The US-China Perception Monitor’s student journalists YuXuan Chen and Xiaoyi (Baker) Lu recently conducted an in-depth Zoom interview with Professor Frank Wu on a range of issues related to Chinese Americans and US-China relations.  Wu is president of Queens College, City University of New York. He previously served as the William L. Prosser Distinguished Professor and Chancellor & Dean at University of California Hastings College of the Law. Wu was the first Asian American to serve in those positions at Queens College and UC Hastings.

USCPM: Do you think China’s scale problem has influence on the United States’ disengagement with China academically? 

Wu: That’s part of it. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

Even if you didn’t care about Chinese-Americans or Asian Americans, even if you didn’t care about racial justice, even if you didn’t care about civil rights, even if you were hostile to China, you should welcome Chinese immigrants. I’ll explain why. It’s in the American national interest. Take a look at Silicon Valley or take a look at the physics department of any American campus, who are the entrepreneurs and professors? They are either foreigners who intend to stay which makes them immigrants or they are people who come here for a period of time and would be exposed of American values. Let’s take these as two groups. They blend together: some stay when they didn’t intend to, others leave when they didn’t want to. Many immigrants, Asians and Chinese win Nobel prizes for America as naturalized US citizens. If all the Chinese Americans vanish from Silicon Valley, half of the coding and engineering workforce would vanish (the other half is South Asian – for each, not exactly half but about half). This is such a huge proportion. Overnight, you would see the collapse of research and development in virtually every significant tech-based sector of the economy. There is a joke going around on Chinese social media, I am told. “The Americans are afraid of the Chinese coming and stealing secrets. If the Chinese don’t come, there would be no secrets to steal.”

My point is that if you want to promote America and its interests, then its comparative advantage historically, has been its ability to welcome people and turn them into Americans. My parents became Americans. They are taxpayers and productive citizens. When my mother passed away, she was buried in the US. I asked my father about it. He said, the family is here now.

This is not my unique family story; it is the American story. You go in one generation from foreigner to citizen. Thus, it’s in the American national interest to continue welcoming people, otherwise it’s not just those people don’t prosper, it is that the American society doesn’t prosper and the American dream is over. New York City was rebuilt by immigrants. There’s this famous headline about New York City in the 1970s, “Gerald Ford to Big Apple Drop Dead” and then the city came roaring back. Why? It the line from Hamilton: Immigrants got the job done. And so do their children and grandchildren.

It is also true that the people who go back, they are foreign agents, but not in the direction we might think. They are foreign agents because they’ve been exposed to American freedom and American opportunity. They go back and take American values such as self expression, self fulfillment, individualism, with them. That’s the soft power. It is what America is exporting. Yes, video games and Hollywood. But within that, the First Amendment and a set of ideals.

USCPM: But we are not seeing this kind of welcome now. In your article ‘Attacking Chinese on Our Campuses Only Hurts America,’ you wrote ‘A decade ago, partnerships with China were heavily promoted…Now those contacts are deemed negative and trigger suspicion.’ Why do we see such a U-turn in the US-China academic relationship?

Wu: I would say this goes back to Samuel Huntington. He wrote a famous article that he turned into a book. The article was published in Foreign Affairs in 1993. I would not call him a bigot. I want to be clear. His ideas regrettably can produce racism and xenophobia. He had a big idea. His central thesis was a cataclysmic clash. He predicted the West, led by America; Islam; and China would have an ultimate showdown. This isn’t just trade war or culture war, but a military war, a shooting war, a giant conflagration with millions dead, devastation. It would grow out of trade war and cultural war, and you’d have military war because of irreducible tribal impulses. After 9/11, people rushed to the book and said he was right, he predicted it. People forgot he envisioned three contenders, with China.

More recently Harvard professor Graham Allison wrote a book about Thucydides Trap. He is definitely not a bigot. He is a thoughtful guy. Most people had not been thinking about Thucydides, but he studied all these cases using as inspiration Thucydides is a Greek general and poet. He said in the most instances – not all – throughout human history when you have an established power and a rising power, usually there is war and in a few instances there wasn’t – why would that be? People who haven’t read him exaggerate and say he said all, but he didn’t; he said most. He wanted to analyzed the differences between when you had war and when you didn’t. Similarly, Rand, the think tank, it has produced the white paper, study of war between the US and China. Rand is highly respected, associated with war games, during the Cold War era analyzing nuclear war with the former Soviet Union.

So, there are people who are warning there is going to be war. There is a problem with a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of these nations is going to attack the other maybe it’s a pre-emptive strike and both have nuclear capacity or maybe it’ll be a proxy war like Korea and Vietnam (fought through allies – but proxy wars can expand into global wars). My point is, serious thinkers who are not conspiracy theorists or alarmists or cranks, not crazy people living in caves, thoughtful people are modeling the possibility of a war.

There was a follower of Huntington, Dr. Skinner, who was at the State Department. She was president Trump’s big picture policy thinker in the State Department and she wrote an interesting internal memo that was leaked to The Washington Post. She wrote about why China was a different threat than the Soviet Union. Her answer to this question is that because China isn’t Caucasian. Let’s put aside whether it’s racist or not. I never want to say that’s racist and dismiss it; I’d rather engage with it. Many people pointed out it’s not clear that this framing is the best description of what’s happening here. It echoes some of the thinking about the Pacific Theater during World War II and it’s actually not correct that US hasn’t faced a non-Caucasian great power. In WW2 it faced Japan. (One of the most interesting things about Japan is treated and has been ever since the Russo Japanese as part of the West. Japanese as people and Japan as a nation in this equation of which side are placed the American side not the Chinese side.)

People also point out Taiwan historically a staunch US ally not only is not white but also racially, ethnically, culturally Chinese. You could look at Skinner’s argument and say the factual premise for this argument is incorrect. It is not true that United States has never faced a non-Caucasian enemy. It’s also not true that every time it faced non-Caucasian Asian countries that that has been was problematic.  The United States and various Asian nations have been great allies.

Therefore, my answer to the question why now and why this, why Chinese Scholars and students are targeted like this, is because there is a fear of war. There is also just a general wariness about the rise of China.

There’s a rise of ethnic nationalism all around. I make clear to people. I’m not an ethnic nationalist for a lot reasons. One of which is my ethnicity and my nationality don’t match up. My white American friend say to me, hey, if China becomes dominant, you’re going to be all set. My reply is are you kidding? But I’m doomed if China becomes the dominant world power. It means my family, in the past three generations, turns out to be wrong, and I bet wrong and chose poorly, and we lined up on the wrong side. I picked America! No offense to my friends or my relatives who are Chinese. In terms of political loyalty and citizenship I’m part of America. I’m respectful people who are part of China.

I think it would be a mistake or a tragedy for humanity if United States and China ended up in a military war. The trade war is bad enough. Now internet and cell phone technology are going to be divided in two. Everyone is going make a choice they will be forced to make this choice. I would think there is some better way to structure the world.

USCPM: To the hundreds of thousands of Chinese students who are or will be studying in the United States, what do you want to say to them?

Wu: Keep coming.

This is a dangerous moment in human history. We’re always living through history. We’re not self-aware. We don’t stop ourselves to say this is historical. But right now, we know. This is historical. It’s a trauma. There are historical moments in the United States like when John F Kennedy was shot, 9/11, this pandemic, and the black lives matter movement (the twin pandemic of what many always knew but some would deny, about racism). Sitting here I know 50 years from now people will be asking what it was like. This is undoubtedly an historical moment. You can add rising US-China tension to these moments. We know we are living in the hyper accelerated moment of history. If you’re religious, this is eschatological – that’s a Biblical term for the end times; there’s even a plague of locusts. It feels fraught. So, this is exactly the moment we need more people like you to come and to make friends.

I do have a piece of advice: when you come to America, embrace the experience. If you come to America and everyone whom you sit with at the cafeteria is also Chinese descent from wherever you came from, you’re not actually coming to America and getting that experience of being here. Make some American friends; they could be Asian Americans or African Americans, Jewish – make lots of friends.

I was talking to my father, who came in United States in the early 1960s. When he grew up, in his family, they weren’t impoverished; they were not rich, but they were not poor. In general my father did not go to bed hungry, but he explained to me that dinner would be a bowl of rice and a stalk of vegetable with a little meat – like meat as a condiment. And usually there was not meat but tofu; if there was meat, it was just like sauce. So he comes United States and he realized he could buy 8 ounce steak. You don’t have to be a king. He couldn’t do that every day but once per month, and 8 ounces is as much meat as he would have eaten in a year. In the 1960s the material advantage in America was astonishing if you just use the measurement of how much meat could you eat. When you came to America as a poor graduate student, you could as much meat in one meal as would have eaten in one year.

Now let’s think about today. Where are luxury cars, French impressionist painting, first growth French Bordeaux wine being auctioned and bought in large quantities? In China not the US. It has been an entire reversal within the span of a lifetime, actually just a generation, twenty years.  China has moved up in the world in a way that is unprecedented in the annals of human history and no nation has demonstrated such rapid sustained economic growth. For people who left and thought they were leaving behind poverty and strife and coming to the shining “city upon a hill,” it turns out that in material terms China is on the edge of surpassing the US in the aggregate.

Teachers always say you’re the future. You are really the future because you’re bilingual in a meaningful way. The standard keeps going up. When I was your age, I could say I was bilingual but I’m really not. [Wu said a few phrases in Mandarin about his language skills being middling.] I can’t read or write but only speak a little. But you can read and write. You are monolingual that means you’re an American and it means you’re not going to be prepared for a multilateral world. United States has been, is and will continue to be a great power and a great nation and I’m proud to be an American. What has changed – most Americans, myself among them, were not ready –

is that America will not be the only great power.

Yuxuan is a college student majoring in International relations at New York University. Baker is a student in master’s program at School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

The US-China Perception Monitor’s student journalists YuXuan Chen and Xiaoyi (Baker) Lu recently conducted an in-depth Zoom interview with Professor Frank Wu on a range of issues related to Chinese Americans and US-China relations.  Wu is president of Queens College, City University of New York. He previously served as the William L. Prosser Distinguished Professor and Chancellor & Dean at University of California Hastings College of the Law. Wu was the first Asian American to serve in those positions at Queens College and UC Hastings.

USCPM: You gave a speech at Google sometime ago, in which you talked about the “Model Minority” stereotype for Asian Americans. You made a very thoughtful and powerful argument against the phrase. Could you share with our readers about your insight on this issue?

Wu: There are actually some Asian who like the ‘Model Minority’ image. It’s a myth. Let me explain what it is and then what’s going on factually and then talk about the political use of this image.

The image of ‘model minority’ is that Asian immigrants and their American born progeny are super successful. They’re smart, hard-working and don’t protest and don’t make a fuss.  That’s the idea of the whiz kid rocket scientist who wins every science fair and math contest and spelling bee. It’s the idea that parents coming here penniless with nothing more than the shirts on their backs. Their kids become valedictorian at the high school. It’s the idea that at the age of 11 they took the SAT and got a perfect score. Basically, in sum, Asian Americans are good citizens who should be applaud. But it’s dangerous.

Part of ‘Model Minority’ is also this must be biology or culture and it shows there’s no racial discrimination that is meaningful in United States because of the success of Asian-American. Now when I talk about this, people sometimes ask “What’s wrong with you? They are complimenting you. Are you some crazy hypersensitive politically correct person that you think that’s racist? They are trying to say your good.”

Let’s unpack this. Let me start by saying for the people have made it I applaud them, and that’s great, that’s fantastic. We should all applaud, congratulate, admire and emulate them. The problem is when we believe it’s because of their race or their culture, an “Oriental secret” that explains this.

Factually, there are multiple problems with this image. Let’s start with selectivity of migration. It’s brain drain. Many – not all – Asians have human capital or financial capital. Their have higher education. You can’t say when someone spends 10 million on a San Francisco penthouse that they buy as an investment property for their children, that they arrived on these shores penniless. They didn’t arrive penniless. They arrived rich.

It is also not true across-the-board. There are all sorts of ethnic variations. You look at Southeast refugees they look statistically and demographically like African and Latino populations. It’s true if you just look at Chinese, South Korean, and earlier people of Japanese descent. But even among those people, there’s a problem. These people concentrate on New York, California, places that are high-income high cost. They’re not distributed the way the population is in general and many more live in the multigenerational household. When you look at household income you’re often comparing a grandparent, two parents and a teenager all making money versus a nuclear family or a family with a single parent so you’re not comparing individual income.

There’s another issue here which is the bimodal distribution of the population. Let’s just take people of Chinese descent coming to the US. The population is bimodal. It’s not a one peak bell curve; it’s a two peak bell curve. One peak is students in elite institutions and Chinese immigrants in the middle class. They are not impoverished. Then you have another peak. Nobody talks about this. Then you have undocumented immigrants. The original dreamers were undocumented Chinese. Some people of Chinese descent get exercised. They say, I’m not illegal. I get that. You have cousins, distant cousins. They work at the all-you-can-eat buffets, they are the waiters and waitresses in Chinatown, they are domestic staff at hotels. There’s a whole other peak of the curve. They’re crowded into tenements, and some were smuggled in by the snakehead gang operations. So, it’s a bimodal distribution in terms of resources and outcomes.

I have described the myth and why empirically why we should be concerned about it. There are other reasons it should be rejected.

The three reasons it’s truly problematic is that, first, it allows the whitewashing of bias. By the way, there is a great study of Asian Americans. My friend Buck Gee did it. It’s in Harvard Business Review. It documents everything statistically, looking at Silicon Valley. Asian Americans are promoted into management at lower rates than anybody else (using an appropriate baseline of those qualified). That includes other people of color. Yet when Asian Americans complain, people say, what? Why are you complaining?  you’re all like the movie “Crazy Rich Asians,” you’re all doing so well and you’re doing better than you would in your “homeland.” The model minority myth makes it impossible for Asian Americans in need or facing discrimination to say I am not privileged. People assume your privilege despite your problems.

The second problem is it stirs up racial resentment. When someone calls you an overachiever, they’re implying you got more than you deserve. How come you got into that school? Where are the real Americans? The late Ronald Takaki, the famous historian of Asian Americans, says Asians punished by their virtues rather than their vices. Go back to the exclusion era, there was a famous pamphlet written by Samuel Gompers. You can find copies easily on the web. He was a progressive labor leader, he was white, in the comparatively skilled labor of rolling cigars, and he and wrote the pamphlet called ‘meat versus rice.’ It says ‘Asiatic coolies must be kept out because they eat rice. Europeans have to eat meat to survive. So Asians have an advantage. It’s an absurd premise, but it was successful. The model minority myth is the part of the exclusion movement. It’s the idea of the Asians working too hard. It does not mean smart and hardworking but means you’re a nerd and too competitive. What does it mean to have a strong family? It means you’re too clannish. Everything that seems positive gets turned on its head to be bad and people become angry. Why are you so successful?  America is a culture that celebrates the underdog, the come-from-behind lovable losers. America is all about people who are high and mighty being toppled and falling from grace. They get their comeuppance. As a result for Asian Americans to be portrayed as super successful, that’s going to cause people to punch us in the nose.

The final reason why the model minority myth is distributing is false flattery. It’s a none too subtle means of saying to African and Latino population, ‘they made it, why can’t you?’ The modern version of model minority myth comes from New York Times Sunday magazine article, written by William Petersen, and people have called it the most influential article ever written about Asian Americans, by someone who wasn’t even a scholar of Asian Americans. It is an article from 1966 that talks about Japanese Americans specifically and it is about how great Japanese Americans are how they got out of the internment camps in WWII and made it. You read all of the article and, in the end, it shows the real point of the article. Petersen said the example of these Asian Americans is in contrast to whom might be called the problem minorities to use his words. Then he goes on and compares Japanese Americans to “Negroes” and “Mexicans”. The whole point of his argument is to say the Asians are great, but black people and brown people are bad. It uses the Asian Americans as a pawn to say, you see there’s no racial discrimination because we have Asian Americans. It’s actually a non-sequitur. The fact that you have an abundance of Asian-American does not excuse the absence of African Americans. It doesn’t mean you don’t have anti-Black prejudice. It just means you substituted a population in some way you’re more comfortable with.

Some people, like me, are unwilling to compare groups on a racial basis. Suppose we put aside all our qualms and objections to comparing racial and ethnic groups. If you want to do a fair comparison, this is not even a fair comparison because you’re typically comparing immigrants since most Asian Americans are immigrants with foreign-born background, to people are native-born. Even among people of Asian descent, you observe what a social scientist would call regression to the mean. It turns out that Asian Americans over generations look like other Americans. I am pretty hard working. But I’m nowhere near as hard working as my parents were. They sacrificed. Wow. I’m a slacker. Meanwhile, newcomers from Africa, like Asian immigrants, on average they do well. But that doesn’t justify comparing foreign-born blacks to native born African American, because their situations are different; they are facing a different set of circumstances. They started at different points in history. I object to all racial generalizations. But if you were going to compare you should at least use a historically accurate, contextualized approach to the comparison.

Yuxuan is a college student majoring in International relations at New York University. Baker is a student in master’s program at School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

The US-China Perception Monitor’s student journalists YuXuan Chen and Xiaoyi (Baker) Lu recently conducted an in-depth Zoom interview with Professor Frank Wu on a range of issues related to Chinese Americans and US-China relations.  Wu is president of Queens College, City University of New York. He previously served as the William L. Prosser Distinguished Professor and Chancellor & Dean at University of California Hastings College of the Law. Wu was the first Asian American to serve in those positions at Queens College and UC Hastings.

USCPM: You’ve been advocating in cases such as those of Sherry Chen and Xiaoxing Xi, two Chinese American scientists who were wrongfully accused by national security related charges. Living in an era of China Initiative, do you have some reflections or thoughts when you look back at those two cases?

Wu: Starting about three years ago, I have been contacted constantly by people of Chinese descent, foreign nationals, naturalized citizens, or even native born citizens who believe that they are victims who have been racially profiled.

I always start with this: There are real cases. By that I mean, there are bad people doing bad things, who happen to be of Chinese descent. There are bad people doing bad things who are white or black or Latino. There are bad people doing bad things of every type of background. But just because somebody has done something that violates our laws does not mean that everyone else who looks like them has a propensity to do the same bad thing. In America, it is easy for us to accept individuals as individuals when you are part of the majority, but when you are in the minority, whether you want to or not you end up being the representative. If you’re a bad driver, it’s, “Look, all the Asians are bad drivers.”

We generalize, and we are all doing that because our brains are hardwired for pattern recognition. You can’t get through the day if we don’t do mental shortcuts. When we walk down the street, you make a judgment about who is friend, who is foe, which of these strangers is dangerous. I’m guilty too. But we exaggerate and we distort. We take little bits of truth and we blow them out of proportion. That’s what a stereotype is. It’s taking one or two real cases, and extrapolating and generalizing until it’s no longer quite true. Indeed, it’s mostly inaccurate. We do that with everything, but with race it is especially volatile, dangerous, highly susceptible to errors. We miss the wrong doers who don’t look like they are wrong doers, because we think we can see who will transgress. We want the wrongdoing to be obvious, and we want criminals to be visibly ugly, to have a sign of their sin. And then we want false positives, people who did nothing wrong, but because they fit a profile, since our brains see a pattern, we assume that this person there we need to pay attention to and they are is suspicious.

You can be in favor of the American national interest and enforcement of the American laws, as I am, and also say but you shouldn’t stereotype. I never want anyone to think I would be trying to help Beijing bring spies to the US to steal military secrets and trade secrets. Why would I want to do that? I don’t want to do that! I am an American. I line up on the American side of the table.

There are other categories of cases. There are people like Sherry Chen and Xiaoxing Xi where the person didn’t do anything wrong. There are so many others, not just one or two. They are just ordinary people. But because of how they look, they fall under suspicion and then they are investigated. The New York Times wrote multiple articles about them. Sixty Minutes did a program about them. And it’s really clear that it is a factual truth that in both those cases, they are accused of terrible crimes, and the government dropped all the charges, meaning that this isn’t my opinion. This is verifiable.

Then there is a third category where people did something wrong, but it’s closer to the parking ticket range than to the first degree murder range. Parking illegally, not paying the meter or in a loading zone, is a violation of the law, and killing someone in a premediated manner, by shooting them or stabbing them, is also illegal. Most people looking at this would say these are not the same. Both break the law, but one is way bigger. We have a sense of proportionality. There are some folks, they who did something wrong. They’re not spies. They are perhaps greedy. It’s moonlighting or double-dipping. They may get paid twice for the same project, didn’t disclose that they have two jobs, or didn’t pay their taxes. They were sloppy in accounting. That’s bad. I am not condoning them. But they are not spies trying to take nuclear weapons secrets on behalf of a foreign government and carry them out of the United States across the Pacific Ocean. 

There are a set of cases where the standards have a changed, a whole category of cases. There has been a massive change in attitudes. This is easy to find. I always make sure people can verify what I say. Nobody has to believe me. I want my claims of fact to have evidence. Just Goggle for this. Ten years ago, the NIH, the NSF, and others, which gave out many of these federal grants to Chinese scientists are now at issue. The NIH on their website bragged about collaboration with China. Every major or minor American university and college wanted to have a program with China to bring students, exchange scholars, visiting professors, and they wanted to find partners, set up articulation agreements. They were wildly enthusiastic ten or even five years ago. And then this collaboration entered a phase where well it’s not as enthusiastic, then neutral, then frowned upon, prohibited, and even criminal. 

This is astonishing given the type of engagement that was being touted has gone from that to if you do this, you will be deported, your career being ruined, you won’t be able to set foot in America ever again, and being vilified in the press. 

In late 2018, the United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the highest law enforcement official in the nation, in one of his very last acts, had a big press conference to announce the ‘China initiative.’ It is a new initiative. This is not my interpretation that this is new. The Justice Department itself held a press conference saying that we have a new initiative. They are saying it’s new. Let’s think about what that means. If they are saying that in 2018 it is new, that means they weren’t doing it in 2017, 2016, 2015, or before. They took laws that were on the books, some are new and some are old. It is true, this is American policy and it has been. The prosecutors will say that it is always the law, but it wasn’t an enforcement priority. Every prosecutor and every police chief, they decide all the time in what is called “exercise of prosecutorial discretion” which crime are they going to make the most serious that I’m going to go after in every case, use all my resources and put the budget; then which are ordinary; and finally which are we not going to bother with. There’s no criminal law that’s one hundred percent enforced. For one thing, you don’t always apprehend your suspect. Until late 2018, these laws about foreign influence were not enforcement priorities. Then they became enforcement priorities as to one nation, but there is another piece to it, as to one nation, one source: China. They didn’t announce we’re going to start enforcing this to everybody, but they targeted specifically at China. The director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, then characterized this as a “whole of society threat,” meaning that all of the Chinese society presents a threat to all of American society. He has given multiple speeches to this effect. President Trump assumes that almost all Chinese students are spies. He said so expressly. Nobody paid any attention. The story just vanished as people shrugged it off.

Let’s talk a moment to talk about scale. As a Chinese American, I only visited mainland China as an adult. I have a hypothesis of why it is so easy to stereotype, why we are susceptible, which is about math. Racial prejudice is about mathematical misunderstandings. You can only comprehend China if you grasp the scale of the “Middle Kingdom.” (Wu used the Mandarin and said, “Central is a better translation, central kingdom – like the Greeks; in antiquity, every civilization thought of itself as the center.)

Most Americans – that includes me — are not accustomed to the scale of China. I’ll explain. When you land Beijing airport, the furthest runway, on a flight landing at midnight and you’re really tired, and then you get on a bus and it goes on for about an hour, what seems to be an unbelievably long ride. Same in Shanghai. You can take the busiest American counterparts and stick the whole thing inside one terminal of the Chinese airport and even its runways would fit inside since everything scales up in an unbelievable way. People have always known this. They have always talked about it.

Carl Crow, a man who really popularized trade with China a century ago and was considered a friend with China wrote a book called “400 Million Customers” in English for Americans and it represents an unimaginable population. And here you get the idea of “Yellow Peril,” massive hordes, popularized by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, which is that Asians, specifically Chinese, can overwhelm Europe with numbers. Yellow Peril has it backwards. What I mean is it emphasizes Asians as all indistinguishable, a faceless mass. If you think about it, the numbers of Asians means what is true of any one person might or might not be true of the next person who happens to look like them. The chances are lower, not higher, that the stereotype is true. This negative image depends on the belief that Asians are like a colony of ants, a collective that acts as if it was a single organism.

Take Covid-19 as an example, many Americans never heard of Wuhan before, but it has at least 11 million inhabitants. That is the city supposedly the source of the pandemic. The Chinese government ranks cities. Wuhan isn’t even first tier. Yet it is more populous than New York City. The city which by Chinese standards is not first tier is by American standards gigantic. That’s scale at work. Let’s take the perspective of Europeans. Germany which is the most economically powerful European nations has a population of 80 million (approximately), France has a population of less than 70. Guang Dong has more than 100 million inhabitants. Its version of Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, across from Hong Kong, allowed to experiment with capitalism early on, has at least 12 million people. Germany as a nation doesn’t even come close in size the Guang Dong, a province of Chinese. Most Americans – most people – can’t grasp this scale. People are bad at scale. It’s why we have trouble calculating risk.

Let’s apply this to the issue of the allegations that Chinese are spies. When Wray testified before congress, he said that China is sending “unconventional collectors” of intelligence data. We’re not talking James Bond, Jason Bourne, “cloak and dagger,” the term used for spy novels such as by John le Carre. Wray was saying, no, no, the spies are graduate students, maybe real graduate students working on a Ph.D in biology, and, secretly, on the side they are “unconventional collectors.” The US has a “grains of sand” theory, that all these Chinese people each had got little tiny pieces of intelligence that by itself doesn’t mean anything, but because there’s so many, if you add it all up, then you get a picture of secret. That’s the hypothesis.

Let’s think about how this works. Before the pandemic, there were about 350,000 Chinese coming to the US to study every year, in that range; it could be as many as 375,000. The Chinese American population is an order of magnitude, 10x greater than that. Let’s say there are 350 criminals, spies That is terrible. That would indeed a huge problem to the US. It would mean every American university with scientific research has a spy on campus. That’s bad. The US has to do something about that.

Yet think about it proportionally. 350 is one tenth of one percent of the total number of Chinese people coming every year to the US to study. That means 99% are innocent. It can be true that there are significant numbers of “wrong doers,” and also true that overwhelmingly almost all are innocent, because of these scales and proportions. 

Yuxuan is a college student majoring in International relations at New York University. Baker is a student in master’s program at School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

The US-China Perception Monitor’s student journalists YuXuan Chen and Xiaoyi (Baker) Lu recently conducted an in-depth Zoom interview with Professor Frank Wu on a range of issues related to Chinese Americans and US-China relations.  Wu is president of Queens College, City University of New York. He previously served as the William L. Prosser Distinguished Professor and Chancellor & Dean at University of California Hastings College of the Law. Wu was the first Asian American to serve in those positions at Queens College and UC Hastings.

Sherry Chen is a U.S. citizen who was arrested on spying charges in October 2014. In March the following year, all charges against her were dropped without explanation, but Chen’s employment in the National Weather Service was terminated on the basis of her arrest. She is currently suing the federal government in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.

USCPM: You wrote an article entitled My Friend Sherry Chen in 2017, which I thought was very touching. You said she resembles the people who visited your house when you were a kid growing up in the 1970s. It is this personal connection that you have lent a lot of help to her. Could you share more with us on the memories that were brought back by Sherry Chen when you were a kid?

Wu: I am a kid from Detroit, the “Motor City.” I am an American. I am a native born American. I always explain that at the beginning.

More than a hundred years ago, there was someone of Chinese descent named Wong Kim Ark. Most people don’t know about his lawsuit, even people of Chinese descent. But he went all the way up to the United States Supreme Court.

He had been born in San Francisco. During the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong visited China, and wanted to came back to his home in America, to his home, the authorities wouldn’t let him. He sued and claimed that ‘I am an native born citizen under the 14th amendment of the US Constitution. This actually is in the news these days because there’s some people who want to repeal that part of the 14th amendment and there are people who argue that even if you are born in the US, since your parents are immigrants, especially not documented, you do not qualify for citizenship. The reason I mention that is it gives people a sense where I am coming from, literally and figuratively. [Wu said in Mandarin that he is an American, born in America, raised in America, and thus a real American.]

I’ve spent my life and my career arguing that you can be, and I am in fact an Asian American. There really aren’t Asians in Asia. There aren’t many Europeans in Europe or Africans in Africa. What I mean is they generally don’t expressly identify with pan Asian identity or pan European or pan African.  If you go to Shanghai or Seoul or Saigon, you ask people who you are and what your identity is in racial or ethnic terms, they are not going to say they are Asians. Instead, they will identify by nation, province, dialect, village, clan, religious faith, saying that they are Chinese or Korean or Vietnamese. In America, Asian Americans are born and come together.

Here, you may have heard the phrase, “You all look alike”. When you look at the hate crimes against people of Asian descent, it’s often mistaken identity twice over, what differences does it make: the ethnicity is wrong, as well as the citizenship. During the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a Burmese family attacked by someone with a knife in Texas who blamed them, despite their Burmese background, but Americans, for a virus which the person who assaulted them believed might be from China in origin. The most famous case is the killing of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American auto worker in Detroit in 1982 by two auto workers who happened to be white, and blamed him for the success of Japanese car companies, even though he was of Chinese not Japanese ancestry and even though he was an American, and working class, no different than them, also feeling the pinch of economic anxiety. 

In Asia, the concept of Asian is associated with either militaristic imperialism or hopeless idealism. Japan during WWII had its East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. That was a euphemism for aggression and conquest. The idea was Japan would liberate all of its East Asian neighbors from the yoke of European colonialism to replace it with Japanese empire. Here, we’ve come together in bridge building, forming a coalition. It’s principled and practical. If you just go back three generations, these are people whose ancestors would have fought total wars against one another. They not only see themselves as separate, but there’s no love lost among them. But here and now, we see there’s the common cause, and that’s how Asian Americans came about.

Of course, in Asia people would not call themselves Asian Americans because they are neither Asian nor American. That’s not their identity. So, when I say I am an Asian American, I really mean both parts of that. It’s aspirational and ideal. But I also recognize that increasingly, there is the phenomenon of a Chinese diaspora that people don’t wish to be Asian American. They don’t want to blend in with other Asians, or other Americans. They embrace an ethnic nationalism, the ascent of China. If they talk about being here in America, it’s not that they live here, they would say they are temporarily here. They’re transients. They’re here to study a few years, maybe work a few years, but their heart belongs to China. [Wu used the Mandarin terms.]

I recognize that there’s a whole range of identities.

There are Asian Americans who are assimilated. They include adoptees raised by white parents. They include people of mixed backgrounds; there are many Afro-Asians, including a population descended from Chinese immigrants to places such as Jamaica. Some are sixth generation Californians. Many have had minimal contact with China. Yet there also is a Chinese diaspora who maintain significant relationships to China. Not all Chinese in America wish to be Asian Americans. This internal diversity presents challenges. I am respectful of all these communities. It isn’t a single Chinese American community. It’s many of them. This also isn’t different than other ethnic communities. If you look at Jews, European immigrants of a century ago or even today, and any demographic, you’ll see the same phenomenon. Some people are resolutely expatriots temporarily here; others are American through and through; some are half and half. Even within the same family, you see differences. Immigrant parents, and the grandparents, may lament that the American-born generation eventually, inexorably, becomes more like other Americans and less like their cousins overseas.

There are Chinese in China, there are Asian Americans in the US and the range in between. The undecided group of people are genuinely bilingual and bicultural. Their English is much better than my Chinese, because they can actually function professionally in an Anglophone setting. I can only say a few phrases in Chinese, and I can’t work professionally in China. I can say only a few phrases. I’m faking it. [Wu repeated that in Mandarin.] I am always interested in the way to reach out, to engage, to build bridges. And it is really sad in this moment of accelerating disengagement that would increase tension rather than decrease them. There are so many more Chinese people who are fluent in English and who could easily in New York or Los Angeles fit in, than there are Americans who could do that in reverse – and that include Chinese Americans.

In addition, people like Sherry Chen are immigrants. She’s actually a naturalized US citizen. She’d be an older sister to me our a cousin. She’s someone who is in her own way, represents Asian America. She represents a different era of migration than my family. She was wrongly accused by a co-worker of being a spy. But she is not a spy, instead, she has dedicated her life to helping the American public, working for the weather service, predicting floods. That’s as innocent an occupation as you could imagine. She is a naturalized citizen of this nation. She was an award winning employee. When she visited her mother in China, which should be applauded as good behavior by people of any background, being a good child to a parent, because we should all visit our mothers more often, when she returned a co-worker reported her as a spy. It’s wrong. She is innocent. She wasn’t just cleared of charges, the government just dropped all the charges. She then brought a civil suit.

I am contacted all the time by people who are in situations where they feel that they are being prosecuted or targeted because of the color of their skin, the texture of their hair, and the shape of their eyes. There are all these opportunities for us to help other people and in helping them, we advance our own ideals. I realized that all the charitable work I do, I see it as a duty, and I enjoy engaging in these projects. But it also protects me. It’s important to participate in the political process to advocate. Whenever I stand up and speak out for someone else, in some small way I am standing up and speaking out for myself. I am demonstrating that we are part of the body politic, that I am not a sojourner, not a tourist. There’s nothing wrong with being a sojourner or a tourist, but that’s not who I am. I am very much an American who has ideals that are American ideals. And I want to make them real, not just rhetorical.  

Yuxuan is a college student majoring in International relations at New York University. Baker is a student in master’s program at School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.