Department of Justice to halt initiative to crack down on Chinese spying

The Department of Justice announced it is going to stop an initiative, began under Donald Trump, to crackdown on Chinese spying in the United States. However, China’s efforts to spy on key spying targets in the United States continues. The information that they obtain, via spying in the US and elsewhere, is used to help China accelerate its own programs.

From Fox News:

Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Biden administration had been under pressure from activists and faculty at some universities over the effort. They said it was harming U.S. competitiveness in research and disproportionately targeting people based on race.

“To be clear, China poses a legit­im­ate threat of espi­on­age that the Justice Depart­ment and FBI must take seri­ously,” Brennan Center authors Michael German and Alex Liang said. “But too often, the Justice Depart­ment has brought cases under the China Initi­at­ive that have not targeted espi­on­age or intel­lec­tual prop­erty theft by Chinese spies but minor admin­is­trat­ive viol­a­tions by scient­ists of Chinese ances­try who are not suspec­ted of affil­i­ation with the Chinese govern­ment.”

“That’s crap,” Chang told Fox News Digital. “Look, the reason they went after academics on technical charges was because making an espionage or treason case was too hard. So what they did was they felt the best use of prosecutorial resources was to go for the easy convictions. That’s not to say that these individuals were not guilty of serious crimes.”

Chang explained that China operates a system where no citizen can refuse the government’s demand to spy on other countries, meaning that all Chinese nationals are legitimate targets.

“It’s not about race,” Chang said. “It’s about China forcing them to commit acts of espionage. The other thing is we know China targets American nationals of Chinese descent, and so again every ethnic Chinese is a legitimate target of counterespionage efforts because China has made them so. So, let’s drop this political wokeism. Let’s start defending our country, because we’re going to lose it if we don’t.”

Writer and policy expert Ying Ma told Fox News Digital that even an appearance of race-based targeting is “unhelpful and undesirable” but added the threats from China are real.

“The government that most aggressively targets Americans of Chinese descent is China’s,” Ma said. “Unfortunately, some individuals are in fact susceptible — whether due to greed or a misplaced sense of Chinese nationalism, or both. Just look at Eileen Gu betraying the United States at the Winter Olympics.”

Fox News has additional information here.

Category: China