During ‘China Week,’ House GOP revived surveillance program. Asian Americans are slamming it.

Asian American groups are sounding the alarm after the House this week passed a bill seeking to revive the highly controversial, Trump-era surveillance program the China Initiative. While the China Initiative, which expired in 2022, was intended to curb Chinese economic and technological espionage, many Asian American groups accused the program of racial profiling toward Asian scholars in the U.S. Now, many scientists, lawmakers and advocates are speaking out, saying they are fearful that if signed into law, the program would again cast a cloud of suspicion over the community. “Originally a Trump-era initiative sold as a national security measure, the China Initiative instead turned out to be a witch hunt,” leaders from civil rights groups Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC, Stop AAPI Hate, and the Asian American Scholar Forum said in a joint statement. The congressman who introduced the bill, Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas, told NBC News that “23 Democrats joined me in standing up for Chinese Americans who have too long been the victim of CCP predatory practices.” “Groups that are against this bipartisan bill should be ashamed of themselves for their racist antics that mislead and scare Asian Americans,” he said. The legislation was passed amid “China Week,” during which the House approved some two dozen mostly Republican-led bills aimed at addressing “military, economic, ideological, and technological threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party,” according to the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. “China Week,” newly introduced to the House, comes after Speaker Mike Johnson said in July that his goal was to present “a significant package of China-related legislation signed into law by the end of this year.” Under the China Initiative, which was first implemented by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2018, several Asian American academics and scientists were falsely accused of spying. “I am still often woken up by my wife’s cries in her dreams as she remembers the police shouting beside her bed that morning I was arrested,” Chen said at the news conference. “Within hours of my arrest, I lost the career I had worked my entire life to build.” He added that “we will be stronger as a nation if we learn from these cases and ensure that this does not happen to anyone ever again.” Additionally, since the bill’s passage, the White House has condemned the China Initiative’s potential revival. “The bill also could give rise to incorrect and harmful public perceptions that DOJ applies a different standard to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct related to the Chinese people or to American citizens of Chinese descent,” the Biden administration said in a statement. He said that he “concluded that this initiative is not the right approach.” For more from NBC Asian America, sign up for our weekly newsletter. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/china-initiative-asian-americans-house-gop-rcna171060