Breitbart
China’s Foreign Ministry demanded the United States end “systemic racial discrimination” and “do some soul-searching” on Thursday in response to news that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is reviewing a program to combat Chinese Communist Party espionage.
The DOJ’s China Initiative, launched under former President Donald Trump, is an attempt to focus law enforcement efforts on identifying Chinese government infiltration of academia and the technology and economic sectors meant to undermine the United States and enrich China’s intellectual property base. The DOJ under President Joe Biden is reportedly nearing the end of a review of the program. According to a report from Reuters this week, the Biden administration is expected to end a program focused on professors working illicitly with the Communist Party and remove “China” from the name of the “China Initiative” “amid concerns that label could fuel anti-Asian rhetoric.”
The program was launched in response to a growing number of incidents in which professors were caught illicitly working with Chinese government agents, or agents themselves were found inappropriately sharing technology and other intelligence with Beijing. Among the most prominent incidents were the arrest and conviction of Harvard University professor Charles Lieber in 2021 for lying about ties to the Wuhan University of Technology and the conviction of engineering professor Yi-Chi Shih in the same year for “a scheme to illegally export integrated circuits with military applications to China.”
