BY HANK REICHMAN
In November 2017 the AAUP released a report on National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom, which decried “increasing restrictions on and threats to the global exchange of scientific research and the academic freedom of American scientists to interact with foreign colleagues,” especially those from China. In 2019, the AAUP joined 21 other organizations in a statement released by PEN America in response to reports that the FBI had urged universities to develop protocols for monitoring students and scholars from Chinese state-affiliated research institutions.
As the 2017 report documented, national security agencies have for some time sounded exaggerated alarms over threats of academic espionage even as the need for greater international scientific exchange continues to grow. In 2018, the Department of Justice publicly announced a “China Initiative” — a directive to all federal agents to set their sights on ferreting out “economic” Chinese spies operating in America. Chinese and Chinese-American professors and researchers at American universities quickly became targets of that initiative.
In its 2017 report, the AAUP acknowledged that “there are certainly instances in which foreign governments or corporations have violated both national security and intellectual property rights of Americans.” However, the report continued, “the conflation of commercial interest and national security” has too often led to careless actions by the government that threaten international scientific exchange and freedom of research.
One recent example of such careless action threatening academic freedom of research is the case of Anming Hu, an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a Canadian citizen born in China. Professor Hu was arrested on February 27, 2020, and charged with three counts of wire fraud and three counts of making false statements. According to a government press release, the professor hid his relationship with a Chinese university while receiving funding from NASA, in what Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers called “just the latest case involving professors or researchers concealing their affiliations with China from their American employers and the US government. We will not tolerate it.”
On Wednesday a jury failed to reach a verdict in the case and a mistrial was declared. After nearly two years of a failed espionage investigation, Professor Hu had been arrested on fraud charges under an obscure 2011 law that bars NASA from giving its research dollars to China or corporations owned by China. He was not charged with or accused of espionage or working with China, although the arrest came only after the FBI’s efforts to first accuse him of spying and then to recruit him as a spy failed. Prosecutors instead alleged Professor Hu intentionally tried to keep NASA and the university from knowing he worked a part-time job teaching graduate students and researchers at the Beijing University of Technology.
Here’s how the “investigation” of Professor Hu proceeded, according to trial testimony summarized by the Knoxville News-Sentinel:
FBI Agent Kujtim Sadiku testified he didn’t know anything about his bosses’ 2018 “China Initiative” when he decided to do a Google search of Hu’s name in March 2018. Sadiku said he got a tip Hu might be a spy but he can’t remember from whom or the exact nature of the information.
His Google search turned up a couple of press releases in Chinese. One included a photograph of Hu, so Sadiku said he decided to use Google’s translation app to dig a bit further. The app fouled up the translation of Hu’s forename in the photo caption.
The translation of the two documents showed Hu’s success in academia and research netted him a 2012 “short-term” award to teach students and researchers at the Beijing University of China for 20 hours annually through China’s Long-Term Thousand Talents Program. The documents also revealed Hu had been invited to speak at a symposium in China in the spring of 2018.
“I investigated him based on his association with the talent program that (the U.S. government believes) benefits the Chinese military,” Sadiku said. “I opened it up as an economic espionage (case because the U.S. government believes) the program is attempting to acquire technology and information from the United States.”
But when Sadiku confronted Hu at his UT office in April 2018, Hu called researchers who agreed to spy for China as part of the Long-term Thousand Talents Program “cheaters” and disavowed any involvement in espionage.
Hu told Sadiku that his research and inventions had helped the U.S. government, the agent conceded in testimony, and pointed in particular to NASA’s praise for and use of his inventions.
[Hu’s defense attorney Phil] Lomonaco says Sadiku offered Hu another way to help America — spy on China using his part-time work at the Beijing University as cover. Hu told the agent he was too scared to even go to an upcoming symposium in China in the coming weeks. Sadiku conceded he encouraged Hu to attend.
“I asked him to meet with me on security concerns (before and after the trip),” Sadiku said.
Hu wound up sending the agent an email.
“He stated he was not going to China,” Sadiku said.
So, Sadiku, who concedes he doesn’t believe Hu is or was a Chinese spy, ordered a surveillance team that would go on to spend 21 months watching the comings and goings of Hu and his son, then a freshman at UT.
Agents also told UT officials — falsely — Hu was suspected of being an operative of the Chinese military using the Tennessee university as cover to steal secrets from U.S. government agencies. Hu was fired from the university.
The spy probe eventually went bust, testimony showed, but Sadiku didn’t give up his bid to put Hu in handcuffs. Using UT as part of an undercover scheme, he and fellow federal agents then began building the fraud case.
UT recruited Professor Hu to teach and conduct research on nanotechnology in 2013. Professor Hu told jurors that he had just a one-hour training session on the stacks of disclosure forms faculty and staff are required to file. That training included a Power Point about the so-called “NASA restriction.” A half dozen UT administrators testified the Power Point was the only guidance the university’s employees are given about how to comply with the restriction.
The Power Point said the university would provide NASA with a “China Assurance letter” for any proposal for a grant submitted by faculty. “The language indicates that we do not view our faculty, staff and students to be entities of China,” it read.
Professor Hu disclosed his ties to Beijing University of Technology in at least two required forms at UT, testimony showed, and disclosed them again in email exchanges with both UT officials and a NASA contractor. No one, testimony revealed, told the professor that he was barred from NASA work. The prosecution charged that Professor Hu “intentionally” defrauded NASA by failing to list his Beijing University teaching work on a single annual form at UT. But that form doesn’t ask professors to disclose ties with China or any other country, UT officials testified. Instead, it asks professors to list any work outside the university that earns them more than $10,000. Professor Hu earned less than $2,000 annually from his work with Beijing University.
Agent Sadiku admitted under oath that he had presented university officials with a Power Point that labeled Professor Hu as an operative for the Chinese military. He never followed up to say it wasn’t true. “Based on my summary translations, my reports and my outline, no, Hu wasn’t involved in the Chinese military,” Sadiku testified.
We don’t yet know if the Biden Justice Department will seek a second prosecution of Professor Hu. Previous prosecutions of Chinese and Chinese-American scientists — for examples, those of Xiaoxing Xi of Temple University and National Weather Service hydrologist Xiafen Chen — also collapsed, although in other cases those charged pleaded guilty. But, as the Knoxville News-Sentinel put it “no matter what the judge or jury decides, Hu — so gifted in developing technology that NASA sought him out — will remain stripped of the UT professorship he prized.”
In early January, a coalition of civil rights groups, Chinese scientific organizations and individuals signed on to a letter urging then President-elect Biden to end the China Initiative. “It is appropriate for the Justice Department to take measures to address the harms caused by agents of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) who have engaged in economic espionage and trade secrets thefts,” said the letter, which was organized by Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Brennan Center for Justice and the APA Justice Task Force. “However, naming only China in a DOJ initiative ignores threats of economic espionage by other nations. The label ‘China Initiative’ itself is as unacceptable as ‘China Virus.’”
“Even if the China Initiative is being implemented in a nondiscriminatory way and is effective in rooting out a few bad scientists with illicit intentions, the Biden administration should not ignore the downside,” Rory Truex, assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, wrote in The Atlantic. “How many good scientists are going to be deterred from coming to the US? In a typical year, tens of thousands of Chinese scientists come to the United States, enriching the universities and research communities they join. Across STEM fields, an estimated 41,000 master’s and 36,000 doctoral students in American universities are Chinese citizens. This represents 16 percent of all US graduate students in those disciplines. The overwhelming majority — about 85 to 90 percent — seek to assimilate and gain US citizenship. When they stay, they create companies, jobs, and new technologies that benefit the United States.”
In 2019, the National Science Foundation charged JASON, an independent group of elite scientists that advises the US government on matters of science and technology, to produce a report addressing concern “that the openness of our academic fundamental research ecosystem is being taken advantage of by other countries.” The report concluded that “many of the problems of foreign influence that have been identified are ones that can be addressed within the framework of research integrity, and that the benefits of openness in research and of the inclusion of talented foreign researchers dictate against measures that would wall off particular areas of fundamental research.”
For a fair and detailed assessment of the China Initiative see Elizabeth Redden, “Reconsidering the ‘China Initiative,” Inside Higher Ed, March 2, 2021. But whatever one’s assessment of the possible threats to national security posed by some individuals charged under the initiative, cases like that of Professor Hu suggest that overzealous enforcement can pose a serious threat to academic freedom.
