Legal Defense Fund for Mingqing Xiao
Summary
Dr. Mingqing Xiao, a 20-year Math Professor at Southern Illinois University, a father of three, and a pillar of his community, needs your help in funding his legal defense against criminal charges by the federal government that he failed to report his work with a Chinese university (which was through his affiliation with SIU) in a grant application he completed on SIU’s behalf. Dr. Xiao’s case is one of a number of prosecutions across the country in which the government is claiming that Chinese-American researchers and students have failed to disclose their work with Chinese universities under the so-called “China Initiative.” Professor Xiao has contributed enormously to our local community: for the past eight years, he has volunteered tremendous time to teach Math to pre-college students and has served as the math coach for our local middle school. For his efforts, he is beloved, and recently received the “Good Neighbor” Award from WSIU Public Broadcasting last November. Dr. Xiao will have to incur significant legal expenses—perhaps over $1,000,000—to defend against these serious federal charges, which is simply unaffordable for any ordinary citizen. He will need whatever financial support you can give, so please contribute whatever you can. Any sum, large or small, can help ensure that Professor Xiao finds justice.
Dr. Mingqing Xiao
Dr. Mingqing Xiao was born in the Guangzhou city of China in 1961 and has been a resident of the United States since 1991 and a proud citizen since 2006. He earned an undergraduate degree from Guongdong University of Technology in 1982, a Master’s Degree in Mathematics from Zhongshan University in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1997. From 1997 to 1999, Dr. Xiao worked as a visiting research professor at the University of California at Davis. Since January 2000, he has served on the faculty of the Department of Mathematics at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, having been granted tenure and promotion in 2002 and promotion to full professor in 2007. Dr. Xiao has also served as a faculty research fellow with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in the summers of 2001 and 2002. His research area is mainly in applied mathematics, such as differential equations and computational science. Dr. Xiao has authored or co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters and referenced conference publications. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and serves on the editorial boards of many prestigious Mathemathatics -related journals. In 2016, Dr. Xiao was named the SIU College of Science Outstanding Scholar. In 2020, he received the Good Neighbor Award from WSIU Public Broadcasting for his work from 2013 to the present volunteering his Saturday teaching middle and high school students in mathematics enrichment, and coaching the local MathCounts team.
The Government’s “China Initiative”
In January 2021, hundreds of individuals and organizations signed a letter to President Biden expressing concern with the government’s profiling and discriminatory investigations of Asian Americans and Asian immigrants. The letter was drafted and organized by Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Brennan Center for Justice, and APA Justice. The letter recounted how Attorney General Sessions launched the “China Initiative” in 2018 to counter the threat of economic espionage and trade secrets theft conducted by or for the benefit of the “communist regime in China.” Noting that it is appropriate for the Justice Department to address these threats, the letter pointed out that the White House put great pressure on the FBI to scrutinize and target Americans of Chinese descent based on their ethnicity rather than on suspicion of criminal activity. The letter noted that Assistant Attorney General for National Security, John Demers, ordered each of this country’s 94 US Attorneys to bring cases of Chinese espionage or economic theft, without any apparent reason to believe that such crimes were being committed in every district in the country. Where the government has failed to find evidence of economic espionage, it has nonetheless chosen to criminally charge people for administrative errors or minor offenses, such as failing to fully disclose conflict of interest information to their universities or research institutions. Universities previously handled matters such as non-disclosures in an administrative process, but now these issues have been criminalized. The letter notes that this practice has been ineffective in combatting security threats while damaging American leadership in science and international collaboration on basic research, not to mention subjecting numerous academics of Chinese descent to unjustified scrutiny, intrusions into their privacy, and for individuals like Professor Xiao and many others, unsupported criminal charges.
On April 9, 2021, four US Congressmen—Eddie Bernice Johnson, Adam Smith, Haley M. Stevens, and James R. Langevin—in a letter addressed to President Joe Biden, stated “we encourage the Department of Justice to raise awareness among investigators and prosecutors about the norms and practices of the research community and the value of openness and international collaboration in research.” Recently, US Congressman Andy Kim talked about how the power competition between China and the US creates fear and anxiety on the home front, which often escalates to anti-Asian rhetoric across the country, including the stories of two scientists, among others, who were falsely accused of spying for the Chinese government. Observers have claimed that the charges that have come from the prior administration’s “China Initiative” are targeted, unjust and politically motivated. As an Op-Ed in the Nashville Tennessean wrote, “Former President Trump’s Department of Justice blurred the line between disclosure violation and espionage to monstrously criminalize what would be and largely has been an employment issue. Many American professors are teaching and lecturing in foreign countries, and vice versa, many foreign professors are studying and teaching at American institutions. That is how science has worked for centuries.”
Dr. Mingqing Xiao Wins “Good Neighbor” Award for Great Commitment to Furthering Pre-College Math Education in Southern Illinois
Carbondale, Illinois, 2020 – Dr. Mingqing Xiao is a distinguished full professor in the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC). In addition to his work for two decades as a math professor at SIUC, he is dedicated to enhancing pre-college students’ knowledge of math. For the past eight years, Dr. Xiao has run the Saturday math enhancement class, weekly math sessions for pre-college students. WSIU Public Broadcasting, a service of Southern Illinois University Carbondale, is pleased to announce Dr. Mingqing Xiao as a recipient of the ‘Neighborly’ award in the educator category.
“The Good Neighbor award is a great honor for myself and my team. I have a lot of support from parents, colleagues, and people who live in Carbondale,” said awardee Dr. Xiao. Dr. Xiao was a research assistant professor at the University of California Davis in the math department. He came to SIUC for a tenure-track position and was promoted to associate professor in 2003 and full professor in 2007. The Saturday math enhancement class was established in conjunction with Saturday Chinese language and learning classes for community children. The sessions are divided into four levels of instruction. A diverse group of students from around Southern Illinois attends these sessions, which enhances the instruction they receive every day in school. He has also served as the coach for the Unity Point School MathCounts team since 2015.
Dr. Xiao is the organizer and higher-level teacher, but he also arranges for other instructors to teach other levels and handles the general administration of the program. Students complete a homework packet in advance each week. The teachers correct and return the homework to them the following week. He has been doing this on a voluntary basis the entire time. The only costs for the students are to defray any expenses for copying.
Expressing his views on being neighborly and what it means to him, Dr. Xiao said, “It means to help each other like we are a big family. We don’t want anyone to fall behind, which is why we do our best to help our neighbors. They help us in different ways every day, too. While teaching college students, I’m always thinking of other ways I can use my teaching skills to help the community. I give back to the community because we do get a lot of help from our neighbors and our community. This is what motivates me. I feel math is my specialty, and I can help local students when they need it. We really love Southern Illinois. We love our neighbors, and we’re always thinking about what we can do for them.”
The goal of the Saturday math class is not to teach the school math curriculum but to inspire students and cultivate an interest and love for math. Dr. Xiao tries to incorporate fun in the learning process. He would like more local youth to participate in their program. “Compared to big cities, we have very limited resources available to local kids except for those attending regular school. Many years ago, this made me think about what I could do for local students, young students in particular. Southern Illinois kids are very intelligent. If we give them the opportunity to learn more, they can be very successful at school and in their career. We encourage parents to bring their kids to attend our class, so we can help the whole neighborhood in terms of learning math,” said Dr. Xiao.
“Ming has volunteered his time for thousands of hours over the past eight years—organizing the Saturday math enhancement class, teaching it every week, and correcting the weekly homework. The students who have gone through Saturday math have won numerous awards in regional, state and national math competitions. Many have attended the Illinois Math and Science Academy, and many have attended prestigious colleges and universities, such as Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia and the University of Chicago. Ming’s selfless efforts to help pre-college students in his community every Saturday demonstrate what a great neighbor he is. He is interested in the well-being of all his students and his friends and family. This also applies to his college students to whom he is available for help above and beyond his regular office hours,” said nominator Edward Benyas. He and Dr. Xiao are colleagues at SIUC and have been good friends since 2004 when their daughters attended daycare at the Child Development Lab.
