WASHINGTON - The US "China Initiative" is harming a far more valuable asset -- its scientists and scientific communities, according to a report by The Atlantic.

In the competition with China, the United States is putting legal pressure on the experts within its own borders, thereby limiting the country's ability to create new intellectual property, said the article published on Saturday.

"The initiative has morphed into a program to punish US-base scientists for lesser kinds of wrongdoing," said the article, noting that the approach is "creating a climate of fear that chills legitimate scientific collaboration and may drive away foreign-born scientists who would otherwise make their discoveries in America."

This is a worrisome sign, it added, as the US authorities are failing to understand that the most useful technology is not intellectual property in the form of written documents, but the unwritten knowledge in people's heads.