Nearly three years ago, a University of Kansas chemistry professor named Feng “Franklin” Tao was arrested and accused of concealing his work for a Chinese university. His arrest “disrupted the transfer of American intellectual property to China,” then-Assistant US Attorney Tony Mattivi would tell the New Yorker. It also inaugurated a new stage in the China Initiative, a Trump-era Justice Department program aimed at fighting Chinese espionage. Tao became the first academic charged under that program.
The Biden administration ended the China Initiative in February after years of heated criticism from academics and Asian American advocates, who have decried the program as overzealous and far-removed from its original national security goals. But Tao’s case lived on, trudging its way through federal court in Kansas City even as nine other scholars of Asian descent had their China Initiative cases dropped by prosecutors or dismissed by federal judges. This week, he was convicted on four charges of wire fraud and making false statements.
“While we are deeply disappointed with the jury’s verdict, we believe it was so clearly against the weight of the evidence we are convinced that it will not stand,” Tao’s attorney Peter Zeidenberg said in a statement. The judge in the case did not immediately set a date for sentencing.
While billed as a broad counter-espionage program, the bulk of China Initiative cases in the past two years involved research integrity issues like lying on a grant application, not spying or theft. During Tao’s trial, the judge barred mention of the China Initiative and the controversy surrounding the program, even as DOJ acknowledged its flaws publicly. “By grouping cases under the China Initiative rubric,” DOJ official Matthew Olsen said in February, “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.”
That “harmful perception” stems from the department’s own caseload. Nearly 90 percent of the people charged under the China Initiative were of Asian descent, according to data compiled by the MIT Technology Review. Meanwhile, the only high-profile academic in that span to be convicted was Harvard chemist Charles Lieber, who is white. (His attorneys have since argued for a new trial.)
