over and part of US' (ugly) history. Whether racial profiling and the resultant damages will continue remains to be seen."

She is among the nearly 2,900 faculty members, scholars and administrators from 230 US institutions who called for Attorney General Merrick Garland to end the program. Lee's study of 2,000 scientists showed that half of those of Chinese descent feared being surveilled by the FBI.

Patrick Toomey, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project, said on Twitter that the dropping of the program is "a welcome step", but it's "not enough to prevent discrimination from seeping into the FBI's investigations of Asian American scientists and others going forward".

The China Initiative was launched by the administration of then-president Donald Trump in 2018.

Asian Americans have said the initiative fueled racism, cast US scientists with ties to China as spies and treated paperwork violations as criminal acts.

Civil rights and business groups and universities told the US administration that the effort had fostered suspicion of Asian professors working in the US, chilled scientific research and contributed to a rising tide of anti-Asian sentiment.