A Growing Chorus of Concern

Faculty at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale are rallying in support of a Chinese American colleague who faces criminal charges for alleged grant fraud.

Federal prosecutors accuse the professor, Mingqing Xiao, of concealing information on a grant application to the National Science Foundation about scientific grants he’d applied for and received from Chinese government sources, and contractual obligations made with Shenzhen University, a public university located in China’s Guangdong Province.

Xiao is one of about a dozen professors to be prosecuted under the U.S. Department of Justice’s China Initiative, which was launched by the Trump administration in 2018 with the stated objective of combating economic espionage and technology theft but which in the academic sphere has typically resulted in prosecutions for alleged nondisclosures on federal grant applications and other federal forms.

Anne Fletcher, president of the Faculty Association at Carbondale, called for the university to drop its disciplinary investigation into Xiao, a tenured professor of mathematics. Xiao was placed on administrative leave by the university after being indicted in April.

“We’re standing by Ming, and we want the university to do the right thing and drop the disciplinary investigation and restore him to his position,” Fletcher said. “Dr. Xiao’s teaching and research is not a threat to anyone.”

She added, “The presumption of innocence is supposed to mean something.”

A university spokeswoman declined to comment on the case beyond confirming that Xiao “has been placed on administrative leave, pending the university’s investigation into the issue.”

Over the past year, there’s been a marked rise in criticism of the China Initiative, as academics and civil rights groups have raised concerns about what they say are racially motivated prosecutions on trumped-up charges. A Jan. 5 letter organized by civil rights groups calling for the then-incoming Biden administration to end the initiative said that prosecutors “are charging many Asian Americans and Asian immigrants with federal crimes based on administrative errors or minor offenses such as failing to fully disclose conflict of interest information to their universities or research institutions and other activities that are not normally treated as crimes except under the pretext of combating economic espionage.”

The American Physical Society voiced concerns about the initiative in September. Hundreds of faculty at Princeton, Stanford and Temple Universities and the Universities of California, Berkeley, and Michigan have signed various letters in recent months opposing the initiative, and the group APA Justice organized a national letter signed by more than 1,000 academics. And recently released results of a survey led by a professor at the University of Arizona found high levels of fear and anxiety about the initiative among scientists of Chinese heritage, and a withdrawal from many Chinese scientific collaborations as a result.

Attorney General Merrick Garland told the House Judiciary Committee in October that the new assistant attorney general for the department’s National Security Division—who at that point was awaiting confirmation but has since been confirmed—would “review all the activities in the department and his division and make a determination of which cases to pursue and which ones not. I can assure you that cases will not be pursued based on discrimination, but only on facts justifying them.”

“There are two issues that we always have to keep uppermost in our minds,” Garland said to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Oct. 27. “One is that the People’s Republic of China is a serious threat to our intellectual property. They represent a serious threat with respect to espionage. They represent a serious threat with respect to cyberincursions and ransomware in the United States. And we need to protect the country against this. And we will and we are in cases in that regard. The other thing that always has to be remembered is that we never investigate or prosecute based on ethnic identity. On what country a person is from or came from or their family.”

Federal prosecutors have had a string of losses related to the prosecution of these cases in recent months. In September a federal judge acquitted a professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Anming Hu, who had been accused of concealing ties to a Chinese university on a grant application to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The judge found that “no rational jury could have concluded that [Hu] had a scheme to defraud NASA in this case.”

Federal prosecutors also dropped charges in July against five visiting Chinese researchers who had been accused of lying about ties to the Chinese military on visa applications.

It’s against this backdrop that Xiao, the Carbondale professor, has been charged with wire fraud and making false statements.

In court documents, the government accuses Xiao of making fraudulent representations to the NSF when he applied for a $151,099 grant in September 2018.

Specifically, the government says that while Xiao was required to disclose all “current and pending support,” that he did not disclose an approximately $180,000 grant he’d received from the National Science Foundation of Guangdong Province of China that ran from 2018 to 2022.

And prosecutors say that while he was required to disclose all “organizational affiliations,” he did not disclose to NSF his “ongoing contractual obligations to Shenzhen University.” The indictment alleges he signed a contract in which he “agreed to certain teaching and research obligations at Shenzhen University and agreed to apply for research grants with the Chinese government on behalf of Shenzhen University” in exchange for a monthly salary.

The indictment further alleges that in March 2019, Xiao submitted an application to Shenzhen University for a grant from the Natural Science Foundation of China requesting about $90,000 in funding.

According to the indictment, a representative of NSF contacted Xiao by email in April 2019 before awarding the grant, writing that NSF was contacting him “to make sure that the current and pending support statement includes worldwide sources. So, if you have any position outside of the U.S. or any source of funding from any non-U.S. funding source please include it in your updated current and pending support page. The award size depends on what other support and commitments of time you have, particularly other projects whose work overlaps this one.”

In response, Xiao allegedly replied—falsely, according to the government—“I don’t have other grants or pending proposals but this one.”

A lawyer for Xiao declined to comment. But in a motion filed with the court, Xiao’s lawyers argue that the questions posed by the NSF were ambiguous and further argued that he is the victim of arbitrary and racially motivated prosecution.

The motion says that Xiao agreed to visit China as a delegate of SIUC on a 2015 trip to recruit students and to develop a joint mathematics degree program between Southern Illinois and Shenzhen University—and that his SIUC-sponsored efforts to grow the university’s connections in China unwittingly made him a target for investigation after the launch of the China Initiative.

“The Indictment does not allege the misappropriation of government data, corporate espionage, the theft of trade secrets, or any other criminal conduct that that poses a national security threat,” his lawyers argue in a court document. Instead, they argue, the government brought felony charges “based substantially on the submission of a proposal for a $151,099 grant from NSF to fund research on ‘the low rank approximation of tensorial data via nonconvex regularization.’ In layman’s terms, a way in which to better manage large data sets. And the awarded grant proceeds, which to date amount to a little more than $5,000, went to SIUC to fund two graduate students, not to Dr. Xiao.”

“Here, the Government, in its dogged pursuit of Chinese spies, found no evidence on which to charge Dr. Xiao with any charges related to national security. This is so even after multiple hours-long interviews by FBI agents at Dr. Xiao’s home and its broad seizure of computers, cellphones and other documents. Yet the Government nonetheless persisted in charging Dr. Xiao, basing those charges on answers he gave to hopelessly ambiguous questions posed by NSF in connection with a grant proposal he submitted, for a hopelessly small sum that went to his employer, SIUC, and not Dr. Xiao himself.”

Kara Benyas, a private piano teacher who formerly taught at SIUC, and a longtime friend of Xiao’s, who is raising money for his defense, said, “The government has got this all wrong.”

“SIU knew that he was going to Shenzhen,” she said. “His reason for going there was to recruit students for SIU.”

“He is totally devoted to his own kids, but he is also devoted to his students,” Benyas said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re SIU students or precollege—he even coached a local MATHCOUNTS team. He’s just so giving. The government, they’ve got it wrong, and I feel very strongly that this is a case of racial profiling.”