Editorials by Gang Chen and Science journals Editor-in-Chief call for end to US Department of Justice’s China Initiative

“Rampant wrongful prosecutions terrorize innocent people—everywhere,” writes Gang Chen, a professor accused by the US government of fraud and questionable connections to Chinese entities. “The scientific community is not immune to this. I know because I was a victim,” he says. In this editorial, Chen – exonerated earlier this year after a two-year process that included being investigated under the US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) China Initiative – conveys he is the “luckiest among the unlucky,” noting many other Chinese American scientists are being unfairly investigated for similar alleged “crimes.” He says his ordeal taught him that “politics affects science and scientists, and that universities and funding agencies must stand up for faculty who are wrongfully prosecuted.” Chen said that what gave him hope during the last two years also provides a lesson for all universities: “MIT leadership…supported me morally and financially after I was detained…and the university made its support public soon after I was arrested.” He notes that MIT has supported other faculty under similar investigation, but other universities have mostly remained silent. “I urge university leaders, trustees, and alumni associations to protect their faculty from a campaign that is misdirected.” He says funding agencies must also stand up for justice, and laments how this was delayed in his own case. Chen concludes the Editorial by calling for an end to the DOJ’s China Initiative.

In an accompanying editorial in Science Advances, Science journals Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp says the recent acquittal of Gang Chen shows how much damage has been done to the scientific enterprise by the China Initiative with so little in return. Now four years after the Initiative was launched, there is “scant evidence that the amount of illegal activity turned up was worth the heartache and expense of running the initiative,” he writes. Thorp acknowledges incidents of scientific information being transferred to China prior to publication in the US, which are appropriate for the US intelligence apparatus to pursue, “but it is an immense overreaction to send university administrators into a frenzy auditing the forms of their productive faculty... More importantly, this effort has a chilling effect both on establishing legitimate and important collaborations with China.” Thorp also highlights a cognitive dissonance between the way scientific leaders go to Congress and request increases in funding in the name of nationalism, and the way science is conducted. “Scientific progress relies on collaboration, on recruiting the best possible talent to important scientific problems, and on publicizing these findings to the entire world,” he writes. “So setting up science as a competition with talented scientists in other countries and as harboring secrets that are not to be shared widely flies in the face of the core values of the scientific community.” Thorp calls on the federal government to “wind down the China Initiative immediately and go back to managing the small number of legitimate issues on an episodic basis.”