First thing’s first: it’s bad to cheat on your wife with your employees and business associates, so Nvidia had compelling reason to push out its CEO Jensen Huang for doing exactly that.But the most salacious part of this ongoing story, that one of Huang’s affair partners was a Chinese spy, deserves just as much scrutiny as Huang’s infidelity.Before we get into it, a little recap. The whole episode kicked off when the New York Times, quoting anonymous US officials who had viewed a classified brief, claimed that US intelligence sources suspected Jensen Huang’s mistress, Alice Huang, of working as a spy for the Chinese government.Mainstream media has been feasting off the story ever since, running startling headlines about the “spy scandal” rocking the AI world. Yet if journalists and media figures were to take second glance at the US government’s track record around Chinese spy allegations, they would find a trail of lives left shattered by baseless and Sinophobic hysteria.One prominent example is Hu Anming, a Chinese-Canadian laser physicist who was fired from his research position at the University of Tennessee Knoxville in 2020 after groundless allegations surfaced that he was engaged in economic espionage on behalf of the Chinese government.Rather than treat Hu as innocent until proven guilty, the university terminated him on the spot, shuttering his nanotech lab and legitimizing the spy accusations before the researcher ever saw the inside of a court room. Hu was later cleared of six felony charges, after two separate trials ended in acquittals. As he faced the allegations in court, a nearly two-year FBI tail took a heavy toll on Hu and his family, and failed to produce any material that could substantiate the charges made against him.That’s because those charges, it turned out, were based on false evidence obtained by US intelligence officials, who had hastily built their case on a shoddy translation from Mandarin into English by Google translate. Though Hu was reinstated at the University of Kentucky in 2022, he lamented in an interview with Nature magazine that “I lost two years of my life.”“I need to get back my reputation. I need to let other people see I didn’t do anything wrong,” Hu continued. “Who is taking the consequences of that?”Hu is not alone. His case was the result of a Department of Justice directive issued during Donald Trump’s first stint in office, meant to combat ambiguous Chinese bogeymen supposedly engaged in economic espionage. Called the “China Initiative,” it resulted in spy allegations against hundreds of Chinese-American academics, many of whom had their careers ended as a result.Take Feng “Franklin” Tao, a tenured chemist and researcher at the University of Kansas who was fired from his position in 2019 when he was arrested as a result of a single anonymous tip alleging he was spying for China. The report, incredibly, was later found to have come from a visiting scholar who was blackmailing Tao as part of a feud over authorship of a research paper. Despite an acquittal, Tao is still trying to clear his name in 2026, with the Kansas Reflector reporting that he’s now suing the university for discrimination and retaliation.Per the lawsuit, Tao has been left functionally “unable to contest the charges against him, unable to secure reinstatement, and indefinitely denied the fair process to which he is entitled.”Though the DoJ’s China Initiative formally ended in 2022, it lives on through sanctions issued by the US National Institutes of Health, which has lobbed allegations — but not charges — against nearly 250 scientists across some 100 research institutions, the vast majority of whom are Asian or collaborated with Chinese researchers during the course of their work. As Science noted in a 2023 article, over one in five researchers scrutinized by the NIH were banned from applying for new government funding for various lengths of time, a “career-ending setback for most academic researchers.”The validity of most of these NIH claims is nearly impossible to ascertain, as actual criminal charges were scant, and the degree to which the grant-writing agency and the Justice Department communicated with each other remains unclear. Instead, administrators familiar with the proceedings explained that simply being accused by the NIH was tantamount to being put on an academic blacklist.“If NIH says there’s a conflict, then there’s a conflict, because NIH is always right,” former vice chancellor for health sciences at the University of California, San Diego David Brenner told Science. Brenner was one of the administrators present at UCSD when the institution received a notice to investigate five medical school faculty members in 2018, all of whom were Chinese-American. “We were told we have a problem and that it was up to us to fix it,” Brenner explained.One victim of the NIH’s crusade against alleged Chinese spies is Jane Ying Wu, a tenured neuroscientist at Northwestern University who died by suicide in 2024 a few months after false espionage allegations emerged against her. Wu was cleared of any wrongdoing by the NIH after her death, and was never formally charged with a crime. Her case prompted over 1,000 research scientists to sign onto a letter demanding accountability from Northwestern, which had gone so far as to send Chicago police to forcibly remove Wu from her lab, who then committed her to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s emergency psychiatric ward.Regardless of Jensen Huang’s personal conduct, it’s clear that the xenophobic hysteria around Chinese spies didn’t end in 2022. Instead of becoming uncritical amplifiers of shadowy US intelligence sources, we all have a responsibility to seek truth from facts and demand evidence before jumping to wild conclusions — especially under a presidential administration as unapologetically xenophobic as Donald Trump’s.More on US government: The US Government Just Issued a Stark Warning to KalshiThe post The US Government Has a Track Record of Falsely Accusing People of Being Chinese Spies appeared first on Futurism.