This article first appeared in The Hill.
Allies of former President Donald Trump want to bring back one of his administration’s most disastrous policies, the China Initiative.
Project 2025, a set of policy proposals put forward by the conservative Heritage Foundation, recommends reviving the program through executive action. And House Republicans, joined by 23 Democrats, just passed a bill that would require reinstating a rebranded version of it.
For the sake of U.S. national security, these efforts must be defeated.
Launched by the Department of Justice in 2018 and led by the FBI and federal prosecutors, the China Initiative was an unmitigated failure that caused lasting harm to U.S. national interests.
Ostensibly designed to combat economic espionage and intellectual property theft by Chinese government agents, the program quickly devolved into a campaign of racial profiling and fearmongering that targeted U.S.-based scientists and technologists who were not even suspected of spying or intellectual property theft. The chilling effect it created within the U.S. scientific community continues to threaten American primacy in science and technology.
The Biden administration ended the China Initiative in February 2022 after a strategic review determined that it fueled a “harmful perception” of bias in Justice Department investigations and stifled scientific research. But Republicans in Congress have been trying to restart it ever since.
They found success in the House last week, leveraging election-year concerns about looking tough on China to obtain Democratic support to pass an appropriations bill that would resume the program under a new name, the “CCP Initiative.” These efforts ignore that the China Initiative failed in its stated goals of catching Chinese spies and curbing state-sponsored intellectual property theft.
While no reasonable person doubts that the Chinese government engages in industrial espionage, FBI director Christopher Wray often described the scope of this activity in hyperbolic terms, calling it a “whole-of-society” threat. But the only statistic he offered in 2020 to substantiate this claim was that the FBI had over 2,000 investigations into China-related misconduct and opened a new one every 12 hours.
Curiously, the number of active investigations Wray claimed remained consistent at 2,000 over several years, both during and after the China Initiative, suggesting the FBI must be closing an investigation every 12 hours as well. If the FBI’s metric for measuring the threat is accurate, the China Initiative does not appear to have reduced it.
The number of investigations is a relatively meaningless statistic, however. If these thousands of investigations didn’t result in indictments and convictions, they were at best a waste of national security resources that should have been directed toward genuine threats, and at worst, evidence of abuse.
The results tell a very different story about the China Initiative.
The several thousand FBI investigations Wray described did not find thousands of Chinese industrial spies or even hundreds of them. A 2021 MIT Technology Review analysis of the 77 cases the Justice Department had identified as China Initiative successes found that only 19 included charges related to economic espionage or intellectual property theft.
The MIT analysis showed that over time, China Initiative investigations increasingly focused not on individuals suspected of spying or stealing trade secrets, but on Chinese and Asian American researchers and scholars alleged to have omitted details in immigration paperwork or U.S. grant applications. Though these so-called “research integrity” cases did not involve alleged harms to national security, by 2020 they made up the bulk of the China Initiative cases.
The Justice Department often announced indictments in such cases with great fanfare, implying without evidence that it had nabbed Chinese spies, only to drop the charges quietly before trial, or see them rejected by juries and by judges for lack of evidence. MIT’s investigation showed that by 2021, only one-third of China Initiative cases had resulted in convictions.
The problem wasn’t just that the China Initiative didn’t fulfill its stated purpose. It also inflicted serious harm. By prioritizing China-related investigations and prosecutions, the China Initiative created what former U.S. Attorney Carol Lam called “perverse incentives.”
To produce statistical accomplishments for the initiative, agents and prosecutors had to prioritize cases targeting individuals with some nexus to China, rather than first looking for evidence of espionage or trade secret theft, no matter who might be doing it. Instead of identifying a crime and then finding the culprit, investigators found suspects who had some connection to China — often merely ancestral — and then searched for a crime, no matter how minor and unrelated to national security.
The MIT analysis found that 88 percent of the people charged, which included U.S. citizens and foreign nationals from China, Taiwan and several other countries, had Chinese ancestry.
The initiative’s narrow focus on Chinese ethnicity reinforced a dangerous historical narrative that people of Asian descent pose a heightened national security threat. Further, it undermined the Asian American community’s trust in the fairness of Justice Department investigations, as frontline FBI officials have recently acknowledged, to their credit.
The chilling effect on both American and foreign scholars remains, making it harder for U.S. universities and research institutions to recruit and retain the finest scientific and technological talent from around the world.
According to a 2024 study, the number of Chinese-born scientists leaving the United States since the China Initiative began increased by 75 percent, with most returning to China. Calls to restart the China Initiative will only reinforce this brain drain to China’s benefit.
At a time when we most need scientific and technological advances to protect against growing threats from nuclear proliferation, pandemics, climate change, disinformation and cybercrime, targeting Chinese and Asian American scientists and scholars rather than focusing on catching foreign spies, leaves the U.S. more vulnerable.
Many countries, including China, use state resources to conduct economic espionage and steal trade secrets. But the China Initiative failed to mitigate this threat. Restarting it will only increase the self-inflicted damage to U.S. national security interests.
Michael German is a senior fellow in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program and a former FBI special agent.
