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TAP TIMES February 2022

Volume 13, Number 2
Test, Assembly & Packaging TIMES

The China Initiative: science under fire

he China Initiative, a
creation of the Trump
administration’s Jus-
tice Department in
2018, was intended to
squelch China’s unham-
pered practice of steal-
ing valuable U.S. trade
secrets and technol-
ogy. It may, however,

T have also had a chill-
ing effect on advances
Ron Iscoff in nanotechnology and In June 2020, Dr. Charles Lieber was arrested by the FBI
on the Harvard Campus. (Harvard University)
Editor other sciences.
chair of Harvard University’s Chemistry
High-profile arrests and Biochemistry Dept.
To date, this initiative, aimed at curbing
China’s economic espionage, has resulted Racial targeting
in the high-profile arrests of more than Quoted in The Crimson, Mark A. Cohen,
150 U.S. academics — 90 percent of whom an intellectual property law expert at the
are Chinese or of Chinese heritage . University of California, Berkeley, said that
the perception of racial targeting may hin-
The Harvard Crimson reported that a “re- der important collaboration with research-
cent analysis of the China Initiative by the ers from China.
MIT Technology Review found that only a
quarter of the defendants charged under “As it was phrased and described, par-
the initiative have been convicted.” ticularly at launch, [the initiative] really
seemed to be targeting individuals who
Research integrity were of Chinese descent and possibly
The Crimson added that the initiative’s those who worked with China,” he said.
focus has shifted away from hacking and
espionage cases to instances of “research “The U.S. has benefited so much from
integrity,’” commonly involving researchers Chinese talent in the U.S., and I think we
failing to disclose ties with Chinese univer- need to keep up those open doors to re-
sities. searchers in collaboration, particularly
now,” Cohen told The Crimson.
One of the few non-Chinese impacted was
Dr. Charles Lieber, a Philadelphia-born It is “unusual” for the FBI to target a non-
nanotechnology expert and the former Chinese such as Lieber,” Cohen noted.
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