Racial Profiling

The Return of the China Initiative

In 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a controversial new program to combat economic espionage and trade theft from the Chinese government. He called it the ‘China Initiative’. Over the next three years, the U.S. Department of Justice investigated 150 scientists as part of the China Initiative. Almost 90% of them were Chinese. And a vast majority were innocent. 

Three years after the Biden administration ended the program — finding it racist and ineffective — some U.S. elected officials are making efforts to bring it back from the dead. 

In partnership with civil rights advocates and scientists nationwide, we are leading the fight against the China Initiative and the racist witch hunt it threatens to ignite. 

This is why Asian Americans should be concerned about the China Initiative:

• It legitimizes the racial profiling and warrantless surveillance of Chinese and Chinese American scientists and researchers at the expense of their careers, livelihoods, and reputations. 
• It hurts our ability to attract and retain foreign-born talent in strategic fields like technology, medicine, and engineering —  stunting U.S. scientific progress and threatening our leadership on the world stage. 
• It sows anti-Asian sentiment more broadly, by reinforcing the racist stereotype that Americans of Chinese heritage have dual loyalties with China and cannot be trusted to protect U.S. security interests.