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Racial Profiling and the China Initiative: Challenges Facing Academics of Chinese Descent and Those Who Collaborate with Scientists in China
March 2, 2023 @ 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
Xiaoxing Xi, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Physics, Temple University
Co-sponsored by the Department of Physics and Critical Responses to Anti-Asian Violence (CRAAV)
Collaborating with academics in China was once encouraged by the US government and universities. As tension between the two countries rises rapidly, those who did are under heightened scrutiny by the federal government. In 2015, I became a casualty of this campaign, being falsely charged by the Department of Justice for sharing American company technology with China. I never did, and the case was eventually dismissed. In 2018, the DOJ established the China Initiative, under which numerous university professors have been prosecuted for allegedly failing to disclose their activities in China. Although the China Initiative was terminated in February 2022, the DOJ continues to racial profile Chinese professors, scientists, and students as suspected spies for China. In this talk, I will describe the cases of Anming Hu, Charles Lieber, Gang Chen, Mingqing Xiao, and Franklin Tao, which exposed again and again the DOJ’s unfair targeting of academics of Chinese descent and those who collaborate with scientists in China. Not only are such policies contrary to America’s ideals, but they also weaken America’s innovation ecosystem and threaten its technological advantage. To protect American science and human rights from irreparable damages, it is imperative for the scientific community to speak up and push back.
This will be a hybrid event.
Critical Responses to Anti-Asian Violence (CRAAV) is a scholarly and community-oriented initiative to build anti-racist coalitions across Johns Hopkins University and Baltimore. It takes anti-Asian violence as a site at which to develop intersectional frameworks to engage the heterogeneous challenges facing AAPI communities and interrogate the effects of white supremacy on academic knowledge produced about minoritized communities.
Contact CRAAV@jhu.edu for additional information and the zoom link.
Location: Schafler Auditorium (Bloomberg 272), Bloomberg Center for Physics & Astronomy
A wine and cheese reception will directly follow.
