US drops charges against Gang Chen, MIT professor accused of lying about China ties
- Department of Justice admits that it cannot prove its case, brought as part of its initiative to stop scientists from sharing sensitive technology with China
- Chen expresses relief that the ordeal is over and thanks those who supported him during a ‘terrible year’
In a blow to the US Justice Department’s China Initiative policy, prosecutors on Thursday dropped all charges against a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor accused of misrepresenting his relationship to China on funding documents.
Gang Chen, a Chinese-born mechanical engineer and nanotechnology expert at MIT, was arrested a year ago for allegedly failing to disclose links to the Chinese government. The indictment also accused his research group of receiving US$19 million from Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen.
Chen, who is a naturalised US citizen, had pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.
“After a careful assessment of this new information in the context of all the evidence, our office has concluded that we can no longer meet our burden of proof at trial,” the Justice Department said in a statement, citing “additional information” that came to light.
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In a statement, Chen expressed relief that the ordeal was over and thanked supporters in this “terrible year”, while his lawyers welcomed the news.
“Today is a great day,” said Robert Fisher, a partner with Nixon Peabody. “Professor Gang Chen is an innocent man. Our defence was never based on any legal technicalities. Our defence was this: Gang did not commit any of the offences he was charged with. Full stop.”
The China Initiative, which began in 2018 during president Donald Trump’s administration, has been criticised by universities, Asian-American groups, civil liberties organizations and lawmakers who accuse the government of overreach.
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“I’m sure there is spying, although they have not put forward evidence to show the scale of the problem,” said Xiaoxing Xi, a Temple University professor accused in 2015 of sharing with scientists in China sensitive technology of possible use in making semiconductors before seeing all charges dropped.
“They should catch spies, that’s their job. What are we paying them for? I don’t think they’re doing a good job.”
Supporters of the initiative counter that China devotes substantial resources to intellectual property theft at home and abroad, has laid out plans to dominate key technologies in its Made in China 2025 initiative and that the more open US approach is highly vulnerable.
Many scientists have been accused of participating in China’s Thousand Talents Plan, which was set up by Beijing in 2008 to benefit from foreign scientific expertise. Participation was initially encouraged by US universities and funding agencies as a way to stretch research money for basic science before rules tightened around 2015.
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In December, Charles Lieber, the former chairman of Harvard University’s chemistry department, was convicted on five counts of tax evasion and failing to disclose his ties to the talent programme after all but admitting his guilt in a video shown to the jury. Critics say Lieber’s being white allowed the Justice Department to argue that its cases were not racially motivated, even as the Harvard connection sent useful shock waves through academia.
Legal experts said Thursday’s decision in the Chen case, combined with other reversals, chips away at the China Initiative. Defendants in at least eight other cases were acquitted or had charges dropped over the past year.
“But simply rebranding the China Initiative will not be enough,” said Patrick Toomey, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. “Under President Biden, the Justice Department must fundamentally reform its policies that enable racial profiling in the name of national security.”
Bureaucratic inertia and politics – including the Biden administration’s reluctance to look weak toward China – reduce the chances of the initiative’s elimination any time soon, although the Justice Department is considering moving existing cases into the agency’s National Security Division, The New York Times reported on Thursday.
Either way, the Chen outcome should place a higher burden on the FBI and Justice Department when considering prosecutions.
“They will likely be more careful and circumspect in bringing charges and focus on true espionage in cases, not alleged paperwork violations that have nothing to do with espionage,” said Brian Kelly, who was lead co-counsel with Fisher.
A legal advocate involved in China Initiative cases said the Justice Department’s repeated unwillingness to explain where they erred in dropped cases exacts a cost, particularly for Chinese-American scientists who must live under the cloud of a federal indictment and potential jail time.
“For the government not to apologise or explain its errors is something that is painful for them,” said the advocate, who asked not be identified given his work with the government. “It really impacts people for the long term.”
He said that in bringing weak cases, the government has also relied on questionable legal theory, and changed its approach as those theories are rejected. This has been the case with the prosecution of Feng Tao, a former chemical engineering professor at the University of Kansas, also charged with failing to disclose ties to China in federal grant applications.
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In that case, prosecutors argued that a form incorrectly filled out qualified as fraud against the US government when the document was used only by the university, he said. “The government repeatedly amended its indictment to add controversial legal theories as those it put forward were challenged by the defence,” he added.
Legal analysts said several factors likely contributed to Thursday’s decision by the Justice Department. MIT was fully supportive of Chen, financing his defence, petitioning the government on his behalf and working with other universities in opposing the broader policy.
In addition, the administration’s review and growing political pressure to drop the China Initiative helped. Furthermore, the US Department of Energy and other funding agencies have acknowledged that some disclosure rules are unclear and contradictory, said one lawyer.
Critics of the China Initiative say they are in for the long haul.
“I see this as one positive outcome in the long struggle we have to keep up,” said Xi. “We just have to keep the fight up.”
