US drops name of Trump’s ‘China Initiative’ after criticism

By ERIC TUCKER
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department is scrapping the name of a Trump-era initiative intended to crack down on economic espionage by Beijing but criticized as unfairly targeting Chinese professors at American colleges because of their ethnicity. The decision to abandon the China Initiative was announced by the department’s top national security official. It follows a monthslong review undertaken after charges that the program chilled academic collaboration and contributed to anti-Asian bias. The department also endured high-profile setbacks in individual criminal prosecutions that resulted in the dismissal of multiple criminal cases against academic researchers in the last year.