The Spy Who Wasn’t

Xi Xiaoxing works out of a warren of labs on the fifth floor of Temple University’s state-of-the-art science and technology building. On a morning in late fall, he led a visitor through the space, navigating around clumps of graduate students and postdocs laboring on some of the nine government-sponsored research projects he leads.

Mr. Xi is a physicist, and as he walked, he discussed his work, which involves creating almost impossibly thin superconducting films. But he also talked up his colleagues — several are National Academies members, he boasted — and the university, which has aggressively sought to advance its standing in the sciences. At one point he even praised Temple’s football team, then in the midst of one of its winningest seasons.

It seemed like nothing so much as the sort of tour that Mr. Xi, as acting chairman of the department, might give a promising job candidate. Until he stepped into an elevator.

“Hey,” said a fellow professor, with a warm smile and a pat on the arm. “It’s nice to see you back. It’s been a rough year.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Xi says quietly.

“Rough year” is an understatement: On May 21, 2015, Mr. Xi was arrested in his suburban Philadelphia home. Technically, the charges were wire fraud. Really, though, he was being accused of selling scientific secrets to his native China.

After the raid, Mr. Xi, a naturalized U.S. citizen, faced four months of legal and professional limbo in which his academic career was in jeopardy, his correspondence with research colleagues scrutinized, his contact with Temple faculty and students largely suspended.

Then, almost as suddenly as the arrest itself, federal prosecutors dropped the case after several prominent physicists — including an inventor of the technology Mr. Xi was said to have shared with the Chinese — came forward to show that the government had bungled the science when it charged him.

What alarms many researchers and academics is that Mr. Xi is not the only Chinese-born scientist against whom charges have been brought and then dropped. In fact, he is at least the fifth in little more than a year.

For some, the prosecutions — which come amid heightened U.S.-China tensions — have raised the specter of racial profiling. Is it safe, they wonder, to practice science while Chinese?

But even as the Chinese and American governments keep each other at arm’s length, American colleges are forging increasingly close relationships with their Chinese counterparts. There is apprehension that the cases against Mr. Xi and others could cast a chill on international, and particularly Chinese-American, research and cooperation. If scientists here feel that they have to look over their shoulder when working with China, that could impinge on academic freedom, many worry.

“The strength of science is in its openness,” says Albert M. Chang, president of the International Organization of Chinese Physicists and Astronomers. “People are worried that engagement with China could lead to them being investigated. There is a fear of presumed guilt until proven otherwise.”

The possibility of such far-reaching repercussions trouble the man whose supposed guilt made headlines in both his adopted and his birth countries. For Xi Xiaoxing, though, there is also another concern: Can he reclaim his reputation and his innocence?

The federal agents came at dawn, a dozen, dressed in bulletproof vests. They arrested Mr. Xi at gunpoint, like a “violent criminal,” he says, as his wife and two daughters — one in middle school, the other home from college — looked on. They searched the Xis’ house, carting away boxes of material: the family’s computers, years of tax returns and bank statements, an old cellphone, every USB stick in the house.

The indictment laid out the charges: The professor, prosecutors claimed, had revealed blueprints for a sophisticated, proprietary piece of laboratory equipment, a device known as a pocket heater, to colleagues in China “in an effort to help Chinese entities become world leaders in the field of superconductivity.” In return, he had sought “lucrative and prestigious appointments” in China. As evidence, authorities cited four emails that Mr. Xi sent between May and December 2010.

The arrest shocked Mr. Xi’s colleagues. The schemer portrayed in the indictment sounded nothing like the warm but reserved junior faculty member whom Moses H.W. Chan had come to know at Pennsylvania State University. Qi Li, Mr. Xi’s wife, is still a physics professor there, and the two men had remained friendly even after Mr. Xi left for Temple in 2009.

But Mr. Chan says he had another reason to be baffled by the charges. As a fellow physicist, he was “completely puzzled about what could possibly have industrial or strategic importance” in Mr. Xi’s work, which he says is years away from having commercial application. “It seemed unlikely,” Mr. Chan says, “to have interest for spies.”

Mr. Xi is an expert, one of the world’s best, on superconducting thin films, which carry electricity without resistance at extremely low temperatures. At the time of his arrest, he was overseeing research projects for the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA, and other federal agencies. Before the government suspected him, it had entrusted him with hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars.

Mr. Xi became an American citizen more than a decade ago, but he was born in Beijing. As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Xi, now 58, was sent to the countryside to work in the fields and shovel manure from pigsties. When China’s shuttered universities reopened, he was among the first group of students to sit for the gaokao, the national college-entrance exam. His top marks won him a place at prestigious Peking University, where he went on to earn his Ph.D.

Now his adoptive country was questioning his loyalty. Released after putting his house up for bail, he hunkered down with his family; at times, says his older daughter, Joyce, they would watch news stories broadcast from their front yard. His passport was confiscated, and he needed the prosecutor’s permission to drive his younger daughter to summer camp.

After a discussion with the dean of Temple’s College of Science and Technology, Mr. Xi agreed to step down as head of the physics department. He was cut off from most of his colleagues and graduate students. (Mr. Xi says he was barred from the campus, although Hai-Lung Dai, the provost, says the professor was asked only to stay away while the FBI was investigating, for about two weeks.) Other professors took over as principal investigators on his research projects.

“I went from being very busy to now having only one thing on my mind,” he says, noting that he faced 80 years in prison and $1 million in fines. “But it was a big, weighty thing.”

Still, Mr. Xi says, from the moment he saw the indictment he was sure the government had misinterpreted his science. The technology discussed in his emails wasn’t the pocket heater at all, but a device of his own design. And the expertise he’d offered to share was for an altogether different area of research. The messages, he maintains, were a typical pitch for international collaboration.

Paul C.W. Chu was one of several scientists asked to review case documents by Mr. Xi’s lawyer. It was immediately apparent, says Mr. Chu, executive director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity, at the University of Houston, that the emails contained “dramatically different” technology than investigators had claimed. He wrote an affidavit on behalf of Mr. Xi.

Though federal prosecutors in Philadelphia declined to discuss Mr. Xi’s case, it seems clear that the statements from Mr. Chu and others had an effect. On September 11, they dropped the charges, citing “additional information” that “came to the attention of the government.”

While the circumstances of Mr. Xi’s case seem nightmarishly improbable, in fact it is one of several against Chinese-American scientists in recent months that Frank H. Wu, former dean of the University of California Hastings College of Law, characterizes as government “oops.”

Two Chinese-born scientists at Eli Lilly spent nearly a year in jail or under house arrest, accused of stealing research on experimental drugs, before the charges were dropped in December 2014. The trade secrets they were accused of filching had appeared in published papers.

Then there’s Sherry Chen, a government hydrologist who was charged with unlawfully downloading material about national dams and lying about meeting with a high-ranking Chinese official. A week before her case was to go to trial, Ms. Chen was cleared — the data were publicly available, and she had reported her contact with the official, a former classmate, to her boss.

Under questioning from Asian-American members of Congress, Attorney General Loretta Lynch has denied that the Department of Justice is targeting Chinese-American scientists and researchers for prosecution. (The department has declined to comment on specific cases.)

Still, even those who think racial profiling is in play in the cases of Mr. Xi and others don’t deny that spying goes on. In 2010, for instance, a former Boeing engineer and naturalized American citizen from China was sentenced to almost 16 years in prison for handing over trade secrets to the country of his birth.

The Obama administration has called economic and cyberespionage among the top threats facing the United States. A 2011 FBI report warns that “foreign adversaries and competitors” could try to exploit the “open environment of U.S. campuses.” The document highlights several incidents involving China.

These, however, are but the latest examples of how tensions between the two countries can affect Chinese and Chinese-American scientists, dating back decades to the early days of Communist rule, says Zuoyue Wang, a historian of science at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona.

The best-known recent case is that of Wen Ho Lee. The Taiwanese-born Mr. Lee was indicted in 1999 on 59 counts of illegally removing classified nuclear data from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos weapons laboratory. Although he spent nine months in solitary confinement, the case never went to trial, and as part of a deal Mr. Lee pleaded guilty to just a single count of mishandling national-security data. The federal judge hearing his case apologized for his treatment.

The journalist and activist Helen Zia helped Mr. Lee write a book about his account, My Country Versus Me. “When U.S.-China relations develop a cold,” she says, “Chinese-Americans get pneumonia.”

There was a definite chill in the months, and even years, after Mr. Lee’s case. Worried they might be discriminated against because of their background, Chinese-American scientists began an informal boycott of government labs. Eventually, starved of some of their best applicants, the heads of the labs reached out to reassure and recruit Chinese-American scientists, says Cheuk-Yin Wong, then chairman of the Overseas Chinese Physics Association.

But if, 15 years ago, scientists opted out of defense work, what might today’s researchers do to avoid Mr. Xi’s fate? After all, he wasn’t conducting classified research — Temple doesn’t do any — but was doing the work of an “ordinary scientist,” says Mr. Wong.

Samuel H. Aronson, immediate past president of the American Physical Society, says he has heard from members who are scared and uncertain. Should they not work in China or with Chinese scientists? Stop accepting Chinese graduate students? Scrutinize every word they commit to email? “At this point, we don’t understand what’s broken, or even whether anything is broken,” says Mr. Aronson, “so we don’t know what to tell them to do.”

The stakes of disengagement could be high. In recent years, more than a quarter of all physics doctorates awarded annually by American universities have gone to Chinese nationals, according to the National Science Foundation. Chinese institutions may have once played catch-up, but they now produce some of the world’s strongest science. Funding agencies like the NSF and National Institutes of Health actually reward grant applications that include international collaboration.

Temple has long had training for professors working abroad, tutoring them, for example, on U.S. laws that govern what sorts of technology can be shared with foreign scientists, says Hai-Lung Dai, the provost. The university is reviewing that training to make sure that it highlights all applicable federal regulations. But, like others, Mr. Dai is unsure of what his faculty members ought to do differently. He hopes that national organizations, like the Association of American Universities or the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, could work with federal agencies, including the FBI, to offer clearer guidelines for overseas research.

The worst-case scenario, he says, would be for colleges to pull back from working abroad, particularly in China, where Temple’s ties are long and deep.

“I hope,” Mr. Dai says, “this won’t discourage academics from reaching across international borders.”

As for the man whose case has fueled such uncertainty, Mr. Xi used his newly reclaimed passport in December to join a faculty delegation to India.

He is again acting department chair, and this semester he returns to the classroom. He is working with federal agencies to resume his role as principal investigator on his grants. Papers based on results from several of his projects have already been submitted to top academic journals. “I want to get my research productivity back up,” he says during the tour of his lab. “This year,” he vows, “will be a blip.”

Moses Chan says he finds his friend and former colleague “surprisingly not bitter.” He says Mr. Xi shared a story of taking a sunrise run past the monuments on the National Mall during a fall trip to Washington. “It felt really good to be an American,” Mr. Xi — who was in D.C. for a news conference about his case — told him.

Mr. Xi himself says that one of his colleagues at Temple approached him soon after the charges were dropped and apologized. “I thought you must have done something,” the man said, “but now I realize you did nothing wrong.” Mr. Xi replied, “I’d think the same thing.”

For all of his determination to move forward, Mr. Xi says, he knows that doubts about his past could continue to dog him. Prosecutors dismissed the charges against him “without prejudice,” meaning that a case could still be brought again. Will foreign researchers want to work with him? Could the allegations be a black mark when he competes for the federal grants that support his lab? Wen Ho Lee, after all, never worked as a scientist again. “There’s a Chinese saying,” says Mr. Xi, who accumulated nearly $240,000 in legal bills: “If you see waves, there must be wind.”

Some in the physics community believe that Mr. Xi’s reputation has been roughed up but not ruined. “He’s a strong scientist,” says Laura H. Greene, chief scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, who has known Mr. Xi and his family for decades. “I think he’ll recover.”

Others, though, say that to remove the cloud over Mr. Xi, the government must formally apologize and make clear that he was falsely accused.

Mr. Xi just wants an explanation. “I would like to have solid data about why they targeted me, why they treated me the way they did,” he says. “I’m a scientist. When you do research, you want data. Without data, it’s just speculation.”

Without answers about why federal authorities focused on him, Xi Xiaoxing says, “it can happen to you.”

Karin Fischer writes about international education, colleges and the economy, and other issues. She’s on Twitter @karinfischer, and her email address is karin.fischer@chronicle.com.

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