What the Lieber Verdict Says, and Doesn’t Say, About Future Probes of Scholars’ Ties to China

A federal jury took fewer than three hours to find Charles M. Lieber, a former chairman of Harvard University’s chemistry department, guilty of lying to U.S. government officials about his ties to China.

Lieber, whom federal prosecutors painted as chasing money and scientific prestige, was one of the highest profile academics charged under the China Initiative, the U.S. Department of Justice’s probe of academic and economic espionage. Yet his conviction does little to resolve the fate of the controversial investigation, which has come under increasing criticism for its chilling effect on international scientific collaboration — including by a former U.S. attorney who previously led Lieber’s prosecution.

“Guilt is individual,” said Margaret K. Lewis, a law professor at Seton Hall University who focuses on China and Taiwan. “This case was about Lieber’s individual behavior, and that was what the jury was required to decide, not give a ruling on the China Initiative as broader government policy.”

Here’s what Lewis and other experts say is important about the December 21 verdict against Lieber.

This case isn’t the final nail in the coffin of the China Initiative some opponents hoped for. Before Lieber’s conviction, the government had suffered several setbacks, including the dismissal of charges against a half dozen Chinese or Chinese American researchers and the acquittal of Anming Hu, a former University of Tennessee at Knoxville professor. Hu and Lieber are the only academics to have gone to trial under the China Initiative, and critics had hoped that a pair of not-guilty verdicts would send a ringing message to the Biden administration to shut down the investigation.

Still, while the decision in the Lieber case doesn’t feed into a clear narrative, the China Initiative is beleaguered. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland told Congress this past fall that the Justice Department would review the program, which was begun under former President Donald J. Trump.

George P. Varghese, a partner with the law firm of Wilmer Hale and a federal prosecutor for 14 years, said the flurry of dismissals suggests a weakness in the China Initiative cases. “When you’ve got six dismissals in a month and a half, there’s a lot of head-scratching in the legal community.”

Academic researchers, Asian American groups, and members of Congress have called for the end of the China Initiative. Professors at Yale University were the latest faculty group to write to Garland in protest of the program, joining colleagues at Stanford, Princeton, and Berkeley in sending letters.

And Andrew E. Lelling, a former U.S. attorney in Boston whose office brought the much-watched charges against Lieber and Gang Chen, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote critically of the China Initiative in a recent LinkedIn post. “The Initiative has drifted and, in some significant ways, lost its focus,” Lelling wrote, calling for the Justice Department to “revamp, and shut down, parts of the program, to avoid needlessly chilling scientific and business collaborations with Chinese partners.”

The government’s evidence against Lieber set his case apart. As Lewis noted, juries are asked to rule only on the evidence in the cases before them.

In Hu’s case, there were questions about whether he was actually required to disclose a low-paying, part-time appointment at a Chinese university, and about whether the FBI’s actions in the case were proper. At his trial, the jury deadlocked, but a federal judge later threw out the charges. “Even viewing all the evidence in the light most favorable to the government, no rational jury could conclude that defendant acted with a scheme to defraud NASA,” Judge Thomas A. Varlan, of the U.S. District Court in Knoxville, wrote in his acquittal of Hu.

By contrast, jurors at Lieber’s trial were shown a video interrogation of the professor in which he admitted he had a contract with a Chinese university, had received cash from the institution, and had a Chinese bank account. In a previous interview with federal investigators, Lieber had said that he did not draw a salary from the university, the Wuhan Institute of Technology, and that he was not part of the Chinese government’s controversial Thousand Talents Program, which seeks to attract foreign researchers to China.

It “looks like I was very dishonest,” Lieber said in the recording, The Harvard Crimson reported. “I wasn’t completely transparent by any stretch of the imagination.”

The jury took just two hours and 45 minutes to find Lieber, who has late-stage lymphoma, guilty on six counts, including lying to investigators, failing to declare income earned in China, and failing to report a Chinese bank account. No sentencing date has been set, and his lawyer said in a statement that he would “keep fighting,” although he did not specify whether an appeal was planned.

Varghese said he couldn’t comment on the specifics of the Lieber case because he had worked on it as an assistant U.S. attorney. But, he said, “it’s an unremarkable proposition that you shouldn’t lie to the government.”

But Lieber’s case, like others, focused on research integrity, not spying. Varghese argued that Lieber’s conviction shouldn’t be chalked up as a victory for the China Initiative because “it doesn’t validate the theory of the China Initiative — that China is using U.S. academic researchers to steal U.S. science and technology.”

Prosecutors never contended that Lieber had engaged in espionage of any kind or that he had given his Chinese partners proprietary information. Instead, they argued that Lieber had been motivated by money — his Thousand Talents contract entitled him to $50,000 a month, plus about $150,000 in living expenses — and by the possibility of further scientific acclaim. “Every scientist wants to win a Nobel Prize,” he told investigators.

Likewise, few of the other China Initiative cases have alleged the theft of trade secrets, an analysis by MIT Technology Review found. Instead, indictments have included failing to disclose Chinese ties to universities or federal grant-making agencies, making false statements to government authorities, and tax and visa fraud. Critics like Lewis have questioned whether criminal prosecutions are appropriate in such cases.

Steven Pei, a founder of the APA Justice Task Force, a group that advocates for Asian American scientists, said the rush to prosecute under the Trump administration may have actually undermined efforts to root out legitimate research-security risks from China. Referring to government officials’ statements about the frequency of new China Initiative cases, Pei, a professor at the University of Houston, said, ”Opening a new case every 10 hours is actually a distraction. It defeats the goal of finding real spies and pushes agents and prosecutors to meet or exceed the performance matrix by prosecuting academics who have not committed any espionage or IP theft crimes.”

Lieber is white, but the case still smacks of racial profiling. The MIT Technology Review analysis found that nearly nine in 10 China Initiative cases had been brought against people of Chinese descent, making Lieber an exception. Still, race was part of his case — Lewis said she had been “stopped in [her] tracks” by testimony from a U.S. Department of Defense investigator that the number of Chinese students working in Lieber’s lab had “played a role in the decision to investigate” him.

Even if the China Initiative is formally wound down, serious efforts are needed to deal with such bias, Lewis said. “It can’t just be anti-bias training for two hours on a Friday afternoon.”

Meanwhile, there is new evidence of the negative impact of the China Initiative on researchers and international scientific collaboration. A survey by the American Physical Society found that 43 percent of international graduate students and early-career scientists in physics currently in the United States perceive this country to be unwelcoming to international students and scholars.

Forty-five percent of young international physicists said that the U.S. government’s current approach to research-security concerns had made their decision to stay here over the long term less likely or much less likely, the survey found.

Those results reinforced an earlier survey by the University of Arizona in which half of Chinese and Chinese American scientists at American research universities said they felt “considerable fear or anxiety” that they were being “surveilled” by the U.S. government. The Lieber verdict could feed those worries.

That was then, this is now. Lieber’s Thousand Talents contract dates to 2012; he was accused of making false statements to investigators in 2018 and early 2019. Likewise, many charges in other China Initiative cases concern activities years ago.

But the ground has been shifting on research transparency and disclosure since the China Initiative began, in 2018. Federal science agencies, and universities themselves, have become aggressive in reporting foreign research collaborations. “The world has changed,” Varghese said.

As a result, many researchers now err on the side of fully disclosing their overseas affiliations, potentially making them less likely to be caught up in similar probes. Grant-making agencies have issued new guidelines, although many scientists say the agencies could yet be clearer.

Still, some scientists could disengage from international work to avoid running afoul of government scrutiny. And that scrutiny is unlikely to end, even if the China Initiative does. Congress, in fact, is working on legislation that could increase disclosure requirements for foreign gifts and contracts to universities, bar federal grant recipients from participating in talent-recruitment programs, and even give the U.S. government the ability to veto some international academic collaborations.