Trial highlights lingering threat from 'China Initiative'

As yet another Chinese American professor faces trial under the so-called China Initiative, US academics are speaking out against the continuing impact of the canceled program.

Mingqing Xiao, an applied mathematician at Southern Illinois University, or SIU, Carbondale, faces charges of defrauding the US government by failing to disclose his ties to Chinese universities. He was scheduled to appear in a federal court in Benton, Illinois, on Monday. The trial is expected to last two weeks.

Xiao, indicted a year ago, is the latest of some two dozen cases emerging from the "China Initiative", a controversial program launched by former president Donald Trump in 2018 to fight economic espionage. Under pressure from critics who accused the program of racial profiling, the government discontinued the program in February.

The prosecutors said Xiao obtained a 2019 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop new mathematical tools for analyzing high-dimensional data sets while failing to tell SIU and the foundation about his ties to Shenzhen University and Guangdong University of Technology.

Xiao earned a PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1997, and has been a faculty member at SIU Carbondale since 2000. He became a US citizen in 2006, and a year later was promoted to full professor. In 2016, the university named Xiao an outstanding scholar.

The SIU Faculty Senate issued a resolution in December in support of Xiao, saying the government should drop all charges and it asked the university to reinstate Xiao and finance his legal defense.

In Xiao's case, "there are no allegations of espionage or intellectual property theft", said Edward Benyas, professor of oboe and conducting at SIU Carbondale, "as his research is in fundamental mathematics and the results of which have and will be available to anyone".

Perfect example

The government's targeting of "such an incredible teacher, scholar and human being is especially reprehensible", Benyas said at a recent webinar hosted by the American Physical Society, or APS, trying to call attention to Xiao's case, which he said is "a perfect example of what went wrong".

The APS has been a strong opponent of the "China Initiative", expressing its concerns through letters and meetings to the White House, the Department of Justice, and the FBI, in two different presidential administrations.

A former president of the APS and a Stanford University professor said academics in the United States need to keep watching and speaking out against the continuing impact of the "China Initiative" even though the program has been ended.

"The FBI's pursuit of academics under the China Initiative may have ended, but existing cases are still in the courts, and new policies and pending legislation may still target the academic community in harmful ways," Phil Bucksbaum, a professor in natural science at Stanford and a former APS president, told a recent webinar hosted by the APS.

"We need to continue watching and speaking out. We're not dropping the ball because the stakes for science and for all of us as scientists are just too high," said Bucksbaum, who is also a former APS president.

There were 24 academics or government scientists involved in "China Initiative" cases, according to APA Justice.