Dear Colleagues:
We, the members of the Asian American Scholar Forum (AASF), call for your support of several open letters to end the “China Initiative”. This initiative, started in November 2018 by the Department of Justice under the previous administration, was intended to investigate threats from China to the U.S. national security. However, the investigations and charges to hundreds of scientists and scholars in U.S. universities and research institutes in the past three years have failed to meet its goal. This initiative has seriously damaged our community. Most scientists and scholars in the investigations are Asian and Chinese descent. The world has observed the injustice and unfair treatment of several lawsuits against our colleagues by the “China Initiative” actions. The chilling effect in the Asian American scholar community is quick and serious, which is harming and shaking the core competence of science and technology of America in the world.
Recently, the faculty members from several universities wrote open letters:
- On September 8, 2021, 177 faculty members at Stanford University sent an open letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland to urge him to end the “China Initiative”.
- On September 30, 214 faculty members of University of California at Berkeley endorsed the Stanford letter.
- On October 12, 167 faculty members at Temple University made the same action to support the Stanford letter.
- On October 18, 198 faculty members at Princeton University sent another open letter to the Attorney General to stop the flawed China Initiative.
We call for your support in two ways. The first is to follow what the concerned faculty members from UC Berkeley, Temple University, and Princeton University did: getting your colleagues of your institutions to endorse the letter from Stanford colleagues. The following website provides the letters and instructions to use Google Forms to submit and collect signatures: https://sites.google.com/view/winds-of-freedom.
The second is to support individually by signing on the open petition https://bit.ly/EndorseStanfordLetter.
We believe that it is crucial to make our voice heard in order to ensure that we are working in an environment under a policy consistent with American values of openness and inclusion.