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Comment by xjwm | Hacker News Reader

> We're going to skip the McCarthyism and go straight to racial profiling I guess.

Lauer said the fact that 82% of those being investigated are Asian “is not surprising” because “that’s who the Chinese target” in their foreign talent recruitment programs.

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NIH grants go out to 300,000 people. Through some largely unclear process they picked 399 of them as "scientists of possible concern,"and further investigated 189 of them, 82% Asian.

Further, that quote suggests they were actively searching for Chinese backed offenders only, and had concluded that Asians are who should be targeted.

China has built a reputation that may make this targeting understandable. The US has also built a reputation of racial profiling, and their waving away of these claims should not be blindly accepted.

And it's entirely possible that these people were given little option but to cooperate with China if they still had family living there.

Or the people investigating did so with the belief that "the Chinese target Asian men" and ended up rounding up a bunch of Asian men.

If "the Chinese are targeting Asians", why would the most prominent example be a non-Asian? Presumably being a prominent researcher makes one harder to influence, and if they were targeting Asians, it would have to be because being Asian makes them easier to influence. If the goal is to influence the most important research, then you would want to influence the most prominent researchers, of which the lowest cost researchers to influence would be a prominent Asian researcher, not a promiment non-Asian researcher.

In addition, if your goal is finding influence, and you end up finding one non-Asian being prominent lyinfluenced, and a bunch of Asians not being as prominently influenced, it generally either means non-Asians are being more prominently influenced in general, or you've been ignoring non-Asians to the point that you only notice the prominent ones.

Looking at the linked article[0], it looks like this is the result of a broader investigation into any undisclosed foreign ties, but it that the Chinese influence has been disproportionately large.

Lelling rejects criticism that the department has unfairly targeted ethnic Chinese people and other Asian Americans. “Dr. Lieber is probably the most prominent academic charged in this kind of case so far,” Lelling says, “and he is not a Chinese national, nor is he of Chinese descent.” But Lelling says China’s aggressive efforts to become the world leader in many high-tech fields has meant devoting more resources to tracking those of Chinese ancestry.

[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/us-prosecutor-leadin...

Of course this investigation was only started because they already had the goal of targeting supposed "Chinese influence". I wonder if this would even be news if they finally found that there was a lot of American researchers with ties British universities.

You wonder about British universities, because you are arguing under the assumption that race is the relevant factor, but your argument is weak. If you thought your argument was strong, you'd normalize across other significant variables, including the adversarial nature of the relationship between the United States and China. Then you'd pick a place like Russia instead, whose people are largely white, like in Britain, but whose government has an adversarial relationship with the United States.

Of course, you know the response to finding out about undisclosed ties to Russia would be roughly the same.

A Chinese spymaster would probably see this as a feature.

The CIA/FBI always seemed to be a bit gobsmacked by who ended up being spies, so best to take advantage of their blind spots.

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