Following a five-year legal battle, Chinese-born former University of Kansas chemistry professor Feng ‘Franklin’ Tao, who was arrested and convicted under the former Trump administration’s now-defunct ‘China Initiative’, has been vindicated. An appeals court in Denver, Colorado has acquitted Tao of his one remaining conviction that he made a false statement about his relationship with a Chinese university.
In April 2022, Tao – a permanent US resident who before his arrest in 2019 had served as a tenured associate professor at the University of Kansas since 2014 – was not only convicted of making a ‘materially false statement’, but also of three counts of wire fraud. He faced up to 20 years in prison and substantial fines. However, he was subsequently acquitted of the wire fraud charges and so only the now-overturned false statements conviction remained. Ultimately, he was sentenced to time served with a $100 (£81) fine.
At issue in the new ruling, issued 11 July, is whether Tao’s lack of disclosure about his affiliation with Fuzhou University in China affected federal agency funding decisions. The Denver appeals court agreed 2-1 that it was irrelevant because Tao had no grant proposals pending before those two agencies in question – the US Department of Energy and National Science Foundation – at the time he made his affiliation statement.
Tao’s lawyer, Peter Zeidenberg welcomed the court’s ruling. ‘Even though there was not a scintilla of evidence that Dr Tao was engaged in espionage or theft of trade secrets, the government nevertheless relentlessly investigated him and ultimately charged him with 10 felonies – all based on an alleged omission on a single internal form he submitted to the University of Kansas research office and which was never shared with any federal agency,’ he stated. Those initial 10 charges were first reduced to three, then one, and now zero.
Zeidenberg emphasised that Tao’s reputation has been ‘unfairly dragged to the mud’, and he was ‘wrongly fired’ by the University of Kansas. ‘Dr Tao, a world-renowned expert in catalysis, has been unable to do his research, depriving all of us who benefit from scientific advances,’ Zeidenberg continued, noting that his legal fight has virtually bankrupted his family. Even with assistance from friends and family and a GoFundMe campaign, Tao still owes over $1 million in legal fees, he said.
Tao was one of an estimated two dozen academics who were charged under the US government’s China Initiative. The programme, launched in 2018 to counter trade secret theft and economic espionage, was widely criticised as racially biased and harmful to academic freedom. It was eventually terminated under President Biden in 2022 following the dismissal of many of the government’s criminal cases that were brought against university researchers under the initiative.
The Asian–American Scholar Forum called Tao’s latest court win ‘a significant victory’ and celebrated it as ‘a crucial step toward rectifying the unjust treatment of Chinese American and immigrant scientists under the now-defunct China Initiative’.
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