ANALYSIS: The China Initiative and Its Antecedents

The Attorney General announced the China Initiative on November 1, 2018, emphasizing from the start that the main purpose of the program to combat economic espionage is the protection of U.S. intellectual property: to identify priority cases of Chinese theft of U.S trade secrets, to ensure that DOJ dedicates sufficient resources to them, and to make sure that DOJ concludes them quickly and effectively.

Nevertheless, the China Initiative rapidly became associated with political disputes between the United States and China, largely as a result of the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in Canada on December 1, 2018, and subsequent ...