Last August a headline in this media-analysis venue charged, “Journalists scant scientists’ ethnic-profiling accusation against the federal government.” With exceptions, reporters and editors were generally overlooking injustices perpetrated against scientists, including National Weather Service hydrologist Xiafen “Sherry” Chen and Xiaoxing Xi, who is a fellow of the American Physical Society and Laura H. Carnell Professor of Physics at Temple University. The piece criticized media inattention to unfounded, abortive criminal prosecutions that devastated the US citizens’ lives.
As of 12 May 2017, that media criticism from August still stands. Xi and Chen are still struggling, and although new information has arisen in their cases, most journalists continue scanting it. Again, with a few exceptions, there’s been little coverage of the March administrative hearing in which Chen sought to get her job back or of Xi’s May lawsuit against an FBI agent.
Among the silent so far in 2017 has been CBS. But in May 2016, the network introduced a 60 Minutes segment by recalling an earlier report that illuminated the source of the harmful federal zeal. The Justice Department, CBS reported, saw a “national security emergency” costing hundreds of billions of dollars in Chinese espionage intended to “rip off American trade secrets and intellectual property.” CBS described a government effort to fight back aggressively with a dragnet strategy that wasn’t “just catching Chinese spies” but was “ensnaring a growing number of Americans who aren’t spies at all.”
A website called “Scientists Not Spies,” advocating for Xi, Chen, and others, accuses the US government of wrongfully charging “multiple Chinese Americans” with spying for China and then—after wreaking harm on the falsely accused—dropping all charges without “explanation, apology, or compensation.” It accuses the Justice Department of failing “to do its proper due diligence or consult with independent scientific experts on the facts before infringing on the rights of innocent people and irreversibly damaging their lives and reputations.”
The unnecessary damage has been considerable. On 21 May 2015, Xi was serving as interim physics chair at Temple, which included conducting projects that involved graduate students who depended on his presence and guidance. Just after dawn, FBI agents pounded on the door of his home. The partially dressed Xi presumed it was all a mistake as the agents, with guns drawn, arrested him and hauled him away in handcuffs. His wife, herself a physicist, and two daughters looked on. The FBI agents later stripped him naked and searched his body cavities, and then they interrogated him without explanation.
Here’s a snippet from a report in Science magazine, which has been an exception in the media scanting: “Xi was released after putting up his home as bail, but his passport was confiscated and his domestic travel restricted to eastern Pennsylvania. For days, his family avoided the windows in their home as television stations broadcast live from their front yard. Over the months that followed, they drained their bank accounts to pay legal fees.” Eventually the charges were dropped, but a local newspaper quoted Jim Napolitano, who replaced Xi as physics chair: “They came close to destroying his life.”
On 20 October 2014, Chen, who had recently returned from a China trip, endured something comparable, starting not at her home but at her workplace, a National Weather Service office in Wilmington, Ohio. Six FBI agents appeared and, in front of her colleagues, hauled her away in handcuffs to a federal courthouse 40 miles away.
Here’s a snippet from a report in the New York Times, which has been another exception in the scanting: “Her life went into a tailspin. She was suspended without pay from her job, and her family in China had to scramble for money to pay for her legal defense. Friends and co-workers said they were afraid to visit. Television news trucks parked outside her house, waiting to spot a foreign spy hiding in plain sight.” The Times quoted her: “I could not sleep. I could not eat. I did nothing but cry for days.” Months passed before prosecutors dropped all charges a week before her scheduled trial. On 14 March 2017, at the time of her administrative hearing to get her job back, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that she remains jobless with mounting legal bills.
In a Washington Post commentary last year, attorney Peter Zeidenberg addressed the harm to the scientists:
The recent Justice Department prosecutions of my clients Chen and Xi suggest that, in their zeal, prosecutors have proceeded as if wearing blinders, ignoring evidence that contradicts their theories of guilt and plowing ahead with prosecutions that should never have been brought.
As a result, innocent U.S. citizens have been victimized by their government. They have been held up to public opprobrium, had their employment and livelihoods threatened and been forced to pay for legal defenses that could easily bankrupt anyone of modest means. The harm caused by the government’s aggressive overreach can hardly be overstated.
The false charges against materials physicist Xi rested on a gross technological misunderstanding that he now charges was deliberate. The original indictment alleged that he devised “a scheme to defraud” a US company “to obtain its technology, provide it to entities in China, and to assist these entities in further exploitation and use of the technology, and to obtain for himself and for entities in China money and property by means of false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises.” But examination of technoscientific facts showed that Xi’s own judgment about the charges had been correct all along: They were “absurd.”
The New York Times reported on 10 May that Xi’s lawsuit, little noticed elsewhere in the media, accuses “the lead F.B.I. agent of falsifying the key piece of evidence and ignoring repeated warnings that he was investigating an innocent man.” Under the law, Xi can’t sue the government, but he can sue a specific official for allegedly violating his constitutional rights. An Associated Press account, apparently widely ignored in the media, says Xi is also pressing an administrative claim. The Times quoted Xi about his motives: “My case has made … so many Chinese-Americans and Asian-Americans scared. That’s why we are doing this. We need some accountability.” He also said, “I do understand they will probably never apologize.”
As the Cincinnati Enquirer reported on 14 March, Chen’s two-day hearing by the US Merit Systems Protection Board was “to decide the merits of her wrongful termination, race discrimination and retaliation case.” She had been falsely charged originally with four felonies, including allegedly illegal downloading of information and making false statements. In a country where diversity issues and ethnic injustice are regularly examined, discussed, and debated, Chen’s continued struggle this year has drawn even less notice than the small amount accorded to Xi’s.
That’s why the ending of that August 2016 media report in this venue bears recycling here, without modification except for the date: “The Americans who are pressing the ‘Scientists Not Spies’ campaign believe that as of late summer 2016″—now almost early summer 2017—“the country has failed to adequately confront, assess, and address their ethnic-profiling concern. When it comes to media attention, results of Google News searches support their belief.”
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today’s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
