# China Initiative The **China Initiative** was a Department of Justice program launched in November 2018 under the [[Donald Trump]] administration, ostensibly designed to counter Chinese economic espionage, trade secret theft, and technology transfer. In practice, the initiative disproportionately targeted academics and researchers of Chinese descent, many of whom were charged with grant fraud or failure to disclose foreign affiliations rather than actual espionage. Of the program's cases brought against researchers, a striking number collapsed at trial or were dismissed — including high-profile prosecutions of MIT professor Gang Chen and University of Tennessee professor Anming Hu. Civil rights organizations documented a pattern of racial profiling, with investigators scrutinizing ethnic Chinese scientists for routine administrative oversights that would not trigger prosecution for non-Chinese researchers. The DOJ formally ended the China Initiative in February 2022, rebranding its counter-espionage work under a broader "Strategy for Countering Nation-State Threats." The initiative exemplified how legitimate national security concerns about [[China]] could be weaponized through [[Scapegoating]] of an entire ethnic community.