The US Department of Justice on Thursday dropped charges against an MIT professor who was suspected of hiding his ties to China by asking for federal funding for research, in the latest setback. of the policy of repression of Chinese influence in American universities.
Federal prosecutors in Boston said new information had emerged that allayed suspicions of omissions by Professor Gang Chen, a Chinese-born mechanical engineer and nanotechnologist.
Gang was arrested in January 2021 on charges of failing to disclose, when he applied for $2.7 million in funding from the US Department of Energy for scientific research, who acted as an “overseas expert” for the Chinese government and who was part of the advisory board of Shenzhen University of Science and Technology of South.
The accusation was within the scope of the so-called “China Initiative”, launched during the administration of then President Donald Trump to combat suspicions of economic espionage and theft of research by the Chinese government.
Prosecutor Rachael Rollins said on Thursday that prosecutors had no evidence to support the case in a trial.
According to the US newspaper The New York Times, Department of Energy officials told prosecutors that the agency would fund Chen’s research even if he had warned about relations with China, because it would not make a difference in the research.
Robert Fisher, Chen’s lawyer, said the professor “revealed everything he was supposed to disclose and never lied to the government or anyone else.” More than 200 teachers from the institution’s five schools signed a letter of solidarity with Chen, and the university paid for the engineer’s attorney fees.
The “China Initiative” particularly targeted university professors. In late 2021, the United States Justice convicted one of the country’s most important scientists in the field of nanoscience, Charles Lieber, 62, accused of lying about his links with a Chinese government recruitment program. He must appeal.
Critics say the US government’s initiative, however, has weakened the country’s academic research and, for racial discrimination, has targeted Chinese researchers.
Lieber’s case has been seen as a test of the strength of the Justice Department’s charges, after more than 2,000 academics denounced to Secretary of Justice Merrick Garland a climate of racial discrimination and intimidation, calling for an end to the Initiative.
Despite the government’s victory in the Harvard case, in several other cases the government lost in court. Last year, the Justice Department dropped seven such cases. In September, a researcher at the University of Tennessee was acquitted of all charges brought by the government, in a lawsuit that one of the jurors called ridiculous.
Anming Hu, a professor of nanotechnology at the institution, was followed for two years by FBI agents (the US federal police) and accused of lying to NASA, the country’s space agency, about his work with the Chinese. The university started cooperating with the government when it was told that the professor was an agent of the Chinese government and fired him. According to his defense, he will regain his job now with the extinction of the process.
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