The U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) China Initiative, launched on Nov. 1, 2018, was designed to identify, investigate, and counter threats to U.S. national security posed by China. The announcement marked a broader change by the Trump Administration in enforcement actions against Chinese companies and individuals. More specifically, the China Initiative was meant to address threats to U.S. national security arising from the unlawful (and lawful) transfer of U.S. intellectual property — especially technology — via economic espionage, hacking, theft of trade secrets, and other unlawful actions. While many of the ten points under the Initiative were not new, the focus of a criminal justice and enforcement initiative on a single country was unprecedented, and many argue this directly led to some of the failings of the Initiative that came later.
Under the Initiative’s umbrella, DOJ initiated more than 75 cases, accusing defendants of a variety of crimes including fraud, economic espionage, trade secret theft, and corruption. However, contrary to China Initiative’s stated purpose, only around 30% of the cases involved allegations against “PRC government agents,” while many others instead targeted professors, engineers, and other professionals who retained ties to Chinese companies or academic institutions while working in the United States. An investigation conducted by the MIT Technology Review in December 2021 pointed out that the China Initiative had deviated from its original purpose of preventing illicit technology transfer to China, and instead increasingly focused on individual academics and researchers of Chinese descent in cases involving no allegation of theft or illicit transfer of intellectual property. These individual prosecutions raised widespread public skepticism about the Initiative’s effectiveness and actual purpose, with some critics suggesting that the China Initiative was tantamount to blatant racial profiling and reflected bias within the U.S. Government against Asian-Americans and Chinese nationals. Some compared the China Initiative to notorious racist episodes such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and McCarthyism.
