Chinese-American scientist’s world upended after he is swept up in US national security net
- Original charges against Emory University researcher are dropped, but fears of continuing overreach by US Justice Department’s ‘China Initiative’ remain
- Critics call the initiative counterproductive and an over-deterrent, as investigations drive experienced scientific researchers back to China amid the pandemic
When six FBI agents knocked on Li Xiao-Jiang’s suburban Atlanta home last November, he knew that his life built around 23 years as a top neuroscientist at Emory University might fall completely apart.
He had just flown back from China for the first time after he was fired in May 2019. “I came back because I felt I did nothing wrong,” Li said in a recent interview. “I was shocked.”
Things were already dire before Li was arrested and charged with theft of federal funds. Just a few months earlier, the school’s officials fired the tenured professor, raided his lab and forced his postdoctoral students out of the US.
Then, in May, prosecutors dismissed all of the charges against him, with Li pleading guilty only to filing false tax returns.
Now Li has spoken publicly for the first time since the case was settled, revealing that the original charges had stemmed, in part, from Emory providing incomplete documentation to the FBI even though he had informed the university about his simultaneous work with Chinese labs, as required.
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His case had been part of the US Department of Justice’s sweeping “China Initiative”, which aims to counter Chinese national security threats, including economic espionage, cyberattacks and the theft of trade secrets and intellectual property. There are about 1,000 cases under the China Initiative, according to the FBI, and nearly one-fifth of them have been initiated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary US agency funding biomedical and public health research.
