Editor’s note for Friday, January 15, 2021

My thoughts today: 

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is spending his last few days in office tweeting his own personal greatest hits of his tenure mixed with sundry quotations from the Bible. He has also put another set of sanctions in place on six Chinese officials for their part in implementing the national security law in Hong Kong. This comes after several moves against China from the U.S. government yesterday. 

In one of those moves, the U.S. Department of Justice charged a Chinese-born MIT scientist for failing to disclose China ties and funding: Chén Gāng 陈刚, “56, was charged by criminal complaint with wire fraud, failing to file a foreign bank account report (FBAR) and making a false statement in a tax return.”

You can read more about the case on Inside Higher Ed, or a letter in Chen’s defense by fellow American-educated scientist, now back at Peking University, Ráo Yì 饶毅. 

In The China Project’s recent video on the often unfair scrutiny on Chinese scientists in the U.S., we found there were three main types of cases:

• Innocent people who are targeted because they are ethnically Chinese;
• Scientists who are sloppy with their paperwork; 
• Real bad actors who steal American intellectual property, or hide or misappropriate funding.  

We don’t know which category Chen is in, but we’ll follow his case closely. Its merits, and how he is treated, will tell us a lot about America’s ability to remain open and avoid succumbing to easy, nationalist bigotry. China poses very real security threats to the U.S., but the average Chinese person does not. 

We will be off on Monday, for the American holiday of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, whose name is our word of the day: 马丁·路德·金 mǎdīng lùdé jīn.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief