In mere decades the nation will look back at these cases against respectable academics as what they truly are: blatant, nonsensical xenophobia.<p>Academic collaboration is “Chinese ties?” Incredible that these cases are even being sent to trial with 0 evidence of these professors sending any kind of sensitive information to China.
Why can't journalists use honest titles for their reports? This is simply a story about one single case. The report tries to spin this as if it represents a wide-ranging phenomenon.<p>Did soviet spies infiltrate American state department and other government agencies during the cold war? Yes. Were there cases of wrong accusations? Yes. But you can't simply point out a case of wrong accusation and deny the wide-ranging infiltration of soviet spies. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_espionage_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_espionage_in_the_United...</a><p>The wide-ranging of recruiting of U.S. academics by the Chinese government is no secret at all. It is self-evident by the Thousand Talents Plan.
( <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan</a> ). Many of the involved academics did so secretly and illegally. They are not necessarily "spies", nor were they commonly accused of being "spies". The article created a strawman narrative, and then try to debunk the strawman with a single case, for the whole purpose of creating an xenophobia narrative.
Regardless of the proportions between truth and exaggeration in this article - today's political climate is becoming like a playground for psychopaths that are willing to push the xenophobia-buttons of the crowd in service of their own purposes.<p>Articles like these make me formulate various escape plans in my head, even though I'm not Asian. I'm not part of the majority group where I live. What if one day my ethnicity becomes targeted by other people's arrangements of bad reputation? How will I start a new life?
Most likely, but the explicitly racist China Initiative did a terrible job of catching them, because I surmise the goal was to disrupt legitimate Sino-US education links in general, which in some people's estimation is more significant than catching some spies. Can't really stop PRC from hacking institutional DBs from across the ocean, or transmitting knowledge back via 1000s of research interns, but can certainly dissuade leading educators from participating in PRC thousand talent exchange programs.