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Feng Tao, who was tenured at the University of Kansas, was cleared of charges brought under a discontinued Trump program aimed at Chinese spying.
March 2, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
The chemistry professor’s nightmare seemed to finally be over.
Five years had passed since Feng Tao, also known as Franklin, was led by F.B.I. agents out of his home in Lawrence, Kansas. The first professor to be arrested under a Trump-era program aimed at fighting Chinese economic espionage, Dr. Tao was accused of hiding his ties to a Chinese university while conducting federally funded research at the University of Kansas, where he was tenured.
In July, he won his legal fight. A federal appeals court overturned the final conviction in his case. His wife, Hong Peng, recalled in an interview that she thought her husband could finally return to his lab, and their family could perhaps recover some semblance of a normal life.
But the University of Kansas has not reinstated him.
Dr. Tao, a Chinese citizen and permanent U.S. resident, is now suing his former employer for wrongful termination. He has accused the university of unlawfully surveilling him on behalf of federal investigators and of violating its own faculty disciplinary policies by terminating him before his criminal proceeding concluded.
“The university allowed itself to join in fearmongering and racist witch hunting,” read a complaint filed by Dr. Tao’s lawyers in January in a federal court in Kansas.
The University of Kansas did not respond to requests for comment.
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Dr. Tao’s experience underscores how, more than three years after the Justice Department officially ended the Trump-era program, known as the China Initiative, its impact is still reverberating among professors and researchers of Chinese descent.
