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Northwestern University sued over suicide of Chinese-American scientist targeted by the Justice Department. Though she was never charged, Northwestern closed her lab and reassigned her grant funding (www.chicagotribune.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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[–] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Now do number convicted vs total number of researchers in the country and we can decide if that "non-small percentage" was worth officially, systematically disenfranchising and vilifying an entire culture and driving this woman to suicide.

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  • [+] -6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I mean, in a murder investigation, you might go through a dozen people, checking alibis and generally investigating to find the final suspect and convict.

    Granted, what happened here was unconscionable for someone that was only being investigated. I can see her being put on administrative leave while it were sorted out to minimize damage if she actually were guilty. But what was done beyond that wasn't right.

    But you also can't ignore investigations because people might get upset. Unfortunately China has spent decades committing provable industrial espionage, so it's hard to say you can't go down that road. And when you get that high of a percentage of convictions, it proves that out. Frankly, the Chinese government should be as much on the hook here for what was done to her as NWU because they sure make it hard to be even-handed when it comes to theft of IP.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Ok, if you won't do it, I will: The US has 1,889,780 researchers, with old data and rough math, we'll just round that to 2M. We'll rough-in 30 for "a few dozen", giving us a ratio of 3/200,000 or 0.000015 or 0.0015%. I'll be generous and round up to 0.002%. Far less than one one-hundredth of a percent of researchers is worth establishing an official, named, racist government program? And what did we gain? The knowledge that poor Chinese people will stay poor and undoubtedly get poorer? The ire and distrust of an entire demigraphic of citizens and residents in our own country? More opportunities for white men? A few extra pennies in the pockets of billionaires? Yay, yippee, woohoo, another wonderfully beneficial use of taxpayer dollars from the party of small government. 🙄🙄🙄

    And given what we're seeing with the current federal haterace-based law enforcement programs, we have absolutely no reason to believe those few dozen convicted researchers were actually even guilty of anything. I honestly wouldn't even be surprised if they're not all Chinese. But I'm sure the bigots met their quota, so that's really all that matters. 🙏

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