 the american government does not trust chinese professors right now let's talk about it yeah you know i used to be the favorite professor in the whole department of faculty love me then the china initiative came along everybody looking at me funny we got to talk about this article and from the university of michigan titled us universities secretly turn their back on chinese professors under the department of justices china initiative guys make sure you like subscribe turn on your notifications check out smiley sauce at smiley sauce dot com it is restocking soon the pre-orders is out right now andrew the china initiative andrew sounds like something that should be good it sounds like something that should be improving trade relations bilateral talks but in fact it was andrew to prevent professor tear espionage it was uh started in 2018 heavily enforced between 2019 and 2022 i heard things have chilled out but in the middle of it andrew people said that a lot of people they didn't do anything got kicked out of america or were forced to resign from their jobs so we're going to talk about this try to break it down we'll give you some of the comment section as well um david so after looking over the basics of the china initiative which is basically what coming down hard on chinese professors right chinese professors being that they're from china probably born and raised they went to college there they come over here as professors as academics are involved in maybe biology the sciences possibly engineering right to keep an extra close eye on these guys and find out if they're spies if they're sharing uh trade secrets with china or information with chinese universities and by the way guys i don't know if you guys know how much chinese love school and academics and being a scholar but there are like thousands of like visiting professors and many many many more thousands of students yes have there been a few high profile cases uh that made it look bad that were like the people were guilty yes but the problem is everybody got blanketed and some of the people who were super not guilty still got kicked out or were forced to retire early or resign and uh for example and or one guy named uh cheng gong or gong chun was a mit mechanical engineering professor and he was arrested on hiding of links to china basically he didn't do anything but he might have gotten a few awards or honorees or grants when he was like in china that he didn't declare they arrested him in 2021 but he said you know i'm the lucky one because i had support from mit because mit andrew basically had his back but not every professor at every university had the university fight on their behalf so some of them just had to give it up and i just think like this man it's really unfortunate these are just like the times that we're in right now right it's like uh i don't want to say andrew it's an outright cold war between america and china right now but it's definitely a pretty cool war i it's more towards cold i i would it feels like a cold war but maybe not on the level that the cold war was at you know with the soviets right how about a slightly cold war where the missiles were pointed at each other and then like they were about to press the button it's it's not that cold it's a brisk breeze war yeah it's definitely a windy war and i feel like there's bad apples everywhere and it's so unfortunate because when you don't really understand something like america doesn't really understand china especially the american government doesn't really understand china you don't want to know the standard american business people understand weight china way better than the american government does that's interesting why do you say that david why do you think business people are having an easier time understanding the nuances than the government because first of all in america the business sector attracts higher tier talent and also they want to continue doing business with china so they have to understand the nuances the pros the cons and the gray zones way more than like these old boomers in the government that are just like china's evil it is china displaced the west at the top of the global hierarchy you know what i mean where i see where they're coming from too but it's like way more nuanced than that even though that's not like i guess they'll come a thousand percent wrong thought it's just super un-nuanced right i think in the business world there's been like a lot of sharing and so much collaboration like no matter what the government says about china the business people are working with china like all day long right like even if we go to a hot war like hypothetically david this is and i don't think this is actually close to happening but let's say there are missiles firing across the waters and there are chinese military and american military dying on both sides there will still be trade with china i believe it like they won't cut off complete trade there will still be like bezos is gonna be like well i can't shut down amazon yeah wish sheen you're still gonna be buying sheen jackets you're still gonna be buying timu stuff like i don't know that's what i think yeah it's just a really weird situation where basically like the people it's like obviously the u.s government absolutely should do its due diligence catch the people who are doing wrong things question people who are on the fence and scare them into doing the right thing and then leave the people who are doing the right thing completely alone right right but like there's no apparatus to like accurately assess anybody yeah so everybody just gets blanketed and it kind of reminds me of the way people enter perceived police like you know how everybody's like all police are corrupt and racist but i was like well isn't it probably only a fraction of them or all this group of people are really bad well isn't a fraction of them or all republicans all democrats hate structures in society these are like stereotypes that people would use on the other side to villainize that side but it's not true even for anywhere close to a majority of that group of people exactly david do you think the china initiative back in 2018 they came down extra hard and ruined and uh un wrongfully ruined some careers because they were just trying to come down so hard and scare other chinese professors like now in 2024 do you think other chinese professors that are trying to come over to work in america are more weary and they're like oh shit like i gotta have all my ducks in place because i don't want the government to think that i'm i'm like working for the chinese government i think depending on what level you are you just don't even go back to china anymore i think that depending on what level you're interfacing with sensitive material or whatever you just go yeah this is not worth it you know i love all the you know that you can get the guo qui now here in america but you know even in wisconsin the mother local chinese food street i just can't go back for the guo qui anymore but do you think that that as a is a favorable outcome for the u.s government in this sense like they would rather have chinese professors come here and just stay here rather than go back and i do think so i do think so i think that that is the sacrifice that they're gonna have to make uh for their lifestyle or whatever just under the current environment and by the way guys i'm not saying i don't understand where the u.s government is coming from i'm just saying that the u.s government is run by a lot of boomers who see it one-sided they don't build the right apparatus so then they blanket everybody because they can't build the system to actually suss out the nuances right because like for some of these professors there was just no evidence you know right right right a couple of them there was i read some cases you know somebody was got caught at the airport trying to send 21 vials of biological research to china that guy got detained right and will go to jail and he should and he should go to jail you should go to jail you should go to jail for a long time too to be honest because he violated or whoever violated and i'm saying this it just feels like anything or anybody who's chinese in the west right now they're guilty before proven innocent and everybody's cool with it and for me i think that that's really unfortunate i think that that's just true in any sort of politicized field maybe the one field where i don't see it as much but even you see it with tiktok and stuff like that is like tech i think you see it the least in tech because that's why the politicians go against tech because the politicians have the least stranglehold on like the new world industries but the old world industries whether that's academia a lot of government funding involved and like obviously politics media hyper politicized right now and that's just what i feel like and i just feel like so there was a bunch of comments andrew saying this guy was like yeah i just cannot help but feel very disaffected i saw so many professors and graduate students around me get sent back and they cannot finish their phd program this made me feel like america hates me and you know what's so interesting about andrew is you can read all these think pieces from uh muslim americans after 9 11 um black americans just throughout history there's so many conflicting feelings but it's like for me i would tell people that it's just like man it's just such a complicated time right now because people are not like seeing the nuance in each other then they feel like china cheated first with stealing ip to come up as a country but then china's gonna look at the opium wars and all the other stuff and how it was the factory world factory for a while so you know what i mean like i'm just saying it's so funny because if you really study it it's just so complicated and layered most people like i don't know like 75 to 85 percent of americans just don't want to do it so they just gonna blanket it right and i just think that that's a really unfortunate time right now and um you know a lot of people were talking about how come germans and russians never got treated that same way because they're like they could pass as white in america i do remember at one point russians were treated a little bit more like that though when i was growing up yeah i would say like anecdotally speaking from a cultural sense white people see a lot of russian people as outsiders of the white race although visually they can pass but they kind of like make fun of russians right if vladimir pulls up in the m3 the older me 46 with the leather jacket on smoking a cigarette white people are like who check out also guys there's not even the number of russian scientists in america as there are chinese professors like chinese scientists from china there's thousands in america like thousands of professors academics scientists researchers if you're watching this video you've probably had a chinese professor or ta guaranteed because academia and like scholarliness and scholastics it's like you have to understand in the chinese culture is so revered and valued as a profession like it's like the top two no i mean i personally rich within our extended family and our friends and family i have friends whose parents are literally chinese professors and scientists so i don't like 20 yeah so that's a lot um somebody said why is a baby civilization so scared of the ascension of a much older civilization this was from a chinese guy oh what are you watching three body problem uh but then a white guy came through and said well if you look at anglo civilization as a somewhat unbroken connection to greek civilization even though the language is different then technically it's just as old if you count anglo civilization being linked to the romans being linked to the greeks and then he said uh plus only the last 100 or 150 years of history really matter anyway this is like his theory on civilizations and of course this turns into a whole civilization battle the geeks and nerds on reddit love to fucking get you know engage in and then um ultimately somebody just said as a chinese american myself it's a very gray zone it's just a shame that there has to be collective punishment on the wrong actions of a few um ultimately i'll say this man everybody has a different threshold of where they're willing to go andrew when people dig for oil in america some people want to dig in sacred indian burial grounds some people don't some people want to trawl the ocean for precious metals but they don't some whales are gonna get killed or dolphins are gonna get killed in that process you know like everybody has a different threshold for like well we gotta keep this country safe so if a few people gotta retire or get out of the country and they were good guys so be it you know what i mean like everybody has different things they're willing to like sacrifice or like overhead or collateral damage and i just wish that especially like as much as like america's gonna do you know be frenemies with china moving forward you need more people in infrastructure positions that actually understand what's going on because the business people they always see the nuance but the government people are more like yeah you know what i mean like yeah but they're challenging the west and i'm like hey guys listen i'm not saying there's nothing to that but it's way more layered and way more intellectual than that and um yeah i just think as a chinese american it's really interesting because everything regarding china sort of gets blown out of proportion and you can't help but feel it on a slight micro level trickle down so i think that's really unfortunate but i would say to chinese americans it's just like a man it's gonna be this way for the next couple decades you know and um you gotta just you can't just you you gotta develop your own sense of what is the truth or what is not the truth or like even what you know and don't know you just cannot listen to the media right i agree so you guys let us know what you guys think down below about these stories obviously there have been some chinese spies since the initiative in 2018 a couple cases but uh i i think there's definitely a lot of stories of chinese professors lives and careers being ruined wrongfully uh but we don't hear about them they don't get a lot of press and they're probably not going to get a national apology from the government they're not gonna they got investigated they got their lives torn apart uh so issue one just too bad for you just go back home and swallow it yeah but you know what that's uh i guess it's the government's uh they they gotta whatever they're i mean there's their beef and their jocelyn i'll tell you this man they are on the low post they are not trying to kill each other but they are elbowing each other in the ribs yeah like like the mba playoffs in the 90s all right everybody uh please let us know in the comments down below tell us what you think and until next time we out peace