Justice Department, National Security Division
The list the government stopped keeping
From 2018 the Justice Department ran the China Initiative and published a register of the prosecutions it brought under it. The page was last updated on …. The Initiative was ended on 23 February 2022. The register now sits in the archive.
Nothing replaced it. No agency publishes a successor list, so after that date these cases can be found one press release at a time and counted by nobody. That is what this page is for. The register below is the government’s own, parsed from its own words, and the cases after it are the ones a reader has to already know to look for.
Who the defendants were
Read from the headline DOJ gave each case, and from nothing else. A headline names the defendant’s own job — “MIT Professor”, “Hospital Researcher”, “Former GE Engineer”. A summary names victims and recipients just as readily, which is why the summary is not used here.
Unclassified means DOJ’s headline stated no job at all, usually because it named a nationality instead. It is not a finding about the person.
What the cases were about
One category each, in priority order, from DOJ’s own headline and summary. Where a defendant held a research post, that is the category, because the chair the person sat in is the more specific fact.
Every entry on the list
In the order DOJ published them, newest first. Each links to the release it came from. Charged marks an entry DOJ announced as an accusation and nothing more.
The outcomes here are the ones DOJ stated on the page, as of the page’s own last-updated date. The courts did not stop in November 2021 and several of these cases moved afterwards. That movement is not on this page, because no official source compiles it either.
After the list stopped
These are not from a list. There is no list. Each one is a single press release, and each quoted phrase below is checked against the cached release every time this page is rebuilt — if a word moves, the build fails.
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What this cannot tell you
Four limits, and they travel with every number above.
- A charge is an allegation. Nothing on this page says any person named on it is guilty of anything. Roughly half the entries were announced as accusations, and an accusation is where many of them stop being documented.
- There is no denominator. The United States graduates tens of thousands of research doctorates a year and hosts hundreds of thousands of students and scholars. A few dozen cases over four years is not a rate, and dividing one by the other would invent one.
- The list was never complete. DOJ called these examples. It published no criteria for inclusion and no count of what it left out.
- It stops in 2021. The frozen list cannot show a trend, and the cases since cannot be counted, because nobody enumerates them. The absence is the finding.
Source: the archived DOJ National Security Division page and
the individual US Attorney and Office of Public Affairs releases linked
above. Built by scripts/build_security_cases.py into
/data/security_cases.json.