"YEAH, BUT WUHAN!":

Inside a Kansas City courtroom, Peter Zeidenberg is growing frustrated. The wiry, gray-haired lawyer isn't making much headway persuading a judge to throw out evidence obtained as a result of what he calls misconduct by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His client, Franklin Tao, a former University of Kansas chemical engineering professor facing 20 years in prison, is furiously scribbling notes and passing them to his defense team.

"They were looking for a spy, looking for evidence of espionage of trade secrets," Zeidenberg says, his voice rising in exasperation. But they found none, he says, because there wasn't any. "At the end of the day, they just have a conflict-of-interest form where the box wasn't checked."

Tao is accused of failing to disclose ties to a Chinese university while employed in Kansas. His prosecution is part of the China Initiative, a sweeping effort by the Department of Justice, the FBI, and other federal agencies launched in November 2018. One primary goal was to counter Chinese espionage in America's corporations and research labs by rooting out spies and halting the transfer of information and technology to China. The FBI says it has opened thousands of investigations involving China since then. But recent setbacks--six cases dropped in July and a directed acquittal in September--have revealed law enforcement errors and prosecutorial overzealousness.

Advocacy groups say the prosecutions reflect racial bias, fueled by tensions with China, that contributed to a 71% rise in incidents of violence against Asian Americans from 2019 to 2020. Attorney General Merrick Garland has pledged to review the program. "They have turned the China Initiative into an instrument for racial profiling," says Judy Chu, a Democratic representative from California who is the first Chinese American woman elected to Congress. "They have turned it into a means to terrorize Chinese scientists and engineers. Something has gone dramatically wrong."

A Bloomberg News analysis of the 50 indictments announced or unsealed since the start of the program and posted on the Justice Department's China Initiative web page reveals a further problem: The China Initiative hasn't been very successful at catching spies. The largest group of cases, 38% of the total, have charged academic researchers and professors with fraud for failing to disclose affiliations with Chinese universities. None of them has been accused of spying, and almost half of those cases have been dropped. About half as many China Initiative cases concern violations of U.S. sanctions or illegal exports, and a smaller percentage involve cyber intrusions that prosecutors attributed to China.

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