The honorees include Gang Chen, a professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was arrested in 2021 and accused of being a spy and failing to disclose ties to Chinese institutions. The charges were later dismissed when the prosecutor's office conceded that it did not have sufficient evidence.

Also honored was Xiaoxing Xi, a physics professor at Temple University, who was targeted before the China Initiative was officially launched by the administration of former US president Donald Trump in 2018. In 2015, the FBI arrested him at his home, and he was accused of sharing confidential technology with China, although the technology had been public for years.

Award recipient Anming Hu, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee, was the first academic to face trial under the China Initiative. He was acquitted in September 2021, with the judge saying that "no rational jury could find him guilty".

Recipient Franklin Tao, who lost his tenured position at the University of Kansas because of government charges, was investigated by the FBI for alleged espionage based on anonymous tips and arrested in 2019 on unrelated charges. Each charge was dismissed for lack of evidence.

Tao called his experience "a significant prosecutorial overreach by the government, driven by racial profiling".

"After a legal battle lasting four to five years, I was fully exonerated in July 2024, with all charges found to be baseless and expunged," Tao said.

Xi, the Temple University physics professor, said in a news release from the Asian American Scholar Forum that the group of scientists and scholars were "victims of the government's discriminatory policies".

The only way to prevent this is "for everyone to speak up and fight back. This is our right and our obligation," he said.

Chen, the MIT professor, called the recognition "bittersweet "because "it brings to mind the many scientists who have been wrongfully prosecuted by our government".