A little more than a year ago, Matthew Olsen, assistant attorney general for national security, used a speech at George Mason University to make an announcement: The U.S. Department of Justice would shut down the China Initiative.
“I have concluded that this initiative is not the right approach,” Olsen said of the investigation, begun under President Donald J. Trump, into academic and economic espionage by China. The inquiry, which focused disproportionately on researchers of Chinese or Asian descent, “fueled a narrative of intolerance and bias,” he said.
On college campuses, there was hope that Olsen’s February 2022 announcement would bring an end to a dark period when many worried that the future of academic ties with China hung in the balance.
Over the past year, the number of allegations of foreign interference reported by federal grant-making agencies has declined, and more cases have been resolved through administrative action instead of prosecution. The rhetoric has also moderated since Trump-administration officials routinely lambasted college leaders for their naïvete in working with Chinese universities and other foreign partners. “There’s been more of a dialogue instead of a shouting match,” said Jeffrey Riedinger, vice provost for global affairs at the University of Washington.
But the assistant attorney general’s speech did not end scrutiny of American higher education’s relationship with China or with other countries “of concern,” like Russia. Since then, Congress has approved new disclosure requirements for foreign funds coming to colleges and barred researchers who receive federal grants from taking part in “malign” talent-recruitment plans like China’s Thousand Talents program, which offers visiting appointments and research stipends to foreign scholars. Government agencies have also been crafting new programs and policies to safeguard research and determine risk.
The ending of the China Initiative seemed to give the illusion that the cloud had gone away. But it’s still overhead.
If a new chapter began with the conclusion of the China Initiative, the underlying narrative remains much the same. China may be the United States’ top collaborator in published scientific research, but it is also its biggest competitor in a race to develop new breakthroughs in science, technology, and medicine, as well as in fields with implications for security and surveillance. It’s a Cold War of innovation, and university labs are the new front line, with many policymakers troubled that working with China could advantage a rival. Indeed, mistrust of China is the rare topic that garners bipartisan agreement in Washington these days.
“Maybe the volume has been turned down a little, but the tune is still playing,” said Jane Gatewood, vice provost for global engagement at the University of Rochester.
International-education administrators like Gatewood and their colleagues in university research offices want to see institutional strategies that protect intellectual property from potential bad actors abroad without cutting off global scientific and technological collaboration. This would be new ground. For decades, research sharing has largely been black and white — sensitive findings were classified, but most areas of inquiry were open, even across borders. “We’re going to have to get used to working in the gray areas,” Gatewood said.
The pressure to act is emanating from the nation’s capital, to be sure, but it is also coming from campuses, from faculty members who want better guidance to navigate the uncertainty. Perhaps no group is watching more closely than those most affected by the China Initiative, Chinese and Asian American researchers.
For many of these academics, the fear lingers. Some are unwilling to apply for federal grants in the current climate. And American researchers may be pulling back from working with Chinese colleagues: Since the start of the China Initiative, joint publications by Chinese and American scientists have declined.
“The ending of the China Initiative seemed to give the illusion that the cloud had gone away,” said Jenny J. Lee, a professor of higher education at the University of Arizona who studies Sino-American research collaboration. “But it’s still overhead.”
Oversight of a Different Kind
One reason the China Initiative may not have ended scrutiny of academic ties to China is that the examination of such relationships pre-dates the Trump-era investigation.
Take the National Institutes of Health, where the number of foreign-interference cases soared from just five in 2017 to 111 in 2018, the year the China Initiative started. For the next three years, the NIH recorded more cases involving allegations of failure to disclose foreign funding, academic affiliations, or other conflicts of interest on grant applications than any other type of research-integrity violation.
In nine of 10 such cases, the “country of concern” was China, an NIH summary notes.
But Michael Lauer, deputy director of extramural research for the NIH, said officials began looking into foreign interference far earlier, in mid-2016. The biomedical-sciences agency was alerted to potential problems, Lauer said, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice, then under President Barack Obama. By the time the Trump administration announced the China Initiative, in November 2018, NIH officials had already begun to send out letters to universities across the country, flagging concerns about foreign influence and possible failures of disclosure.
Last year, the number of foreign-interference cases logged by the NIH dropped sharply, to just 23, which Lauer attributes to greater awareness of reporting requirements and of the risks of nondisclosure among universities and researchers.
What of the China Initiative’s conclusion? “It really didn’t have any effect on us at all,” Lauer said, adding that even during the initiative the NIH referred few foreign-disclosure cases for prosecution. (A notable exception was Charles M. Lieber, a former chairman of Harvard University’s chemistry department and the most prominent academic to be convicted as part of the China Initiative.)
The Department of Justice’s decision to wind down its inquiry does not stop grant-making agencies from opening foreign-interference cases or pursuing their own investigations. Instead, the move signaled that, except in the most serious of cases, allegations of research-security violations would be handled outside of the courts.
The resolution of recent cases by the National Science Foundation, or NSF, reflects the non-prosecutorial approach. Since the end of the China Initiative, the agency’s Office of Inspector General has found indications of foreign conflicts of interest in at least nine cases involving grantees. But according to memos published by the office, it either closed the cases without pursuing criminal actions or forwarded them to the Justice Department, which decided not to prosecute.
That does not mean no penalties were assessed for research-security violations. In two cases, colleges were required to return grant funds to the NSF, and in one, the principal investigator was forbidden to apply for grants from the agency for three years. In November, Ohio State University agreed to pay $875,000 to settle allegations that it failed in NSF grant applications to disclose support one professor had received from a foreign government.
Rebecca Keiser, chief of research security strategy and policy for the NSF, said the agency doesn’t want to be in the policing game. “We are not law enforcement,” she said in an interview with The Chronicle. “We set policy.”
Still, a shift away from prosecutions or a drop in case counts doesn’t mean less oversight. The NSF, for example, plans to use “big data” to spot disclosure failures, using data analytics to look for inconsistencies between information that researchers include on grant applications and in databases of scientific publications.
A driver of current oversight efforts is a national-security directive Trump signed shortly before he left office that orders all federal research-funding agencies to strengthen and standardize their research-security policies. It continues under President Biden.
A proposal released by the White House last month requires colleges and other organizations that receive $50 million or more annually in federal-scientific grants to develop research-security plans. It has also published draft guidance that would beef up disclosure rules while making them more consistent across the federal government.
For colleges, the new mandates bring an added burden. The Council on Governmental Relations, an association of research universities, academic medical centers, and independent research institutes, estimates the initial costs of meeting new federal disclosure requirements could be nearly $445,000 for universities with $100 million or more in federal-research funding. For institutions that receive less grant funding, expenses could top $100,000.
“It’s a lot of money, especially for emerging research institutions,” said Kristin West, the council’s director of research ethics and compliance. She notes that while some of the compliance spending will be on one-time purchases, other expenditures, for staffing, software licensing, and routine training, will be continual. “That seems to cut against the goal of diversifying research beyond the big boys.”
A Call for More-Nuanced Guidance
The council and other higher-education groups are nonetheless supportive of efforts to bring consistency to what needs to be reported and how. Having multiple disclosure requirements and processes for reporting makes it more likely that researchers or university administrators responsible for research security could make errors, West said.
Solving the problem may be easier said than done. Although the presidential directive calls for uniform standards, NASA recently released a policy for handling conflicts of interest, including ties with foreign universities or governments, that diverges from those of other science agencies. And competitiveness legislation passed last year by Congress includes a new requirement for reporting overseas gifts and contracts to the NSF that both duplicates existing foreign-funds reporting to the U.S. Department of Education and differs from it, in the amount that must be disclosed.
College groups would also like government agencies to more clearly articulate what they see as the real research-security risks. Universities’ longstanding practices for monitoring research integrity have typically been geared toward screening for more traditional types of misconduct than for detecting threats from foreign influence, said Tobin Smith, senior vice president for policy at the Association of American Universities. “If there’s fabricated data, that’s easier for us to assess.”
The China Initiative was too broad in its approach to identifying risk, said Riedinger of the University of Washington. “Picking whole countries is a remarkably blunt instrument.”
Riedinger and his colleagues are calling for more nuanced guidance: What types of individuals, institutions, disciplines, or research areas warrant additional scrutiny? What sorts of programs and affiliations raise red flags? What are the potential vulnerabilities that keep policymakers up at night?
Having such guidance is important as colleges create research-security plans, said Kalpen Trivedi, vice provost for global affairs at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “Tell us, how can we reassure you that we are doing what we can to safeguard science in our universities?” he said. “What represents safe science to you?”
Already, a consensus is emerging about certain areas of concern, like “malign” foreign-talent programs that offer salaries, honoraria, or other research support in an effort to lure American scientists to transfer their scientific knowledge. In addition to talent programs that seek to poach American intellectual property, Congress specifically banned those run by China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and science agencies are working to incorporate the new prohibition into grant applications, said the NSF’s Keiser.
She agrees with the need for more information about the scale and scope of potential threats to research security. The NSF plans to start a risk-assessment center that will help give colleges tools for identifying, assessing, and mitigating risk, Keiser said. Its use of data analytics could also help pinpoint problematic trends.
Building Trust
Still, when it comes to safeguarding international research, universities play a key role, said Lauer of the NIH. After all, science agencies like his award grants not to individual researchers but to institutions.
In the years since the NIH began its investigation, Lauer said, colleges have become more “proactive” in developing institutional policies for international research and enforcing those already on the books.
Many experts point to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the gold standard. The university has an extensive process for vetting international collaborations for risks relating to national security, economic competition, and civil and human rights; projects in China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia are flagged for extra scrutiny. (Some faculty members have criticized MIT’s approach as too heavy handed.)
While not all institutions have MIT’s structured approach, most research-university administrators said their institutions now had a process in place for reviewing foreign contracts and partnerships for potential research-security vulnerabilities and for advising faculty members about conflicts that could jeopardize federal grants.
Of the NIH foreign-interference cases, about a third were self-disclosed, with the share of violations reported by colleges increasing after 2020. “Rather than hearing from us, they wanted to see whether or not there were problems,” Lauer said.
This more collaborative approach stands in contrast to the early, often-adversarial days of the China Initiative, when colleges frequently found themselves in a defensive posture.
Riedinger called some of the current conversations between college and government officials “constructive” and said university leaders had gotten better about being transparent about their efforts to balance research security and open science. “For a long time, higher ed’s response was, ‘Trust us, we know what we’re doing,’” he said. “Now, rather than ‘Trust us,’ it’s, ‘Here’s why you should trust us.’”
But both universities and federal agencies are likely to have to rebuild trust with another group: scientists, especially those of Chinese descent.
That may not be easy. Some colleges were seen as offering insufficient support to their faculty members when they came under scrutiny, or even abetting investigations. Many researchers see a lack of clarity in the new rules and are concerned about being penalized for types of international engagement that were previously encouraged. Advocacy groups say discussions about research-security policy have focused too much on the policing of international collaboration and not enough on supporting researchers or educating them about shifting requirements for disclosure.
“So far, there is more of a focus on deterrence,” said Gisela Perez Kusakawa, executive director of the Asian American Scholar Forum. “But what are the positive efforts that would make Asian American scholars feel more protected?”
For example, Kusakawa said research-security policies should include due-process provisions that would allow researchers to challenge findings or to file complaints if they thought they were being discriminated against.
Trivedi, of the University of Massachusetts, said colleges have to be careful how they frame the actions they take, and the reasons for them, with faculty members. “Our compliance shouldn’t create a chilling effect.”
Researchers ‘Still Scared’
But the damage to research, and to researchers, wrought by the China Initiative may be harder to undo. “They are still scared,” said Steven Pei, a professor at the University of Houston and an organizer of the APA Justice Task Force, a group that advocates for Asian American scientists. “People are much more careful.”
There is a sense among researchers, Pei and others said, that they could fall under suspicion simply for doing science while Chinese. After all, with the exception of Lieber, the Harvard professor, prominent prosecutions under the China Initiative were of Asian American scientists. Of the NIH foreign-interference cases, three-quarters involved Asian scientists.
Of a half-dozen scholars interviewed by The Chronicle, none said they were currently willing to apply for federal grants, because of their anxiety they could be racially profiled. The stakes were too high. Among the scientists investigated by the NIH, nearly two-thirds were removed from federal grants. As Science has previously reported, 42 percent lost their jobs or were forced to resign.
Fearful, academics and graduate students of Chinese descent may be pulling back from academic work with China. When the University of Arizona’s Jenny Lee, who conducted a survey of scientists, drilled into the data, she found that their reluctance to engage with China had nothing to do with the nature or sensitivity of their research. “It really came down to whether someone was of Chinese descent, period,” Lee said.
There are reports that Chinese American researchers have been stopped at the border and questioned about their work. A special congressional committee has been set up to examine competition with China. And in a speech at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in December, Christopher Wray, the FBI director, defended government investigations of academic ties to China.
Gang Chen is one of the scholars who said he would no longer apply for federal funding to support his research. A professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, he was arrested in January 2021 for allegedly hiding his affiliations to and payments from Chinese universities. A federal prosecutor later dropped the charges against Chen, saying it was in the “interests of justice.”
The China Initiative and other investigations damage academics like him who have collaborations with China, Chen said in an interview. But its effects are more than individual, he said. “This is a fundamental assault on the scientific community. It could hurt and weaken American science.”
Not long ago, Chen was back in the headlines. He is credited with having helped discover a new semiconductor material that is being called a game-changer.
