In preparing to meet with Vice Premier Qian Qichen from Beijing, President George W. Bush and his administration is facing a major challenge in foreign policy. Since the outcome of the administration’s handling of this bi-lateral relationship could mean the difference between peace or war, stability or strife, economic growth or stagnation, a lot is at stake. And, no issue is more sensitive and explosive than whither Taiwan.
Historically, culturally, ethnically and linguistically, Taiwan has always been a part of China. Today, approximately half a million professionals and executives from Taiwan are living and working on the mainland, some are even employed as senior executives in mainland firms. Taiwan investments already employ over 3% of the mainland workforce and increasing. Every year more than 30% of Taiwan’s population leave the island for a vacation; about half of them head for the mainland. Cultural affinity and ethnic roots account for the economic ties and recreational pilgrimage. [Everywhere on the mainland, one can see Taiwan influence from eating places to entertainment palaces to electronic factories.]* The synergy across the Taiwan strait is palpable. At the people to people level, there exists a common desire for a peaceful resolution.
For America to now sell advanced weapons or a theatre missle defense system to Taiwan is exactly the wrongheaded thing to do. Such actions would rachet up the cross strait tension, destroy the on-going harmony and ruin any chance for a peaceful reconciliation. Taiwan is already the second largest arms buyer in the world. As is, she is plenty equiped to deter any temptation towards a lose-lose military solution.
The people of Taiwan and the mainland need the space and quietude to resolve their differences. The U.S. cannot dictate the outcome, not even act as a mediator across the straits. As in any family squabble, the best approach is for the U.S. to “leave the room" and let the two sides reach settlement without outside interference, all the while insist that the ultimate resolution must be a peaceful one.
Needless to say this suggested approach by the Bush administration will take courage but will win the eternal gratitude of all the people of the world.
Historically, culturally, ethnically and linguistically, Taiwan has always been a part of China. During the height of the presidential election last year, a poll of Taiwanese revealed that only 2.5% wanted independence right away and 15% sooner or later.
Today, approximately half a million professionals and executives from Taiwan are living and working on the mainland, some are even employed as senior executives in mainland firms.
Taiwan businesses already employ over 3% of the mainland workforce..and more join every day.
Half of all Taiwanese who go off the island for holidays go to the mainland.
The synergy across the Taiwan strait is palpable at the people to people level.
For America to now sell advanced weapons or a theatre missle defense system to Taiwan is exactly the wrongheaded thing to do. It would rachet up the cross strait tension, destroy harmony and ruin any chance for a peaceful reconciliation.
Further, Taiwan is already the second largest arms buyer in the world.
So it is well-equipped to deter any Chinese temptation to try a military solution.
The people of Taiwan and the mainland need the space and quiet to resolve their differences. The U.S. cannot dictate the outcome, not even act as a mediator across the straits.
As in any family squabble, the best approach is for the U.S. to "leave the room", and let the two sides reach settlement without outside interference. All Washington can do is make it clear that any solution must be peaceful.
For Pacific Time, I'm George Koo
Showing posts with label speeches. Show all posts
Showing posts with label speeches. Show all posts
Thursday, March 22, 2001
Monday, October 30, 2000
Asian American Ticket to the American Dream
Keynote speech, October 28, 2000
Seattle Area Asian American Professional Organizations Joint Fall Conference,
Ladies & Gentlemen,
It is a distinct pleasure and privilege to be with you today. Seattle is my adopted hometown. When I immigrated to the United States as a refugee, not knowing a word of English, Seattle was where I landed and where I grew up. My father was a research fisheries biologist with University of Washington, and I attended Laurelhurst Elementary, Nathan Eckstein and Hamilton Junior Hi and Lincoln High School. After I went to MIT for college, I had summer jobs at Boeing. I remember working one summer as interns when we carefully updated the original engineering drawings with all the engineering changes and advanced engineering changes. We were part of Boeing’s effort in converting the military tanker KC-135 into 707, the first commercial jet liner in the world. While my contribution is not even infinitesimal, I am proud to be part of Seattle’s history. Roughly some twenty years later, I was to make a business trip to Bellevue. When I got off the elevator at the wrong floor of the then only skyscraper in Bellevue, I walked into the office where a bunch of scruffy young kids was sitting around. Unfortunately I didn’t ask if I could buy some of their stock but those were the early days of the eventual software giant that has since moved to Redmond.
So as you can see, I have some real Seattle roots, and I presume, in common with many of you in the audience. I am very proud to be a former Seattleite. However, even though I lettered in varsity tennis, I am convinced that growing up in Seattle deprived me of any chance of becoming a Michael Chang. I simply didn’t see the sun often enough.
The organizers of this conference asked me to talk about what it means for a Chinese American to be successful in America. There are many Chinese Americans more prominent than I, more accomplished and with higher net worth, so I am not sure why I have been accorded this honor. However, as I grow older, I have become more opinionated and I rarely pass up the opportunity to sound off. So here I am and I will do my best on this subject.
Even as far back as the 19th century, the Chinese made contributions to America far beyond their numbers. The transcontinental railroad could not have been built without the Chinese taking on the most dangerous, life threatening tasks. The Chinese also took on jobs that no one else wanted, operating laundries, small shops and eating places. Despite their contributions, they were not given citizenships and cannot be called Chinese Americans. When the last spike was driven to link the transcontinental railroad and a photo taken to document the occasion, no Chinese can be seen in the historic photo. Instead, the Chinese in the Wild West were beaten, robbed and frequent victims of vigilante acts.
On the shores of the San Francisco Bay, there is now a state park on a beach where the Chinese used to catch the tiny bay shrimp, dry them and ship them back to China where dried shrimp has been and continues to be a favorite flavoring agent in cooking. In those days, the shrimp had no other commercial value and attracted interest from no one else. Nevertheless, the city passed a series of ordnances that restricted or prohibited shrimping on certain times of the year and drying on the beach. All for the purpose of stifling the Chinese without being explicitly racist.
Others more authoritative than I can tell you about the unjust and unfair laws, regulations or simply racist attitudes that prevailed in the U.S. against the Chinese up to and following World War II. I will simply relate to you a couple of personal experiences of mine.
When we moved into our first house in America, it was on 4th Avenue and 47th Street in the northeast section of Seattle, between University district and Wallingford. This is now one block away from Interstate 5. After living a university housing project for three years, we moved into the house in 1952, a modest home that my father could afford. On the first day we moved in, I remember an obviously inebriated man knocking on our door to tell us that “our kind” was not welcome. That was our welcome to the neighborhood. That was how our American dream got started.
In the ‘60s, my wife and I took a vacation on Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. A beach apparel shop was plastered with signs announcing an end of season sale. Being a Chinese, I couldn’t pass up a bargain, went in and selected a beach robe. When the manager of the store rang up the regular price, I said wait a minute, wasn’t this on sale? He said only some items were but not beach robes. When I said in that case I didn’t want the item, he blew his top. He was outraged and said people like me should go back to where ever I came from.
I am sure most of you have experiences of your own to tell. Stories of slights that you still remember vividly to this day, stories that remind you that you are still a foreigner in your own country. My parents used to remind me all the time, “don’t forget you are a Chinese. Don’t do anything to embarrass us.” For me, the consequence of all this admonition was to develop an attitude, an attitude that automatically assumed that I would have to put out more than 100% of effort to get the credit that my white colleague can get with less than 100%. Along with this attitude also came the desire to always outdo the white guys in every undertaking.
Indeed I began my professional career just about when the term, “model minority,” as a way of describing the Chinese Americans, came into vogue. We were considered a model minority because we had a lower crime rate, we held tight family values and we were academic achievers. Until the politicians got hold of the term, I believe the people that referred us as “a model minority” were sincere and did it out of admiration. However, even without condescension the term has some unfortunate consequences, one of which is a mental trap, namely, the presumption that if we keep our nose clean, behave and mind our own business, we will be OK. Not getting involved means staying away from volunteer organizations and local politics.
For much of the 20th century, the model minority concept worked reasonably well. Our willingness to mind our business and know our place fitted comfortably with the mainstream’s expectation that we know our places and cause no trouble. So long as we were content and willing to settle for professional rank and file positions and not expect or demand a shot at management positions, everything was copasetic. It didn’t seem to bother us that we could be senior engineers and scientists but not managers, that we could be professors but not deans or chancellors, that we could do the heavy lifting in the national labs but not serve as lab directors. It may not have been idyllic but it was a peaceful co-existence.
In recent years our willingness to get along as second-class citizens ran into trouble. In 1989, the evil empire known as USSR began to crumble and at the same time the world saw on TV the student protest on Tiananmen Square in China getting out of hand, culminating in bloodshed and tragedy. Since that day, the man standing in front of the tanks became forever imbedded in the media’s consciousness to be re-wound and replayed every June. It became the icon that demonized China. Zhongnanhai replaced the Kremlin and the leaders of China became the butchers of Beijing. For those in America disquieted by the sudden absence of an enemy, China conveniently stepped into the void as the next evil empire.
The next event that significantly affected the lives of Chinese Americans was the election of Bill Clinton as the president of the United States. For whatever reason and for reasons really beyond the scope of my presentation, President Clinton has managed to arouse the hatred of a certain segment of the American population. These people went thru millions of taxpayers’ money to go after Bill and Hillary Clinton ranging from Whitewater to travelgate to campaign contributions to Monica Lewinsky to Los Alamos. While this was basically a domestic political squabble, somehow we Chinese American by-standers were victimized.
How were we victimized? It has been estimated that the total amount of money spent at each presidential election run in the order of $2 billion, give or take a few hundred million. No body got hot and bothered about the source of funds except for the $2 million or so that Chinese Americans were accused of raising possibly from foreign sources. The senators and pundits making the accusation couldn’t even tell the difference between Chinese Americans, Chinese from PRC, Hsilai Temple Buddhists from Taiwan, or Indonesians that are ethnic Chinese. It didn’t matter. If an ethnic Chinese was involved, it must be sinister and it must have involved Beijing trying to influence the election. Imagine for a moment, how much influence $2 million can really be in changing the course of a history with the momentum of a couple of billion dollars.
John Huang, an assistant Commerce secretary, was made into the arch villain/fund raiser, for alleged irregularities--irregularities that never came into light of day. The only consequence is that his career ended in tatters and he in financial ruin. Even the famed Cox Report after pages and pages demonizing China, Chinese and Chinese Americans had to admit that John Huang never upgraded his level of access to confidential information even though he was entitled. He was observed not taking notes during briefing and not asking for documents that he could have asked for. In other words, they couldn’t find a single disloyal act upon close scrutiny.
The Cox Report, of course, has done more to alienate the Chinese Americans than any other act since the days of Joseph McCarthy. Unfortunately, your great state of Washington is complicit in this by virtue of the minority chair of the Select Committee being headed by Congressman Norm Dix. The Democrats on this committee must have been so glad that President Clinton escaped from the Lewinski scandal that they did not even protest the publication of this report. The report distorts, exaggerates, and fabricates, all for the purpose of demonizing China and embarrassing Clinton and by innuendo implying that somehow Clinton is letting the Chinese get away with absolutely everything worth stealing. Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation, in a report prepared by four eminent scientists and edited by Michael May, former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab tore the Cox Report to shreds. They concluded and I quote: “The report lacks scholarly rigor, and exhibits too many examples of sloppy research, factual errors and weakly justified inferences”—and in my opinion the Stanford group was being kind. Again the unfortunate by-product of the hysteria created by the Cox Report is to imply that all Chinese Americans are potential spies for PRC.
The Cox Report also led directly to the Wen Ho Lee case. In January 1999, the committee leaked the word that they had uncovered evidence of espionage by China whereby China had stolen the secrets of W88 multiple warhead and that the secrets were stolen from Los Alamos. This information turns out to be based on closed-door testimony given by Notra Trulock. Trulock was absolutely certain that the secrets were stolen with the help of a Chinese American. The code name the FBI used in their investigation was “kindred spirit,” so you can see that everybody in the counterintelligence business pretty much share the same foregone conclusion as to where to look for the culprit. This information was leaked to the New York Times, which led to the immediate firing of Wen Ho Lee. The news broke on March 6 and Richardson fired Lee on March 8.
After Lee was fired, cooler heads pointed out that W88 secrets could have been pilfered from literally hundred of places and not just from Los Alamos. Further there was no real evidence, other than Trulock’s overactive imagination, that China has really co-opted the W88 design. In fact to this day, China has not been observed to have made any multiple warhead missiles. At this point in mid 1999, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson must have been getting awfully uncomfortable with eggs on his face. He could have backed off. Instead he persisted on the Lee case. In the meantime, the FBI got lucky. They were roundly criticized for failing to conduct a wide and objective investigation, but while searching Lee’s home, they found evidence of Lee having downloaded restricted data. Somebody, I don’t know if it’s the FBI or someone else upgraded the classification of the restricted data into the “crown jewel” class so as to justify arresting Lee, throwing him in solitary confinement in a cell lit around the clock, isolating him from the outside contact including TV, and subjecting him to chain and shackle for the one hour of fresh air each day.
As you all must know, the Wen Ho Lee case has become a cause celebré. Asian Americans who have been actively working on getting Wen Ho Lee fair and due process are now clamoring for an impartial panel to conduct public hearing on this case. The feeling is that until all the details of this case are out in the open, there can be no closure.
The Wen Ho Lee case has driven home a point that should be increasingly obvious to us all. Namely, uneasy lies your American dream if you are satisfied with being a second-class citizen. In our case being second-class doesn’t mean an increase probability in getting pulled off the road. You don’t fit that profile. But your loyalty is suspect and you are not entitled to the customary rights of presumed innocent until proven guilty. Even if you do your best to keep your head down and avoid trouble, trouble can come to your doorsteps anyway due to circumstances beyond your control.
Whether you like it or not, whatever your political inclination may be, and how ever you might feel about Taiwan and China, your American dream is intimately tied to the U.S. China relationship. When China is regarded as a friend of the White House and U.S. Congress, we are the model minority. When China becomes the demon in America’s eyes, we become potential enemy agents. As the campaign finance scandal has shown and as what happened to Wen Ho Lee has confirmed, to the mainstream America, a Chinese is a Chinese, or in many cases, an Asian is an Asian. They don’t care or necessarily know how to make the distinction between those that came from Mainland China or Taiwan or elsewhere in Asia or those born in America. There is no escaping the broad profile cast to fit us all.
Before concluding on where do we go from here, I would like to share with you my experiences and observations of Silicon Valley. Deloitte & Touché, my employer, conducts an annual survey of fastest growing, technology companies in America. The survey is based on the compounded growth rate in revenue over the most recent 5-year period. Every region has a list of fast 50 companies, which is consolidated into a national Fast 500. This year from Silicon Valley, the top three and five of the top eight fastest growing companies are founded and/or headed by a Chinese American CEO. In case you are interested, the five are Yahoo, Pctel, Nvidia, Broadvision and Viador. Yahoo is the only company not headed by a Chinese American CEO, but as you all know founder Jerry Yang has become a worldwide icon for the Internet age.
Even for Silicon Valley, where Asian Americans found 30% of the companies, 5 out of top 8 are pretty remarkable. I have been living and working in Silicon Valley for nearly 30 years and have had a ringside seat. I can tell you, it wasn’t always this way. Twenty years ago, Asian American entrepreneurs had to band together and form their own network and associations. Ten years ago, most of the blue ribbon venture capital funds had no Asian American partners. Today, most of them do. How did this happen? I think the current generation of successful entrepreneurs owes a debt to the pioneers who broke through the glass ceiling and proved that they can manage a company as well as doing the technical work.
David Lee founded Qume, a daisy wheel printer company, which was sold to ITT and he became one of the earliest senior executives of a Fortune 100 company. Even though public speaking is not his favorite activity, he is seen frequently in public forum sharing his experience with the younger generation. David Lam founded Lam Research, a major semiconductor equipment company. He went on to found or lead a series of companies. He is active in various associations such as Asian American Manufacturers Association and served as advisor to many other start-ups. Pauline Lo Alker is also a serial entrepreneur and widely recognized and honored for her achievements. She makes a point of allocating part of her time coaching young Asian entrepreneurs, and served as role model to young women entrepreneurs. Lester Lee founded his own company called Recortec but devotes much of his time serving on the board of Chinese related organizations. All of these people support political candidates and are involved in fund raising efforts for them. Lester was the first Chinese American to serve on the board of regent for University of California. David Lee is a current regent.
Thanks to the organizing skills of people like Barry Chang, the Bay Area has become a must visit place for Asian American political candidates in search of financial support. Your governor Gary Locke has been a regular visitor. When Barry organizes a fundraiser, he gets young people involved by getting the students to preside over the fundraiser and introduce the speakers and candidates. His goal is to get young people engaged early. Barry’s publicly stated goal is to see a Chinese American as the president of the United States.
The Wen Ho Lee Defense Fund was started by a handful of Chinese Americans in the Bay Area. We met Alberta, Lee’s daughter in September of last year, and began letters of protest, fund raising, and discussions with the media. Eventually Chinese Americans from all over the country got into the act that then pulled in other Asians and the rest of American public was made aware that justice in the Lee’s case was not being served.
Ladies and gentlemen, I think it is pretty obvious where we go from here. Second class citizenship, with or without the moniker of model minority, just isn’t going to cut it any more. Even if you can be satisfied with a permanent seat in the back of the bus, is it right to leave this legacy for future generations of Asian Americans? How can you be sure that your middle class, or even upper middle class, respectability won’t be stripped away in a moment’s notice when a scapegoat is needed? Or that you won’t be shot dead by the police because they fear your martial arts capability even if you are drunk and can barely stand, as it happened to a Chinese scientist in Santa Rosa, California? Or that you won’t be clubbed to death because some Detroit workers thought you were Japanese, as it happened to Vincent Chin?
This is only one way. That is to make sure you belong to the first class with full rights pertaining to the citizenship of the United States. If you have been living in the U.S. for any length of time, you would have heard the saying: “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” What it means is that you will have to act like a regular citizen before you can be treated like one. Register and vote. Speak up about issues in public forum and with letters to the editor. Show up in town hall meetings with your Congressional representative. Support political candidates. Run for office. Be a volunteer in local community. Every day, look everybody in the eye with the bearing that says I belong here, this is my country too.
Thomas Jefferson said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” For Asian Americans, a variation should read: “Vigilant insistence of all rights due a citizen so that there will be no more Wen Ho Lees.”
Seattle Area Asian American Professional Organizations Joint Fall Conference,
Ladies & Gentlemen,
It is a distinct pleasure and privilege to be with you today. Seattle is my adopted hometown. When I immigrated to the United States as a refugee, not knowing a word of English, Seattle was where I landed and where I grew up. My father was a research fisheries biologist with University of Washington, and I attended Laurelhurst Elementary, Nathan Eckstein and Hamilton Junior Hi and Lincoln High School. After I went to MIT for college, I had summer jobs at Boeing. I remember working one summer as interns when we carefully updated the original engineering drawings with all the engineering changes and advanced engineering changes. We were part of Boeing’s effort in converting the military tanker KC-135 into 707, the first commercial jet liner in the world. While my contribution is not even infinitesimal, I am proud to be part of Seattle’s history. Roughly some twenty years later, I was to make a business trip to Bellevue. When I got off the elevator at the wrong floor of the then only skyscraper in Bellevue, I walked into the office where a bunch of scruffy young kids was sitting around. Unfortunately I didn’t ask if I could buy some of their stock but those were the early days of the eventual software giant that has since moved to Redmond.
So as you can see, I have some real Seattle roots, and I presume, in common with many of you in the audience. I am very proud to be a former Seattleite. However, even though I lettered in varsity tennis, I am convinced that growing up in Seattle deprived me of any chance of becoming a Michael Chang. I simply didn’t see the sun often enough.
The organizers of this conference asked me to talk about what it means for a Chinese American to be successful in America. There are many Chinese Americans more prominent than I, more accomplished and with higher net worth, so I am not sure why I have been accorded this honor. However, as I grow older, I have become more opinionated and I rarely pass up the opportunity to sound off. So here I am and I will do my best on this subject.
Even as far back as the 19th century, the Chinese made contributions to America far beyond their numbers. The transcontinental railroad could not have been built without the Chinese taking on the most dangerous, life threatening tasks. The Chinese also took on jobs that no one else wanted, operating laundries, small shops and eating places. Despite their contributions, they were not given citizenships and cannot be called Chinese Americans. When the last spike was driven to link the transcontinental railroad and a photo taken to document the occasion, no Chinese can be seen in the historic photo. Instead, the Chinese in the Wild West were beaten, robbed and frequent victims of vigilante acts.
On the shores of the San Francisco Bay, there is now a state park on a beach where the Chinese used to catch the tiny bay shrimp, dry them and ship them back to China where dried shrimp has been and continues to be a favorite flavoring agent in cooking. In those days, the shrimp had no other commercial value and attracted interest from no one else. Nevertheless, the city passed a series of ordnances that restricted or prohibited shrimping on certain times of the year and drying on the beach. All for the purpose of stifling the Chinese without being explicitly racist.
Others more authoritative than I can tell you about the unjust and unfair laws, regulations or simply racist attitudes that prevailed in the U.S. against the Chinese up to and following World War II. I will simply relate to you a couple of personal experiences of mine.
When we moved into our first house in America, it was on 4th Avenue and 47th Street in the northeast section of Seattle, between University district and Wallingford. This is now one block away from Interstate 5. After living a university housing project for three years, we moved into the house in 1952, a modest home that my father could afford. On the first day we moved in, I remember an obviously inebriated man knocking on our door to tell us that “our kind” was not welcome. That was our welcome to the neighborhood. That was how our American dream got started.
In the ‘60s, my wife and I took a vacation on Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. A beach apparel shop was plastered with signs announcing an end of season sale. Being a Chinese, I couldn’t pass up a bargain, went in and selected a beach robe. When the manager of the store rang up the regular price, I said wait a minute, wasn’t this on sale? He said only some items were but not beach robes. When I said in that case I didn’t want the item, he blew his top. He was outraged and said people like me should go back to where ever I came from.
I am sure most of you have experiences of your own to tell. Stories of slights that you still remember vividly to this day, stories that remind you that you are still a foreigner in your own country. My parents used to remind me all the time, “don’t forget you are a Chinese. Don’t do anything to embarrass us.” For me, the consequence of all this admonition was to develop an attitude, an attitude that automatically assumed that I would have to put out more than 100% of effort to get the credit that my white colleague can get with less than 100%. Along with this attitude also came the desire to always outdo the white guys in every undertaking.
Indeed I began my professional career just about when the term, “model minority,” as a way of describing the Chinese Americans, came into vogue. We were considered a model minority because we had a lower crime rate, we held tight family values and we were academic achievers. Until the politicians got hold of the term, I believe the people that referred us as “a model minority” were sincere and did it out of admiration. However, even without condescension the term has some unfortunate consequences, one of which is a mental trap, namely, the presumption that if we keep our nose clean, behave and mind our own business, we will be OK. Not getting involved means staying away from volunteer organizations and local politics.
For much of the 20th century, the model minority concept worked reasonably well. Our willingness to mind our business and know our place fitted comfortably with the mainstream’s expectation that we know our places and cause no trouble. So long as we were content and willing to settle for professional rank and file positions and not expect or demand a shot at management positions, everything was copasetic. It didn’t seem to bother us that we could be senior engineers and scientists but not managers, that we could be professors but not deans or chancellors, that we could do the heavy lifting in the national labs but not serve as lab directors. It may not have been idyllic but it was a peaceful co-existence.
In recent years our willingness to get along as second-class citizens ran into trouble. In 1989, the evil empire known as USSR began to crumble and at the same time the world saw on TV the student protest on Tiananmen Square in China getting out of hand, culminating in bloodshed and tragedy. Since that day, the man standing in front of the tanks became forever imbedded in the media’s consciousness to be re-wound and replayed every June. It became the icon that demonized China. Zhongnanhai replaced the Kremlin and the leaders of China became the butchers of Beijing. For those in America disquieted by the sudden absence of an enemy, China conveniently stepped into the void as the next evil empire.
The next event that significantly affected the lives of Chinese Americans was the election of Bill Clinton as the president of the United States. For whatever reason and for reasons really beyond the scope of my presentation, President Clinton has managed to arouse the hatred of a certain segment of the American population. These people went thru millions of taxpayers’ money to go after Bill and Hillary Clinton ranging from Whitewater to travelgate to campaign contributions to Monica Lewinsky to Los Alamos. While this was basically a domestic political squabble, somehow we Chinese American by-standers were victimized.
How were we victimized? It has been estimated that the total amount of money spent at each presidential election run in the order of $2 billion, give or take a few hundred million. No body got hot and bothered about the source of funds except for the $2 million or so that Chinese Americans were accused of raising possibly from foreign sources. The senators and pundits making the accusation couldn’t even tell the difference between Chinese Americans, Chinese from PRC, Hsilai Temple Buddhists from Taiwan, or Indonesians that are ethnic Chinese. It didn’t matter. If an ethnic Chinese was involved, it must be sinister and it must have involved Beijing trying to influence the election. Imagine for a moment, how much influence $2 million can really be in changing the course of a history with the momentum of a couple of billion dollars.
John Huang, an assistant Commerce secretary, was made into the arch villain/fund raiser, for alleged irregularities--irregularities that never came into light of day. The only consequence is that his career ended in tatters and he in financial ruin. Even the famed Cox Report after pages and pages demonizing China, Chinese and Chinese Americans had to admit that John Huang never upgraded his level of access to confidential information even though he was entitled. He was observed not taking notes during briefing and not asking for documents that he could have asked for. In other words, they couldn’t find a single disloyal act upon close scrutiny.
The Cox Report, of course, has done more to alienate the Chinese Americans than any other act since the days of Joseph McCarthy. Unfortunately, your great state of Washington is complicit in this by virtue of the minority chair of the Select Committee being headed by Congressman Norm Dix. The Democrats on this committee must have been so glad that President Clinton escaped from the Lewinski scandal that they did not even protest the publication of this report. The report distorts, exaggerates, and fabricates, all for the purpose of demonizing China and embarrassing Clinton and by innuendo implying that somehow Clinton is letting the Chinese get away with absolutely everything worth stealing. Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation, in a report prepared by four eminent scientists and edited by Michael May, former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab tore the Cox Report to shreds. They concluded and I quote: “The report lacks scholarly rigor, and exhibits too many examples of sloppy research, factual errors and weakly justified inferences”—and in my opinion the Stanford group was being kind. Again the unfortunate by-product of the hysteria created by the Cox Report is to imply that all Chinese Americans are potential spies for PRC.
The Cox Report also led directly to the Wen Ho Lee case. In January 1999, the committee leaked the word that they had uncovered evidence of espionage by China whereby China had stolen the secrets of W88 multiple warhead and that the secrets were stolen from Los Alamos. This information turns out to be based on closed-door testimony given by Notra Trulock. Trulock was absolutely certain that the secrets were stolen with the help of a Chinese American. The code name the FBI used in their investigation was “kindred spirit,” so you can see that everybody in the counterintelligence business pretty much share the same foregone conclusion as to where to look for the culprit. This information was leaked to the New York Times, which led to the immediate firing of Wen Ho Lee. The news broke on March 6 and Richardson fired Lee on March 8.
After Lee was fired, cooler heads pointed out that W88 secrets could have been pilfered from literally hundred of places and not just from Los Alamos. Further there was no real evidence, other than Trulock’s overactive imagination, that China has really co-opted the W88 design. In fact to this day, China has not been observed to have made any multiple warhead missiles. At this point in mid 1999, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson must have been getting awfully uncomfortable with eggs on his face. He could have backed off. Instead he persisted on the Lee case. In the meantime, the FBI got lucky. They were roundly criticized for failing to conduct a wide and objective investigation, but while searching Lee’s home, they found evidence of Lee having downloaded restricted data. Somebody, I don’t know if it’s the FBI or someone else upgraded the classification of the restricted data into the “crown jewel” class so as to justify arresting Lee, throwing him in solitary confinement in a cell lit around the clock, isolating him from the outside contact including TV, and subjecting him to chain and shackle for the one hour of fresh air each day.
As you all must know, the Wen Ho Lee case has become a cause celebré. Asian Americans who have been actively working on getting Wen Ho Lee fair and due process are now clamoring for an impartial panel to conduct public hearing on this case. The feeling is that until all the details of this case are out in the open, there can be no closure.
The Wen Ho Lee case has driven home a point that should be increasingly obvious to us all. Namely, uneasy lies your American dream if you are satisfied with being a second-class citizen. In our case being second-class doesn’t mean an increase probability in getting pulled off the road. You don’t fit that profile. But your loyalty is suspect and you are not entitled to the customary rights of presumed innocent until proven guilty. Even if you do your best to keep your head down and avoid trouble, trouble can come to your doorsteps anyway due to circumstances beyond your control.
Whether you like it or not, whatever your political inclination may be, and how ever you might feel about Taiwan and China, your American dream is intimately tied to the U.S. China relationship. When China is regarded as a friend of the White House and U.S. Congress, we are the model minority. When China becomes the demon in America’s eyes, we become potential enemy agents. As the campaign finance scandal has shown and as what happened to Wen Ho Lee has confirmed, to the mainstream America, a Chinese is a Chinese, or in many cases, an Asian is an Asian. They don’t care or necessarily know how to make the distinction between those that came from Mainland China or Taiwan or elsewhere in Asia or those born in America. There is no escaping the broad profile cast to fit us all.
Before concluding on where do we go from here, I would like to share with you my experiences and observations of Silicon Valley. Deloitte & Touché, my employer, conducts an annual survey of fastest growing, technology companies in America. The survey is based on the compounded growth rate in revenue over the most recent 5-year period. Every region has a list of fast 50 companies, which is consolidated into a national Fast 500. This year from Silicon Valley, the top three and five of the top eight fastest growing companies are founded and/or headed by a Chinese American CEO. In case you are interested, the five are Yahoo, Pctel, Nvidia, Broadvision and Viador. Yahoo is the only company not headed by a Chinese American CEO, but as you all know founder Jerry Yang has become a worldwide icon for the Internet age.
Even for Silicon Valley, where Asian Americans found 30% of the companies, 5 out of top 8 are pretty remarkable. I have been living and working in Silicon Valley for nearly 30 years and have had a ringside seat. I can tell you, it wasn’t always this way. Twenty years ago, Asian American entrepreneurs had to band together and form their own network and associations. Ten years ago, most of the blue ribbon venture capital funds had no Asian American partners. Today, most of them do. How did this happen? I think the current generation of successful entrepreneurs owes a debt to the pioneers who broke through the glass ceiling and proved that they can manage a company as well as doing the technical work.
David Lee founded Qume, a daisy wheel printer company, which was sold to ITT and he became one of the earliest senior executives of a Fortune 100 company. Even though public speaking is not his favorite activity, he is seen frequently in public forum sharing his experience with the younger generation. David Lam founded Lam Research, a major semiconductor equipment company. He went on to found or lead a series of companies. He is active in various associations such as Asian American Manufacturers Association and served as advisor to many other start-ups. Pauline Lo Alker is also a serial entrepreneur and widely recognized and honored for her achievements. She makes a point of allocating part of her time coaching young Asian entrepreneurs, and served as role model to young women entrepreneurs. Lester Lee founded his own company called Recortec but devotes much of his time serving on the board of Chinese related organizations. All of these people support political candidates and are involved in fund raising efforts for them. Lester was the first Chinese American to serve on the board of regent for University of California. David Lee is a current regent.
Thanks to the organizing skills of people like Barry Chang, the Bay Area has become a must visit place for Asian American political candidates in search of financial support. Your governor Gary Locke has been a regular visitor. When Barry organizes a fundraiser, he gets young people involved by getting the students to preside over the fundraiser and introduce the speakers and candidates. His goal is to get young people engaged early. Barry’s publicly stated goal is to see a Chinese American as the president of the United States.
The Wen Ho Lee Defense Fund was started by a handful of Chinese Americans in the Bay Area. We met Alberta, Lee’s daughter in September of last year, and began letters of protest, fund raising, and discussions with the media. Eventually Chinese Americans from all over the country got into the act that then pulled in other Asians and the rest of American public was made aware that justice in the Lee’s case was not being served.
Ladies and gentlemen, I think it is pretty obvious where we go from here. Second class citizenship, with or without the moniker of model minority, just isn’t going to cut it any more. Even if you can be satisfied with a permanent seat in the back of the bus, is it right to leave this legacy for future generations of Asian Americans? How can you be sure that your middle class, or even upper middle class, respectability won’t be stripped away in a moment’s notice when a scapegoat is needed? Or that you won’t be shot dead by the police because they fear your martial arts capability even if you are drunk and can barely stand, as it happened to a Chinese scientist in Santa Rosa, California? Or that you won’t be clubbed to death because some Detroit workers thought you were Japanese, as it happened to Vincent Chin?
This is only one way. That is to make sure you belong to the first class with full rights pertaining to the citizenship of the United States. If you have been living in the U.S. for any length of time, you would have heard the saying: “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” What it means is that you will have to act like a regular citizen before you can be treated like one. Register and vote. Speak up about issues in public forum and with letters to the editor. Show up in town hall meetings with your Congressional representative. Support political candidates. Run for office. Be a volunteer in local community. Every day, look everybody in the eye with the bearing that says I belong here, this is my country too.
Thomas Jefferson said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” For Asian Americans, a variation should read: “Vigilant insistence of all rights due a citizen so that there will be no more Wen Ho Lees.”
Friday, October 13, 2000
The Impact of the Wen Ho Lee Case on Asian Americans
Remarks before the China Institute, New York, October 13, 2000
.
Before I begin, I want to make one point crystal clear. I am an American. I am proud to be an American. I pay my taxes, vote regularly –certainly more often than some of our candidates running for the highest offices in this land. I’ve worked as volunteer worker for candidates that I believe in, at the local and national level. I belong here. I resent that this clarification is even necessary. If my subsequent remarks seem anti- America, then I am being misunderstood. I am critical of certain institutions of America but not America. Quite the contrary, I am motivated by the desire to help make America a better place for my kids and grandkids.
As other speakers of this conference will attest, the behavior of the U.S. government in conduct of the Wen Ho Lee case has been no better, I repeat no better, than the behavior of 3rd world dictatorships that the U.S. is so wont to criticize. By now everybody should be familiar with the particulars of this case, I would simply like to summarize certain aspects relevant to how this case has affected Asian Americans—which is the topic of my presentation. However, I must acknowledge one crucial difference: in a third world country, I would not be able to stand before you and say what I am about to say. And that’s what makes this country great, unless the FBI comes and takes me away after this speech.
When this case first broke in March 1999, the presumption by the general public was that the government has caught a spy. Whether orchestrated or just happened that way, the country was at near hysteria over nuclear crown jewels allegedly stolen by China, thanks to a series of leaks from the Cox Committee. (I will come back and amplify my views on the Cox Committee.) On March 6, the New York Times trumpeted on the front page that the W-88 secrets were stolen from Los Alamos National Laboratory and the spy was a Chinese American employee in the lab. W-88 for those that might not have been following the story closely stands for multiple warhead missiles that the United States developed in the 1970s. Two days later, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson fired Dr. Wen Ho Lee. Instantly Dr. Lee was tried and convicted by the media all across the country. From then until he was arrested in December, from sunrise to sun down, Lee had four FBI agents as his constant companions. Brian Sun the attorney representing the family will be speaking and I leave it for him to describe how Dr. Lee was treated.
Now let me discuss how this case affected Chinese Americans and how they reacted. The first thing that struck some of us was the complete lack of due process in this case. The judiciary due process was turned completely upside down. Dr. Lee was presumed guilty and it was up to him to prove otherwise. Shortly after Lee’s high profile dismissal, the Committee of 100 was having their annual conference in New York on April 30 and May 1 and we invited Secretary Richardson to speak. He accepted, I believe, because he was anxious to explain his action. In fact he was to devote a significant portion of his time in ensuing months explaining, explaining to Asian American communities, explaining to the employees of the laboratories and explaining to the American public that racial profiling played no role in the victimization of Dr. Lee. Knowing that he was coming, we convinced ABC Nightline to cover his speech. We found two Chinese American scientists from Lawrence Livermore, a sister lab within the Energy Department, brave enough to come and meet with Secretary Richardson to tell him about racial prejudice that has been running through the laboratories and now exacerbated by the Wen Ho Lee case. Again, I expect that Ms. Kalin Wong will address more fully this issue of racial discrimination in our national laboratories.
Nightline didn’t run this program until June because Kosovo was a hot topic in May. The Nightline program was the first nation-wide media coverage of the case that suggested that there might be more to the story than simply a case of a Chinese American spy. If you saw the program, you would see that Secretary Richardson did not come out particularly well in this 30-minute piece. His image was tarnished even further by the CBS 60 Minutes piece that came out in August.
In latter part of May, the much-ballyhooed report from the House Select Committee headed by Congressman Christopher Cox was finally released. Henry Tang, the chairman of the Committee sent me a copy in time for my business trip to Korea, and I read over much of the 900-page report while on my trip. 900 pages may seem a lot to you, but actually it was a fairly easy read. The hard part was lugging the report around. The report unlike most government publications is nicely formatted, with a lot of photos and colorful charts, in large fonts and full of statements in bold face. It is a slick piece of work. More like a product of Madison Avenue than staid Capitol Hill.
The only problem with this report is that it contains flat out misrepresentations, gross exaggerations, flying leaps of logic and claims that cannot stand up to rigorous scrutiny. As a matter of fact, an immediate chorus of ridicule and protest from the public greeted this report culminating in a 100 page report from Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation prepared by four eminent scientists and edited by Michael May, former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The Stanford study tore the Cox Report to shreds. They concluded and I quote: “The report lacks scholarly rigor, and exhibits too many examples of sloppy research, factual errors and weakly justified inferences”—and in my opinion the Stanford group was being kind.
One of many accusations in the Cox report is China’s theft of the W88 multiple head missiles. Former Senator Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.), is the chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which made an independent review of the espionage allegations at the request of President Clinton and in response to the Cox Report. He said in a recent interview appearing in the Washington Post, "It is my belief that there was no espionage involved with the W-88 data obtained by the Chinese.” As far as China's new, smaller warhead, Rudman said, "What they did, they did on their own."
The reason I am dwelling so much on the Cox Report is not just because this is the most disgusting and disgraceful piece of work to come out of Congress since Senator Joseph McCarthy days, which it is, but because this report victimized all Chinese Americans living in this country. This report accused China of practicing mosaic espionage. What they mean by this is that China is patient and willing to collect random tidbits and piece them together into one devastating breach in national security. And who do they turn to, to collect these tidbits? Why the Chinese Americans living in this country, of course. The so-called kindred spirits that FBI also referred to in the Los Alamos case. What sort of evidence did the Cox Report offer to back up their claim? Nothing. Zippo. Not one shred of hard data.
Let me give you just one example of how the Cox committee reached their conclusions. The report indicates that the State Department can identify 2 companies from China based in the U.S. with connections to the People’s Liberation Army. The AFL-CIO, no friend of China as you all know, thinks it closer to 12 or more. The Committee concludes that the number is closer to 3000! 3000 companies sent from China connected to the PLA for the ostensible purpose of collecting tidbits big and small. Where did the committee arrive at the 3000 number? The report did not say. The report then talks about the 100,000 students from China that are in the U.S. and goes on to speculate about the instructions they were given by the Beijing government on the kind of information they should collect. The report makes no distinction between visitors from China on a short trip and those that might be living in the U.S. as permanent residents. The implication is that all Chinese Americans are potential spies.
The federal prosecutors slapped 59 charges including possibility of life imprisonment on Dr. Lee to end up with one admission of guilt for time served. The Cox Committee took 2 companies from the State and blew it up into 3000 sinister covert operations. Do you not see a common pattern here?
The Cox committee is not the only one subscribing to this line of thinking. Notra Trulock, the former chief of counter-intelligence, according to the press reports I have read, was absolutely convinced that China had stolen the multiple nuclear warhead missile technology from the U.S., the so-called W-88 missile. And he, Trulock knew exactly how it happened. Los Alamos was where the leaks occurred and a Chinese American scientist was where to look. Of course, some time after Trulock received a commendation and $10,000 cash award from Richardson, others point out that information on the W-88 could have been obtained in literally hundreds of places. Still others in addition to Senator Rudman question whether China really had taken the W-88 secrets and how useful the technology developed in 1970’s would have been for China. According to numerous published sources such as a recent article in Current History, to this day China has yet to build any multiple head missiles.
Bob Vrooman is also on today’s program and perhaps he will share his views of Trulock with you. Let me simply quote Charles E. Washington, former acting director of counterintelligence at the Energy Department, who said, "Based on my experience and my personal knowledge, I believe that Mr. Trulock improperly targeted Dr. Lee due to Dr. Lee's race and national origin." He goes on to say, "Based upon my personal experience with Mr. Trulock, I strongly believe that he acts vindictively and opportunistically, that he improperly uses security issues to punish and discredit others, and that he has racist views toward minority groups.”
Mr. Trulock of course isn’t the only one with bigoted views working inside our government. Until their recent falling out, FBI apparently shares Trulock’s view. Throughout their investigation of Los Alamos and Wen Ho Lee, the code name was “kindred spirit.” Kindred spirit, not too subtle are they? Certainly sounds like they knew who their man was going to be even before they started their investigation, doesn’t it? After Dr. Wen Ho Lee was fired by Richardson, Mr. Paul Moore, another speaker in today’s program, was seen on Jim Lehrer’s hour proclaiming that yes, FBI practices racial profiling but that’s because The People’s Republic of China targets Chinese Americans as their preferred sources. In other words, the Chinese made them do it. Mr. Moore did not offer any proof for his statements but claims to know that this is the case, based on his experience from some 20 years of his career with the FBI. In a way very convenient, when Mr. Moore went public with his theory about the Chinese method to spying, he had already retired from FBI so that his remarks cannot be used to directly discredit FBI.
Of course since Mr. Moore went public with his theory of mosaic spying, there have been many others in government and in the intelligence business that have directly refuted his theory. For example, again I quote Mr. Washington: “In the counterintelligence training I have received and in my counterintelligence experience, I am unaware of any empirical data that would support a claim that Chinese- Americans are more likely to commit espionage than other Americans. Further, I know of no analysis whatsoever that has been done as to whether American citizens born in Taiwan would be more likely to commit espionage for the People's Republic of China.”
Since America is founded on the principle that a man or an ethnic group is innocent until proven guilty, I will say no more but defer to Mr. Moore to make his case. Hopefully he will have more specific and convincing evidence to present today than simply requiring us to accept his word on good faith.
Based on FBI conduct on the Lee case, good faith is not going to be easy to come by. The FBI lied to Lee and lied to the presiding judge. The FBI interrogators threatened Lee with the electric chair. They rejected the results of the first test, which Lee passed—with flying colors according to the tester but now according to FBI director Louie Freeh was inconclusive. The FBI re-administered the lie detector test under such conditions as to come up with “inconclusive” results. They did what they had to do so that the government can justify arresting Lee, deny him bail and throw him in solitary confinement, in a 7 by 13 cell with the light turned on around the clock, restrict his access to outside contact including TV and chain and shackled him for his one hour of exercise per day.
You might ask: Why would the most democratic nation in the world, the one that goes around monitoring and criticizing other nations for real and imagined abuses of human rights, resort to the very Gestapo tactics that they normally deplore? We will not likely ever get an official response to this question but the answer is clear to me. They thought they could intimidate a 5 ft 4, 60 year old Chinese man, they thought they could apply enough pressure to get him to cave in and sign a confession, any confession to get them off the hook. Unfortunately for Lee and his tormentors, this is a case of cultural misunderstanding. They simply did not understand that the quiet, mild manner demeanor of an Asian scholar does not mean the person is a willing foil easily run over and coerced. To his credit, Dr. Lee came out of the nine months of solitary by authoring a textbook in mathematics and two scientific journal articles. I don’t think there are many of us that could have done as well in such an enforced sabbatical.
So what has this case done to this country?
We saw a presiding judge apologize to Lee, who had to strike the bargain of becoming a convicted felon for his freedom. Before dismissing Lee, Judge Parker apologizes to him for the prosecutorial abuse by the U.S. government. If this isn’t unprecedented, I don’t know what is.
We saw the most influential news daily of America, namely the New York Times, publish a self-criticism in the form of an editor’s review acknowledging that “we fell short of our standards on our coverage of this story.” The editors generously fell on their own sword and did not put the blame on the offending reporters, saying “the blame lies principally with those who directed the coverage, for not raising questions that occurred to us only later.”
We saw the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine collectively write to the president asking for due process for Lee. These organizations represent the highest scientific bodies in this country.
We also heard the lamentations of the directors of the national labs because Asian Americans and foreign-born scientists are not applying for positions at the labs. Not only no new applications, but they are leaving in droves. The direct aftermath of this case is shattered morale among the staff of the national labs. No spy whatever the origin could have wreaked as much damage as the Department of Energy, the Congress, the FBI and the Department of Justice have done to our national security in their handling of this case.
As a most thoughtful op-ed appearing in points out: America has always depended on immigrant scientists to retain her superiority as the world leader in technology. This case has now sent a chilling message to all foreign born scientists whether they are working here or contemplating coming to heretofore the land of opportunity. If you can work for 20 years in a national lab and still risk sudden dismissal, get thrown into jail and have your life turned inside out, the American dream suddenly doesn’t look quite so golden. It remains to be seen how this self-inflicted gash on our national psyche will heal.
What has not changed is the almost reflexive reaction of those in the government to stonewall and if possible finish the scapegoating of Wen Ho Lee they began in jail. FBI director Freeh insists that they could have won if they persisted and Lee is really guilty of the 59 counts. Oh really now. Attorney General Reno insists that when national security is at stake, draconian measures such as those levied against Lee is justified.
While the potential abuse of prosecutorial power in the name of national security is a matter of concern raised by many, the Asian Americans have found Reno’s justification viscerally troubling. They remember when President Franklin Roosevelt also invoked the threat to national security as justification for putting 100,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry behind barb-wired detention camps. Attorney General Reno may have forgotten but not the Asian Americans.
Dr. Lee’s case may well represent a new dawn for Asian Americans in this country. He himself represents the old school Chinese American. He does note vote. He minds his own business and he doesn’t get involved. He doesn’t even read the newspapers according to his daughter. He is fortunate that he is living in an era where not all Chinese Americans and Asian Americans are like him. First, he is lucky to have been introduced to a Mark Holscher, a thoroughly decent man and former federal prosecutor, who was so moved by the injustice that he not only served pro bono but also recruited others to the cause. Second, he found enough Asian Americans that are no longer willing to be passive bystanders.
In September of last year, Lee’s daughter, Alberta, Brian Sun and Mark Holscher came to the Bay area to tell their story before a group of Chinese Americans. This was the beginning of the Wen Ho Lee Defense Fund. When the San Jose Mercury News reported this meeting, it was one of the earliest public indications that not everybody agreed with the way the government was stating the case.
Early this year, the Committee of 100 organized a three-hour, nation-wide conference call involving some 20 organizations followed by a series of calls with smaller groups to hammer out a letter of concern on the Wen Ho Lee case sent to President Clinton and Attorney General Reno. San Francisco based Chinese for Affirmative Action and Asian Law Caucus organized a national coalition, which staged simultaneous multi-city protests of the government’s treatment of Wen Ho Lee. From coast to coast, Chinese Americans got involved. They also got Asian Americans involved and eventually mainstream noticed. Our activism in getting all the facts out led to public reflection and played to the American sense of fairness and justice. Mainstream organizations ranging from scientific and professional societies to American Civil Liberties Union to Amnesty International and eventually to all the major daily newspapers joined in the national indignation and condemnation.
So have we won? Not by a long shot. Not until there is a blue ribbon panel, impartial and unburdened by politics, look into the origin of this case. We need answers to at least the following questions:
(1) Why is it that if China is so prolific in their recruiting and spying activity, the Cox Report names only one Chinese American as having passed information to China? Mind you, this person was sentenced to 12 months in a halfway house, fined and made to do certain number of hours of community service. Hardly an Aldrich Ames serving life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
(2) While we are on this vein, perhaps we should ask the FBI as to how many spies they have apprehended versus the number of Chinese American scientists they have intimidated and badgered for no justifiable cause? I personally know of several victims in the Bay Area whose careers were destroyed by the FBI. Mr. Moore for example spent 20 years allegedly monitoring the Chinese in America, how many arrests and convictions can he claim? Parenthetically, in my early days of going to China on business, I would be interviewed by CIA agents and sometimes by FBI agents on my return. I cooperated willingly thinking that I was helping our government better understand China. Little did I know that I was participating in reverse mosaic espionage.
(3) I would like to know where the oft-used reference to the 400,000 pages of nuclear secret came from. If 800 megabytes of downloaded data consist of only text, it would approximate 13 stories of paper, as prosecutor Bay likes to dramatize. But 800 MB of equations, graphs, drawings can be rather unspectacular in the amount of paper it would take. I don’t know if the prosecutors are ignorant of subtleties of computer software or just plain prone to exaggerate.
(4) I certainly would like to know if racial profiling entered into this case and if so the respective role of Notra Trulock, the FBI, the federal prosecutors and senior members of the Clinton Administration. The defense asked for government documents that would reveal whether racial profiling had anything to do with this case. Presiding Judge Parker was about to grant this request when the case was settled. I believe the American people have a right to know the content of these documents. Only a public inquiry has any chance of giving us the answers.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have not won until all Asian Americans are treated just like any other citizens in this country. We have not won until we are represented in government leadership positions as well as in worker bee positions. We have not won until we get paid the same amount for same work done. We have not won until we are not automatically assumed to be a foreign spy unless we can prove otherwise. We have not won, if people still ask us where we came from.
Asian Americans have been energized by the Wen Ho Lee case, but this is not the end of the story. Did you know that when San Jose Mercury News first broke the story about Bay Area Chinese Americans meeting with Lee’s daughter and defense team, the reporter got crank phone calls and threatening email? Someone should ask the newspaper if the reason for reassigning the Wen Ho Lee beat to Dan Stober from the original Chinese American journalist wasn’t because of their concerns of racist backlash.
Most recently, William Safire, the senior columnist of New York Times and well-known cold war dinosaur, is still using the term “anti-McCarthyism” in a pejorative sense. In his essay dated September 25, 2000 commenting on the Wen ho Lee case, he observes that “anti-McCarthyism suppressed anti-Communism once before.” Clearly anti-Communism is his Holy Grail and he certainly doesn’t see anything wrong with McCarthyism if that will get him the Holy Grail.
Tony Hillerman, arguably the best known fiction writer from New Mexico, where the Lee case originated, said, “A lot of us were deeply concerned about what they (the Justice department) were doing to the U.S. Constitution and our Bill of Rights. Dr. Lee is an American citizen. If he could be locked up without bail and without trial in violation of our basic law, how safe are the rest of us?” Until we have an overwhelming majority of Hillermans and until we can consign Safires to the endangered species list, we have not won.
Thomas Jefferson said, "Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty.” A logical corollary for Asian Americans should read: vigilant insistence on all rights due us as American citizens or there will be more Wen Ho Lees.
.
Before I begin, I want to make one point crystal clear. I am an American. I am proud to be an American. I pay my taxes, vote regularly –certainly more often than some of our candidates running for the highest offices in this land. I’ve worked as volunteer worker for candidates that I believe in, at the local and national level. I belong here. I resent that this clarification is even necessary. If my subsequent remarks seem anti- America, then I am being misunderstood. I am critical of certain institutions of America but not America. Quite the contrary, I am motivated by the desire to help make America a better place for my kids and grandkids.
As other speakers of this conference will attest, the behavior of the U.S. government in conduct of the Wen Ho Lee case has been no better, I repeat no better, than the behavior of 3rd world dictatorships that the U.S. is so wont to criticize. By now everybody should be familiar with the particulars of this case, I would simply like to summarize certain aspects relevant to how this case has affected Asian Americans—which is the topic of my presentation. However, I must acknowledge one crucial difference: in a third world country, I would not be able to stand before you and say what I am about to say. And that’s what makes this country great, unless the FBI comes and takes me away after this speech.
When this case first broke in March 1999, the presumption by the general public was that the government has caught a spy. Whether orchestrated or just happened that way, the country was at near hysteria over nuclear crown jewels allegedly stolen by China, thanks to a series of leaks from the Cox Committee. (I will come back and amplify my views on the Cox Committee.) On March 6, the New York Times trumpeted on the front page that the W-88 secrets were stolen from Los Alamos National Laboratory and the spy was a Chinese American employee in the lab. W-88 for those that might not have been following the story closely stands for multiple warhead missiles that the United States developed in the 1970s. Two days later, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson fired Dr. Wen Ho Lee. Instantly Dr. Lee was tried and convicted by the media all across the country. From then until he was arrested in December, from sunrise to sun down, Lee had four FBI agents as his constant companions. Brian Sun the attorney representing the family will be speaking and I leave it for him to describe how Dr. Lee was treated.
Now let me discuss how this case affected Chinese Americans and how they reacted. The first thing that struck some of us was the complete lack of due process in this case. The judiciary due process was turned completely upside down. Dr. Lee was presumed guilty and it was up to him to prove otherwise. Shortly after Lee’s high profile dismissal, the Committee of 100 was having their annual conference in New York on April 30 and May 1 and we invited Secretary Richardson to speak. He accepted, I believe, because he was anxious to explain his action. In fact he was to devote a significant portion of his time in ensuing months explaining, explaining to Asian American communities, explaining to the employees of the laboratories and explaining to the American public that racial profiling played no role in the victimization of Dr. Lee. Knowing that he was coming, we convinced ABC Nightline to cover his speech. We found two Chinese American scientists from Lawrence Livermore, a sister lab within the Energy Department, brave enough to come and meet with Secretary Richardson to tell him about racial prejudice that has been running through the laboratories and now exacerbated by the Wen Ho Lee case. Again, I expect that Ms. Kalin Wong will address more fully this issue of racial discrimination in our national laboratories.
Nightline didn’t run this program until June because Kosovo was a hot topic in May. The Nightline program was the first nation-wide media coverage of the case that suggested that there might be more to the story than simply a case of a Chinese American spy. If you saw the program, you would see that Secretary Richardson did not come out particularly well in this 30-minute piece. His image was tarnished even further by the CBS 60 Minutes piece that came out in August.
In latter part of May, the much-ballyhooed report from the House Select Committee headed by Congressman Christopher Cox was finally released. Henry Tang, the chairman of the Committee sent me a copy in time for my business trip to Korea, and I read over much of the 900-page report while on my trip. 900 pages may seem a lot to you, but actually it was a fairly easy read. The hard part was lugging the report around. The report unlike most government publications is nicely formatted, with a lot of photos and colorful charts, in large fonts and full of statements in bold face. It is a slick piece of work. More like a product of Madison Avenue than staid Capitol Hill.
The only problem with this report is that it contains flat out misrepresentations, gross exaggerations, flying leaps of logic and claims that cannot stand up to rigorous scrutiny. As a matter of fact, an immediate chorus of ridicule and protest from the public greeted this report culminating in a 100 page report from Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation prepared by four eminent scientists and edited by Michael May, former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The Stanford study tore the Cox Report to shreds. They concluded and I quote: “The report lacks scholarly rigor, and exhibits too many examples of sloppy research, factual errors and weakly justified inferences”—and in my opinion the Stanford group was being kind.
One of many accusations in the Cox report is China’s theft of the W88 multiple head missiles. Former Senator Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.), is the chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which made an independent review of the espionage allegations at the request of President Clinton and in response to the Cox Report. He said in a recent interview appearing in the Washington Post, "It is my belief that there was no espionage involved with the W-88 data obtained by the Chinese.” As far as China's new, smaller warhead, Rudman said, "What they did, they did on their own."
The reason I am dwelling so much on the Cox Report is not just because this is the most disgusting and disgraceful piece of work to come out of Congress since Senator Joseph McCarthy days, which it is, but because this report victimized all Chinese Americans living in this country. This report accused China of practicing mosaic espionage. What they mean by this is that China is patient and willing to collect random tidbits and piece them together into one devastating breach in national security. And who do they turn to, to collect these tidbits? Why the Chinese Americans living in this country, of course. The so-called kindred spirits that FBI also referred to in the Los Alamos case. What sort of evidence did the Cox Report offer to back up their claim? Nothing. Zippo. Not one shred of hard data.
Let me give you just one example of how the Cox committee reached their conclusions. The report indicates that the State Department can identify 2 companies from China based in the U.S. with connections to the People’s Liberation Army. The AFL-CIO, no friend of China as you all know, thinks it closer to 12 or more. The Committee concludes that the number is closer to 3000! 3000 companies sent from China connected to the PLA for the ostensible purpose of collecting tidbits big and small. Where did the committee arrive at the 3000 number? The report did not say. The report then talks about the 100,000 students from China that are in the U.S. and goes on to speculate about the instructions they were given by the Beijing government on the kind of information they should collect. The report makes no distinction between visitors from China on a short trip and those that might be living in the U.S. as permanent residents. The implication is that all Chinese Americans are potential spies.
The federal prosecutors slapped 59 charges including possibility of life imprisonment on Dr. Lee to end up with one admission of guilt for time served. The Cox Committee took 2 companies from the State and blew it up into 3000 sinister covert operations. Do you not see a common pattern here?
The Cox committee is not the only one subscribing to this line of thinking. Notra Trulock, the former chief of counter-intelligence, according to the press reports I have read, was absolutely convinced that China had stolen the multiple nuclear warhead missile technology from the U.S., the so-called W-88 missile. And he, Trulock knew exactly how it happened. Los Alamos was where the leaks occurred and a Chinese American scientist was where to look. Of course, some time after Trulock received a commendation and $10,000 cash award from Richardson, others point out that information on the W-88 could have been obtained in literally hundreds of places. Still others in addition to Senator Rudman question whether China really had taken the W-88 secrets and how useful the technology developed in 1970’s would have been for China. According to numerous published sources such as a recent article in Current History, to this day China has yet to build any multiple head missiles.
Bob Vrooman is also on today’s program and perhaps he will share his views of Trulock with you. Let me simply quote Charles E. Washington, former acting director of counterintelligence at the Energy Department, who said, "Based on my experience and my personal knowledge, I believe that Mr. Trulock improperly targeted Dr. Lee due to Dr. Lee's race and national origin." He goes on to say, "Based upon my personal experience with Mr. Trulock, I strongly believe that he acts vindictively and opportunistically, that he improperly uses security issues to punish and discredit others, and that he has racist views toward minority groups.”
Mr. Trulock of course isn’t the only one with bigoted views working inside our government. Until their recent falling out, FBI apparently shares Trulock’s view. Throughout their investigation of Los Alamos and Wen Ho Lee, the code name was “kindred spirit.” Kindred spirit, not too subtle are they? Certainly sounds like they knew who their man was going to be even before they started their investigation, doesn’t it? After Dr. Wen Ho Lee was fired by Richardson, Mr. Paul Moore, another speaker in today’s program, was seen on Jim Lehrer’s hour proclaiming that yes, FBI practices racial profiling but that’s because The People’s Republic of China targets Chinese Americans as their preferred sources. In other words, the Chinese made them do it. Mr. Moore did not offer any proof for his statements but claims to know that this is the case, based on his experience from some 20 years of his career with the FBI. In a way very convenient, when Mr. Moore went public with his theory about the Chinese method to spying, he had already retired from FBI so that his remarks cannot be used to directly discredit FBI.
Of course since Mr. Moore went public with his theory of mosaic spying, there have been many others in government and in the intelligence business that have directly refuted his theory. For example, again I quote Mr. Washington: “In the counterintelligence training I have received and in my counterintelligence experience, I am unaware of any empirical data that would support a claim that Chinese- Americans are more likely to commit espionage than other Americans. Further, I know of no analysis whatsoever that has been done as to whether American citizens born in Taiwan would be more likely to commit espionage for the People's Republic of China.”
Since America is founded on the principle that a man or an ethnic group is innocent until proven guilty, I will say no more but defer to Mr. Moore to make his case. Hopefully he will have more specific and convincing evidence to present today than simply requiring us to accept his word on good faith.
Based on FBI conduct on the Lee case, good faith is not going to be easy to come by. The FBI lied to Lee and lied to the presiding judge. The FBI interrogators threatened Lee with the electric chair. They rejected the results of the first test, which Lee passed—with flying colors according to the tester but now according to FBI director Louie Freeh was inconclusive. The FBI re-administered the lie detector test under such conditions as to come up with “inconclusive” results. They did what they had to do so that the government can justify arresting Lee, deny him bail and throw him in solitary confinement, in a 7 by 13 cell with the light turned on around the clock, restrict his access to outside contact including TV and chain and shackled him for his one hour of exercise per day.
You might ask: Why would the most democratic nation in the world, the one that goes around monitoring and criticizing other nations for real and imagined abuses of human rights, resort to the very Gestapo tactics that they normally deplore? We will not likely ever get an official response to this question but the answer is clear to me. They thought they could intimidate a 5 ft 4, 60 year old Chinese man, they thought they could apply enough pressure to get him to cave in and sign a confession, any confession to get them off the hook. Unfortunately for Lee and his tormentors, this is a case of cultural misunderstanding. They simply did not understand that the quiet, mild manner demeanor of an Asian scholar does not mean the person is a willing foil easily run over and coerced. To his credit, Dr. Lee came out of the nine months of solitary by authoring a textbook in mathematics and two scientific journal articles. I don’t think there are many of us that could have done as well in such an enforced sabbatical.
So what has this case done to this country?
We saw a presiding judge apologize to Lee, who had to strike the bargain of becoming a convicted felon for his freedom. Before dismissing Lee, Judge Parker apologizes to him for the prosecutorial abuse by the U.S. government. If this isn’t unprecedented, I don’t know what is.
We saw the most influential news daily of America, namely the New York Times, publish a self-criticism in the form of an editor’s review acknowledging that “we fell short of our standards on our coverage of this story.” The editors generously fell on their own sword and did not put the blame on the offending reporters, saying “the blame lies principally with those who directed the coverage, for not raising questions that occurred to us only later.”
We saw the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine collectively write to the president asking for due process for Lee. These organizations represent the highest scientific bodies in this country.
We also heard the lamentations of the directors of the national labs because Asian Americans and foreign-born scientists are not applying for positions at the labs. Not only no new applications, but they are leaving in droves. The direct aftermath of this case is shattered morale among the staff of the national labs. No spy whatever the origin could have wreaked as much damage as the Department of Energy, the Congress, the FBI and the Department of Justice have done to our national security in their handling of this case.
As a most thoughtful op-ed appearing in points out: America has always depended on immigrant scientists to retain her superiority as the world leader in technology. This case has now sent a chilling message to all foreign born scientists whether they are working here or contemplating coming to heretofore the land of opportunity. If you can work for 20 years in a national lab and still risk sudden dismissal, get thrown into jail and have your life turned inside out, the American dream suddenly doesn’t look quite so golden. It remains to be seen how this self-inflicted gash on our national psyche will heal.
What has not changed is the almost reflexive reaction of those in the government to stonewall and if possible finish the scapegoating of Wen Ho Lee they began in jail. FBI director Freeh insists that they could have won if they persisted and Lee is really guilty of the 59 counts. Oh really now. Attorney General Reno insists that when national security is at stake, draconian measures such as those levied against Lee is justified.
While the potential abuse of prosecutorial power in the name of national security is a matter of concern raised by many, the Asian Americans have found Reno’s justification viscerally troubling. They remember when President Franklin Roosevelt also invoked the threat to national security as justification for putting 100,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry behind barb-wired detention camps. Attorney General Reno may have forgotten but not the Asian Americans.
Dr. Lee’s case may well represent a new dawn for Asian Americans in this country. He himself represents the old school Chinese American. He does note vote. He minds his own business and he doesn’t get involved. He doesn’t even read the newspapers according to his daughter. He is fortunate that he is living in an era where not all Chinese Americans and Asian Americans are like him. First, he is lucky to have been introduced to a Mark Holscher, a thoroughly decent man and former federal prosecutor, who was so moved by the injustice that he not only served pro bono but also recruited others to the cause. Second, he found enough Asian Americans that are no longer willing to be passive bystanders.
In September of last year, Lee’s daughter, Alberta, Brian Sun and Mark Holscher came to the Bay area to tell their story before a group of Chinese Americans. This was the beginning of the Wen Ho Lee Defense Fund. When the San Jose Mercury News reported this meeting, it was one of the earliest public indications that not everybody agreed with the way the government was stating the case.
Early this year, the Committee of 100 organized a three-hour, nation-wide conference call involving some 20 organizations followed by a series of calls with smaller groups to hammer out a letter of concern on the Wen Ho Lee case sent to President Clinton and Attorney General Reno. San Francisco based Chinese for Affirmative Action and Asian Law Caucus organized a national coalition, which staged simultaneous multi-city protests of the government’s treatment of Wen Ho Lee. From coast to coast, Chinese Americans got involved. They also got Asian Americans involved and eventually mainstream noticed. Our activism in getting all the facts out led to public reflection and played to the American sense of fairness and justice. Mainstream organizations ranging from scientific and professional societies to American Civil Liberties Union to Amnesty International and eventually to all the major daily newspapers joined in the national indignation and condemnation.
So have we won? Not by a long shot. Not until there is a blue ribbon panel, impartial and unburdened by politics, look into the origin of this case. We need answers to at least the following questions:
(1) Why is it that if China is so prolific in their recruiting and spying activity, the Cox Report names only one Chinese American as having passed information to China? Mind you, this person was sentenced to 12 months in a halfway house, fined and made to do certain number of hours of community service. Hardly an Aldrich Ames serving life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
(2) While we are on this vein, perhaps we should ask the FBI as to how many spies they have apprehended versus the number of Chinese American scientists they have intimidated and badgered for no justifiable cause? I personally know of several victims in the Bay Area whose careers were destroyed by the FBI. Mr. Moore for example spent 20 years allegedly monitoring the Chinese in America, how many arrests and convictions can he claim? Parenthetically, in my early days of going to China on business, I would be interviewed by CIA agents and sometimes by FBI agents on my return. I cooperated willingly thinking that I was helping our government better understand China. Little did I know that I was participating in reverse mosaic espionage.
(3) I would like to know where the oft-used reference to the 400,000 pages of nuclear secret came from. If 800 megabytes of downloaded data consist of only text, it would approximate 13 stories of paper, as prosecutor Bay likes to dramatize. But 800 MB of equations, graphs, drawings can be rather unspectacular in the amount of paper it would take. I don’t know if the prosecutors are ignorant of subtleties of computer software or just plain prone to exaggerate.
(4) I certainly would like to know if racial profiling entered into this case and if so the respective role of Notra Trulock, the FBI, the federal prosecutors and senior members of the Clinton Administration. The defense asked for government documents that would reveal whether racial profiling had anything to do with this case. Presiding Judge Parker was about to grant this request when the case was settled. I believe the American people have a right to know the content of these documents. Only a public inquiry has any chance of giving us the answers.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have not won until all Asian Americans are treated just like any other citizens in this country. We have not won until we are represented in government leadership positions as well as in worker bee positions. We have not won until we get paid the same amount for same work done. We have not won until we are not automatically assumed to be a foreign spy unless we can prove otherwise. We have not won, if people still ask us where we came from.
Asian Americans have been energized by the Wen Ho Lee case, but this is not the end of the story. Did you know that when San Jose Mercury News first broke the story about Bay Area Chinese Americans meeting with Lee’s daughter and defense team, the reporter got crank phone calls and threatening email? Someone should ask the newspaper if the reason for reassigning the Wen Ho Lee beat to Dan Stober from the original Chinese American journalist wasn’t because of their concerns of racist backlash.
Most recently, William Safire, the senior columnist of New York Times and well-known cold war dinosaur, is still using the term “anti-McCarthyism” in a pejorative sense. In his essay dated September 25, 2000 commenting on the Wen ho Lee case, he observes that “anti-McCarthyism suppressed anti-Communism once before.” Clearly anti-Communism is his Holy Grail and he certainly doesn’t see anything wrong with McCarthyism if that will get him the Holy Grail.
Tony Hillerman, arguably the best known fiction writer from New Mexico, where the Lee case originated, said, “A lot of us were deeply concerned about what they (the Justice department) were doing to the U.S. Constitution and our Bill of Rights. Dr. Lee is an American citizen. If he could be locked up without bail and without trial in violation of our basic law, how safe are the rest of us?” Until we have an overwhelming majority of Hillermans and until we can consign Safires to the endangered species list, we have not won.
Thomas Jefferson said, "Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty.” A logical corollary for Asian Americans should read: vigilant insistence on all rights due us as American citizens or there will be more Wen Ho Lees.
Monday, December 27, 1999
Bill Richardson and Asian Americans, the Saga Continues
Since the summary dismissal of physicist Wen Ho Lee from the Los Alamos National Laboratories last March, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has had to repeatedly assure the Asian Americans that he will not tolerate racial profiling in the national laboratories. The latest assurance took place just before Christmas.
On the day Lee’s friends and supporters gathered to celebrate his birthday with a fund raiser for his legal defense, Richardson visited the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories to once again pledge “zero tolerance” for discrimination against Asian Americans working in government labs. Two days later, nine Asian Americans employed at Lawrence filed claims of racial bias in their treatment at the Labs.
“Without Richardson’s statement against discrimination, there certainly would be nothing, no claims filed today. But he said he’s committed to zero tolerance. Now he needs to do something about it. So far it’s all talk,” said Kalina Wong, one of the nine filing suit. According to the San Jose Mercury News report, the harassing of Asian Americans after the arrest of Lee has angered her and Richardson’s highly publicized pledge emboldened her to file the complaint.
Given Richardson’s own Hispanic heritage, it seems particularly ironic that he should be if not at the center at least the catalyst for Asian American ire at racial profiling stemming from the Wen Ho Lee case. It seems instructive during this holiday lull to retrospectively review the developments that led to this debacle, a scandal that promises to blot the entry of the new millennium.
Almost exactly a year ago, Americans spent their holiday season watching the President Clinton’s impeachment hearings unfold on national TV. He did not topple but was severely wounded. In early January, the House Select Committee headed by Congressman Christopher Cox began to rumble about rampant Chinese spying on the leaky national labs. By then the exhausted administration was too tired to fight the allegations of wrongdoing.
In March the New York Times broke the news of suspected spy in Los Alamos Laboratories and Richardson promptly fired Lee. The media, led by New York Times, then rushed to label Lee the Chinese spy and pronounced him guilty. Lee and his family became targets of round the clock FBI surveillance. At this critical juncture, if a California major law firm had not come to Lee’s defense and if national Asian American organizations had not protest the lack of fairness and due process in this case, Lee would have been put on the express train to prison and the case would have been over.
In latter part of May, the Cox report became public. Once in the public domain, it quickly became evident that the sound and fury preceding its publication could not be supported by the actual contents of the report. The general reaction was best summarized by the assessment of the report released by Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation, “[the report] lacks scholarly rigor, and exhibits too many examples of sloppy research, factual errors and weakly justified inferences.” Even members of the conservative Republican camp agreed with this assessment, in particular members of the faction headed by former Congressman Jack Kemp.
Once the Cox report turned into a dud and no longer pose as a threat to the Clinton administration, it should have been possible for Richardson to call for a review of the Wen Ho Lee case and a halt to the proceedings. But he didn’t do so.
When Robert Vrooman’s internal memo became public, the whole world then knew that FBI failed to conduct an objective investigation but zeroed in on Lee because of his ethnic background. Vrooman is the former head of internal security at Los Alamos. This would have been another good time to review the case against Lee. Richardson didn’t.
By the time Lee appeared in a Mike Wallace interview on CBS 60 Minutes in August, this case may have already suffered from overexposure. While Richardson found it necessary to continue to reassure Asian American scientists in the labs, he could not find a way to resolve the Lee case out of the limelight. Not even when it was demonstrated that Lee could not have been the source of alleged leak on nuclear warhead design. Not even after Attorney General Janet Reno instructed the FBI to restart their investigation and cast a considerably wider net in search of spies, spies that may yet turned out to be mere figments of overactive, right wing imagination.
After another tortuous four months, just two weeks before Christmas, Lee was finally arrested and jailed on charges of mishandling information from secured computer files. He was not charged with espionage. To justify holding Lee in jail without bail and threatening him with life imprisonment, the prosecution charged Lee under certain obscured statues in the Atomic Energy Act. He became the first to be charged under those statues, a dubious distinction indeed.
The public reaction has been swift and unambiguous. Editorials from coast to coast criticized the government’s heavy-handed treatment towards Lee. Selective prosecution, harassment with intent to intimidate the defendant and prosecution overkill without due process are some of the criticism leveled at the U.S. government. National Asian American organizations gathered via conference calls to draft a public statement condemning the government action. Fourteen organizations initiated the action. Many more has sign on since the statement was disclosed one week before Christmas.
The question at hand is why the persistence on the part of Richardson. While only he knows for sure, his actions appear tied to politics. He may no longer be a viable vice presidential candidate but he may still run for governor of New Mexico in the coming election. If he were to drop charges against Lee, his opponents could attack him for bungling the duties of his office. By keeping the Lee trial pending, his opponents would be deprived of a useful issue against him.
While Lee is paying a heavy price as the sacrificial lamb in the battle between the Clinton Administration and the detractors, he is not entirely without blame. His mistake is to assume that as a citizen of the United States, he is guaranteed certain “inalienable” rights. He naively assumes that right is might and he is presumed innocent until proven guilty and does not need to engage attorneys to defend him. He did not appreciate the adversarial nature of American law and how politics can tilt justice way out of balance.
The one good thing that may yet come out of this affair, other than eventual exoneration of Lee, is that Asian Americans are rallying together and realizing they are not exempt from racial profiling. They are now visibly protesting the treatment of Lee and they are taking Richardson’s promise at face value by challenging to overturn the racial discrimination that exists in the national laboratories. So the saga continues.
On the day Lee’s friends and supporters gathered to celebrate his birthday with a fund raiser for his legal defense, Richardson visited the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories to once again pledge “zero tolerance” for discrimination against Asian Americans working in government labs. Two days later, nine Asian Americans employed at Lawrence filed claims of racial bias in their treatment at the Labs.
“Without Richardson’s statement against discrimination, there certainly would be nothing, no claims filed today. But he said he’s committed to zero tolerance. Now he needs to do something about it. So far it’s all talk,” said Kalina Wong, one of the nine filing suit. According to the San Jose Mercury News report, the harassing of Asian Americans after the arrest of Lee has angered her and Richardson’s highly publicized pledge emboldened her to file the complaint.
Given Richardson’s own Hispanic heritage, it seems particularly ironic that he should be if not at the center at least the catalyst for Asian American ire at racial profiling stemming from the Wen Ho Lee case. It seems instructive during this holiday lull to retrospectively review the developments that led to this debacle, a scandal that promises to blot the entry of the new millennium.
Almost exactly a year ago, Americans spent their holiday season watching the President Clinton’s impeachment hearings unfold on national TV. He did not topple but was severely wounded. In early January, the House Select Committee headed by Congressman Christopher Cox began to rumble about rampant Chinese spying on the leaky national labs. By then the exhausted administration was too tired to fight the allegations of wrongdoing.
In March the New York Times broke the news of suspected spy in Los Alamos Laboratories and Richardson promptly fired Lee. The media, led by New York Times, then rushed to label Lee the Chinese spy and pronounced him guilty. Lee and his family became targets of round the clock FBI surveillance. At this critical juncture, if a California major law firm had not come to Lee’s defense and if national Asian American organizations had not protest the lack of fairness and due process in this case, Lee would have been put on the express train to prison and the case would have been over.
In latter part of May, the Cox report became public. Once in the public domain, it quickly became evident that the sound and fury preceding its publication could not be supported by the actual contents of the report. The general reaction was best summarized by the assessment of the report released by Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation, “[the report] lacks scholarly rigor, and exhibits too many examples of sloppy research, factual errors and weakly justified inferences.” Even members of the conservative Republican camp agreed with this assessment, in particular members of the faction headed by former Congressman Jack Kemp.
Once the Cox report turned into a dud and no longer pose as a threat to the Clinton administration, it should have been possible for Richardson to call for a review of the Wen Ho Lee case and a halt to the proceedings. But he didn’t do so.
When Robert Vrooman’s internal memo became public, the whole world then knew that FBI failed to conduct an objective investigation but zeroed in on Lee because of his ethnic background. Vrooman is the former head of internal security at Los Alamos. This would have been another good time to review the case against Lee. Richardson didn’t.
By the time Lee appeared in a Mike Wallace interview on CBS 60 Minutes in August, this case may have already suffered from overexposure. While Richardson found it necessary to continue to reassure Asian American scientists in the labs, he could not find a way to resolve the Lee case out of the limelight. Not even when it was demonstrated that Lee could not have been the source of alleged leak on nuclear warhead design. Not even after Attorney General Janet Reno instructed the FBI to restart their investigation and cast a considerably wider net in search of spies, spies that may yet turned out to be mere figments of overactive, right wing imagination.
After another tortuous four months, just two weeks before Christmas, Lee was finally arrested and jailed on charges of mishandling information from secured computer files. He was not charged with espionage. To justify holding Lee in jail without bail and threatening him with life imprisonment, the prosecution charged Lee under certain obscured statues in the Atomic Energy Act. He became the first to be charged under those statues, a dubious distinction indeed.
The public reaction has been swift and unambiguous. Editorials from coast to coast criticized the government’s heavy-handed treatment towards Lee. Selective prosecution, harassment with intent to intimidate the defendant and prosecution overkill without due process are some of the criticism leveled at the U.S. government. National Asian American organizations gathered via conference calls to draft a public statement condemning the government action. Fourteen organizations initiated the action. Many more has sign on since the statement was disclosed one week before Christmas.
The question at hand is why the persistence on the part of Richardson. While only he knows for sure, his actions appear tied to politics. He may no longer be a viable vice presidential candidate but he may still run for governor of New Mexico in the coming election. If he were to drop charges against Lee, his opponents could attack him for bungling the duties of his office. By keeping the Lee trial pending, his opponents would be deprived of a useful issue against him.
While Lee is paying a heavy price as the sacrificial lamb in the battle between the Clinton Administration and the detractors, he is not entirely without blame. His mistake is to assume that as a citizen of the United States, he is guaranteed certain “inalienable” rights. He naively assumes that right is might and he is presumed innocent until proven guilty and does not need to engage attorneys to defend him. He did not appreciate the adversarial nature of American law and how politics can tilt justice way out of balance.
The one good thing that may yet come out of this affair, other than eventual exoneration of Lee, is that Asian Americans are rallying together and realizing they are not exempt from racial profiling. They are now visibly protesting the treatment of Lee and they are taking Richardson’s promise at face value by challenging to overturn the racial discrimination that exists in the national laboratories. So the saga continues.
Friday, November 19, 1999
UNITY 99 Address, Seattle
Ladies & gentlemen,
It's an honor for me to join this distinguished panel and to have this opportunity to address you, representatives of the mainstream media.
An uninterrupted monologue to members of the mainstream is a prospect I have been looking forward to with relish. Over the years, I have become increasingly frustrated by the mainstream coverage of the U.S.-China relationship and I view this as an opportunity to help set the record straight, so to speak.
I have been asked to talk about the positive and negative aspects of the bilateral US China relationship and I certainly hope that we will get to that during this panel discussion. For my opening remarks, however, I want to address a matter of more serious concern and closer to home.
First let me state unequivocally that the origin of the up and down rockiness of the US China relationship is rooted in domestic politics and squabble. There are factions in this country that demonize China for real or perceived political advantages. In the process, whether by design or otherwise, Chinese Americans have become victims of racial profiling.
We may not get pulled off the highway for no good reason, but the form of racial profiling that we are subject to is just as if not more insidious and harder to combat. As the brutal murder of Vincent Chin has shown, if Chinese Americans are affected, then all Asian Americans are affected because [quote] we all look alike [unquote].
While China is the ostensible target, I would like to explain how we have been victimized by the Cox report, the Los Alamos case and the campaign finance scandal.
By now, the Cox report has been so widely discredited that I don't need to go over the gory details on why this report heaps more scorn on Congress, a place where integrity rarely visits. For anyone that missed the salient points of this report, I have done a careful analysis of this 900 page tome that I would be happy to share. In fact, I have with me today a list of websites with information that supplement my remarks for anyone interested in looking into it further.
For today's discussion, I will just focus on the racial profiling aspects of this report. A couple of examples should suffice.
The report indicates that the State Department has identified 2 Chinese companies in the U.S. as having connections with the PLA, that is, People's Liberation Army. AFL-CIO can identify "no less than 12." This report categorically claims that there are more than 3000 such companies operating in the U.S. If there is any justification of the Select Committee's conclusion, I am sure Congressman Cox will tell you that it's classified.
On top of this, the report says that there are more than 100,000 nationals from PRC studying, working and living in this country. Thus the stage is set for the mosaic theory of espionage. This theory has been further elaborated by the likes of Senator Shelby of Alabama and appeared as a commentary in LA Times written by a former counter intelligence officer of FBI.
According to the commentary, the Beijing government does not spy along traditional lines. They don't pay a lot of money for professional spies. Instead they make friends with the ethnic Chinese Americans, cater to their cultural affinity, and turn them into an army of collectors of tidbits of information from public and private sources, which Beijing then painstakingly reassembles and, voila, they have captured the crown jewel secrets of America.
In one fell swoop, China becomes the demon and all Asian Americans part time spies.
This particular FBI analyst, by the way, spent twenty years in counterintelligence and did not catch a single spy from China. Doesn't take much to conclude that his chagrin for wasting 20 years of his life leads to this fanciful theory. I wonder if "counter" in this case isn't equivalent to "negative." You know, negative intelligence as in dumb and dumber?
This mosaic theory is also a convenient way out for the Cox report. For all the rampaging spying China is accused of committing, the only culprit the Cox report can point to is someone sentenced to 12 months in a halfway house, fined $20,000 and made to do 3000 hours of community service. Now I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, how does that stack up against a Jonathan Pollard serving life sentence for spying? For which there has been no Select Committee and no Cox report?
A prelude to the release of the Cox report is the Los Alamos case. This case broke open when the Secretary of Energy, Bill Richardson, reached down from Washington to dismiss one researcher working at Los Alamos and the media went wild. From the media response that ensued, it would appear that to members of Congress and the media, Wen Ho Lee's guilt was a foregone conclusion.
Twice in April I was part of two different groups of Asian Americans that met with Secretary Richardson to voice our concerns and to listen to his explanations on this case. He went to great lengths to explain that one individual case is no cause for profiling all members of the same ethnic group. I am satisfied that he is sincere, but he never could provide a response when it was pointed out to him that the dismissal of Wen Ho Lee came just two days after New York Times broke the news.
In fact I'll go further. There isn't much doubt in my mind that the firing is politically motivated and Lee is the convenient scapegoat and sacrificial lamb rolled into one. The dismissal was to anticipate and placate in advance certain Republicans out to get the President. Indeed shortly after the news broke, there was an orchestrated clamor for the dismissal of Attorney General Janet Reno by the Republicans in Congress.
Then when it didn't look as if there will be a case against Lee, the FBI had a ready explanation. They claim the premature disclosure of Lee being under suspicion forecloses on any chance of finding the goods to convict him. Conveniently forgotten is that FBI has been talking to Lee for three years and he even passed an earlier lie detector test.
It's hard to know what if anything Wen Ho Lee is guilty of, but one thing is certain. He did not get anything that comes close to the due process, something that is supposed to be the sacred right of every American citizen.
Of course when the campaign scandal hit about two years ago, due process was the last thing anyone had in mind. Innuendoes flew thick and fast unimpeded by any hard facts or evidence. Senator Thompson among others was outraged supposedly over the Chinese trying to influence Washington with money. Imagine that, somebody trying to influence Washington with money.
Asian Americans who thought they were joining the mainstream political process by becoming active fundraisers for political campaigns were suddenly pariahs in America. The Democratic National Committee couldn't return checks with Asian surnames fast enough. As for coming to the defense of loyal Asian Americans, are you kidding?
Republicans were busy accusing every Asian American they could find of being foreign agents funneling money for the purpose of corrupting the American political process. Unless, of course, the Asian American happens to be raising funds for their side.
When billions are spent in the federal elections, an alleged two million attributed to China surely generated outrage out of all proportion. I guess hypocrisy has a way of magnifying things. Two years later, what have we found out?
For one thing, Johnny Chung was one heck of an intermediary. He found that certain Chinese were willing to pay $300,000 for a photo op in the White House with the President. Since he only needed to contribute about 10% of that amount to the DNC to make it happen, he got to pocket one huge commission. He is some broker.
We are still waiting to hear what John Huang has to say, but here is what the Cox report said about him:
While at the Department of Commerce, he could have upgraded his clearance to a higher level, which he didn't do. He was entitled to weekly briefings, but he had significantly fewer. He asked few questions and never tried to expand the scope of the briefings. He could have upgraded the level of cable traffic he could review but he never did so. Observers of the Office of Intelligence Liaison found no instance in which Huang mishandled or divulged classified information.
There must be some twisted logic I am missing that makes this set of credentials sound like that of a suspicious character.
An economist who served on the staff of Council of Economic Affairs under both Bush and Clinton administrations co-authored a paper pointing out that the U.S. trade deficit with China is overstated. Some other economist publicly questioned not his thesis but his nationality and his status in the U.S. His name happens to be Fung.
In March, I participated on a New California Media TV panel discussion on China bashing, a program telecast on the West Coast, and made an observation that much of the accusations about China are not based on fact but originate from petty domestic politics in Washington. Some irate viewer emailed the producer and wanted to know if I am a communist and where I am from.
Ladies and gentlemen, this sort of racial profiling has to stop. You can do something about it. You can help raise the sensitivity of your mainstream colleagues and you can help introduce the Asian American perspective to the American public. What makes America unique and America strong among all nations is its diversity. This is worthy of your attention and your diligent efforts to protect. Thank you very much.
Relevant Websites
compliments of George Koo
National Imaging and Mapping Agency (NIMA) refuse to take the blame.
Visit their website for an accurate map of Belgrade
http://www.nima.mil/
James Oberg article on errors in the Cox Report
http://www.jamesoberg.com
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/oberg990602.html
For translation of award winning, in-depth investigative piece on China’s prison system by Jean Shao that appeared in American edition of SingTao Daily:
http://www.ncmonline.com/special-reports/1999-05-27/prisons.html.
For translation of a 6-day series of articles entitled “Breaking Harry Wu’s Funhouse Mirror” by dissident Fan Shidong, go to
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/CRRC/Articles/Misc/Fan.html.
For The Committee of 100 position on “Seek Common Grounds, while Respecting Differences as a way of building a strong U.S.-China relations, go to
http://www.committee100.org
It's an honor for me to join this distinguished panel and to have this opportunity to address you, representatives of the mainstream media.
An uninterrupted monologue to members of the mainstream is a prospect I have been looking forward to with relish. Over the years, I have become increasingly frustrated by the mainstream coverage of the U.S.-China relationship and I view this as an opportunity to help set the record straight, so to speak.
I have been asked to talk about the positive and negative aspects of the bilateral US China relationship and I certainly hope that we will get to that during this panel discussion. For my opening remarks, however, I want to address a matter of more serious concern and closer to home.
First let me state unequivocally that the origin of the up and down rockiness of the US China relationship is rooted in domestic politics and squabble. There are factions in this country that demonize China for real or perceived political advantages. In the process, whether by design or otherwise, Chinese Americans have become victims of racial profiling.
We may not get pulled off the highway for no good reason, but the form of racial profiling that we are subject to is just as if not more insidious and harder to combat. As the brutal murder of Vincent Chin has shown, if Chinese Americans are affected, then all Asian Americans are affected because [quote] we all look alike [unquote].
While China is the ostensible target, I would like to explain how we have been victimized by the Cox report, the Los Alamos case and the campaign finance scandal.
By now, the Cox report has been so widely discredited that I don't need to go over the gory details on why this report heaps more scorn on Congress, a place where integrity rarely visits. For anyone that missed the salient points of this report, I have done a careful analysis of this 900 page tome that I would be happy to share. In fact, I have with me today a list of websites with information that supplement my remarks for anyone interested in looking into it further.
For today's discussion, I will just focus on the racial profiling aspects of this report. A couple of examples should suffice.
The report indicates that the State Department has identified 2 Chinese companies in the U.S. as having connections with the PLA, that is, People's Liberation Army. AFL-CIO can identify "no less than 12." This report categorically claims that there are more than 3000 such companies operating in the U.S. If there is any justification of the Select Committee's conclusion, I am sure Congressman Cox will tell you that it's classified.
On top of this, the report says that there are more than 100,000 nationals from PRC studying, working and living in this country. Thus the stage is set for the mosaic theory of espionage. This theory has been further elaborated by the likes of Senator Shelby of Alabama and appeared as a commentary in LA Times written by a former counter intelligence officer of FBI.
According to the commentary, the Beijing government does not spy along traditional lines. They don't pay a lot of money for professional spies. Instead they make friends with the ethnic Chinese Americans, cater to their cultural affinity, and turn them into an army of collectors of tidbits of information from public and private sources, which Beijing then painstakingly reassembles and, voila, they have captured the crown jewel secrets of America.
In one fell swoop, China becomes the demon and all Asian Americans part time spies.
This particular FBI analyst, by the way, spent twenty years in counterintelligence and did not catch a single spy from China. Doesn't take much to conclude that his chagrin for wasting 20 years of his life leads to this fanciful theory. I wonder if "counter" in this case isn't equivalent to "negative." You know, negative intelligence as in dumb and dumber?
This mosaic theory is also a convenient way out for the Cox report. For all the rampaging spying China is accused of committing, the only culprit the Cox report can point to is someone sentenced to 12 months in a halfway house, fined $20,000 and made to do 3000 hours of community service. Now I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, how does that stack up against a Jonathan Pollard serving life sentence for spying? For which there has been no Select Committee and no Cox report?
A prelude to the release of the Cox report is the Los Alamos case. This case broke open when the Secretary of Energy, Bill Richardson, reached down from Washington to dismiss one researcher working at Los Alamos and the media went wild. From the media response that ensued, it would appear that to members of Congress and the media, Wen Ho Lee's guilt was a foregone conclusion.
Twice in April I was part of two different groups of Asian Americans that met with Secretary Richardson to voice our concerns and to listen to his explanations on this case. He went to great lengths to explain that one individual case is no cause for profiling all members of the same ethnic group. I am satisfied that he is sincere, but he never could provide a response when it was pointed out to him that the dismissal of Wen Ho Lee came just two days after New York Times broke the news.
In fact I'll go further. There isn't much doubt in my mind that the firing is politically motivated and Lee is the convenient scapegoat and sacrificial lamb rolled into one. The dismissal was to anticipate and placate in advance certain Republicans out to get the President. Indeed shortly after the news broke, there was an orchestrated clamor for the dismissal of Attorney General Janet Reno by the Republicans in Congress.
Then when it didn't look as if there will be a case against Lee, the FBI had a ready explanation. They claim the premature disclosure of Lee being under suspicion forecloses on any chance of finding the goods to convict him. Conveniently forgotten is that FBI has been talking to Lee for three years and he even passed an earlier lie detector test.
It's hard to know what if anything Wen Ho Lee is guilty of, but one thing is certain. He did not get anything that comes close to the due process, something that is supposed to be the sacred right of every American citizen.
Of course when the campaign scandal hit about two years ago, due process was the last thing anyone had in mind. Innuendoes flew thick and fast unimpeded by any hard facts or evidence. Senator Thompson among others was outraged supposedly over the Chinese trying to influence Washington with money. Imagine that, somebody trying to influence Washington with money.
Asian Americans who thought they were joining the mainstream political process by becoming active fundraisers for political campaigns were suddenly pariahs in America. The Democratic National Committee couldn't return checks with Asian surnames fast enough. As for coming to the defense of loyal Asian Americans, are you kidding?
Republicans were busy accusing every Asian American they could find of being foreign agents funneling money for the purpose of corrupting the American political process. Unless, of course, the Asian American happens to be raising funds for their side.
When billions are spent in the federal elections, an alleged two million attributed to China surely generated outrage out of all proportion. I guess hypocrisy has a way of magnifying things. Two years later, what have we found out?
For one thing, Johnny Chung was one heck of an intermediary. He found that certain Chinese were willing to pay $300,000 for a photo op in the White House with the President. Since he only needed to contribute about 10% of that amount to the DNC to make it happen, he got to pocket one huge commission. He is some broker.
We are still waiting to hear what John Huang has to say, but here is what the Cox report said about him:
While at the Department of Commerce, he could have upgraded his clearance to a higher level, which he didn't do. He was entitled to weekly briefings, but he had significantly fewer. He asked few questions and never tried to expand the scope of the briefings. He could have upgraded the level of cable traffic he could review but he never did so. Observers of the Office of Intelligence Liaison found no instance in which Huang mishandled or divulged classified information.
There must be some twisted logic I am missing that makes this set of credentials sound like that of a suspicious character.
An economist who served on the staff of Council of Economic Affairs under both Bush and Clinton administrations co-authored a paper pointing out that the U.S. trade deficit with China is overstated. Some other economist publicly questioned not his thesis but his nationality and his status in the U.S. His name happens to be Fung.
In March, I participated on a New California Media TV panel discussion on China bashing, a program telecast on the West Coast, and made an observation that much of the accusations about China are not based on fact but originate from petty domestic politics in Washington. Some irate viewer emailed the producer and wanted to know if I am a communist and where I am from.
Ladies and gentlemen, this sort of racial profiling has to stop. You can do something about it. You can help raise the sensitivity of your mainstream colleagues and you can help introduce the Asian American perspective to the American public. What makes America unique and America strong among all nations is its diversity. This is worthy of your attention and your diligent efforts to protect. Thank you very much.
Relevant Websites
compliments of George Koo
National Imaging and Mapping Agency (NIMA) refuse to take the blame.
Visit their website for an accurate map of Belgrade
http://www.nima.mil/
James Oberg article on errors in the Cox Report
http://www.jamesoberg.com
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/oberg990602.html
For translation of award winning, in-depth investigative piece on China’s prison system by Jean Shao that appeared in American edition of SingTao Daily:
http://www.ncmonline.com/special-reports/1999-05-27/prisons.html.
For translation of a 6-day series of articles entitled “Breaking Harry Wu’s Funhouse Mirror” by dissident Fan Shidong, go to
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/CRRC/Articles/Misc/Fan.html.
For The Committee of 100 position on “Seek Common Grounds, while Respecting Differences as a way of building a strong U.S.-China relations, go to
http://www.committee100.org
Monday, October 11, 1999
Is Racial Profiling Necessary in U.S. China Relations?
Text of a speech given at the Commonwealth Club, October 11, 1999.
I am grateful for this opportunity to present to you some serious concerns of mine which I also believe should be serious concerns for anyone that cares about the future of this country. When Mr. Shepler asked me to speak a few months ago, we came up with a deliberately provocative title. Is Racial Profiling Necessary in U.S. China Relations? I want to thank you for coming and I hope to convince you that the title is not merely a rhetorical question.
First I would like to establish beyond any doubt that racial profiling of Chinese Americans and by extension all Asian Americans still run deep in this country. Then I hope we can engage in a discussion on what can be done about this matter. I sincerely believe that if this prejudice is not overcome, what makes this country so strong and unique will erode away and the future of this nation will be in peril.
I would like to review some events with you in reverse chronological order. Now that I work for Deloitte & Touche, I have learned to say "LIFO," that is last in, first out.
I came back recently from Beijing and Shanghai where I attended the national day celebration. China has not had a celebration on this grand a scale since their 35th anniversary in 1984. Somehow I became
part of a Taiwan group of guests attending the celebration on Tiananmen Square. We all stayed at Minzu Hotel on the main drag and there were ten busloads of us, slightly fewer than 300 in numbers. Half came directly from Taiwan and the other half came from all over the world but lived at one time in Taiwan-except me and perhaps a handful of others.
As tanks, armor vehicles, missile launchers and intercontinental ballistic missiles rumbled by on national day parade, the common murmur among this crowd was "look at that, all made in China." There was obvious pride among these overseas Chinese in a strong China able to defend itself. This brings up the dual loyalty question, which I hope to come back to later.
The point I want to make now is that this is single most watched event in China and a headliner event in rest of Asia. At the lobby of Minzu Hotel, I bumped into a couple checking out after the parade was over. The husband approached me to find out where I was from and I asked him in turn. He said he is a local citizen and just spent a month salary to spend one night at the Minzu just so that he can watch the parade. It was worth it, he said, because there is only one 50th anniversary. He also said somewhat ruefully that he wished he had gotten a higher floor so as to get an unobstructed view. I felt bad because overseas guests took all the higher floors.
CNN in Asia ran a "Visions of China" program for 30 days leading up to October 1. The visions program related China's history and explained how today's China came to be, and included interviews of academicians, historians, businessmen in and outside of China, officials, dissidents, and just persons on the street. I did not see all of them, but the ones I saw were balanced, informative and interesting. I understand the program did not run in the West. This is an unfortunate catch 22. Where the audience is most ignorant and needs to be informed most, is where there is not enough viewing interest to justify commercial support needed to run the program.
The print media in the West by and large gave cursory coverage to China's national day celebration. A few days later, the front page of San Jose Mercury News ran an article on how officials in Beijing swept away all the undesirables and made them go away in preparation for the celebration. I don't understand why this is front page news except that it fits with the image we have of China in the West. As my friend, Professor Norm Matloff commented, has any newspaper ever investigated as to how many prostitutes and panhandlers are permitted to ply their trade on Pennsylvania Avenue during the presidential inauguration?
Now a few words about the Cox Report, the best seller of the right wing press. The outlandish claims and exaggerations contained in what has to be the most disgraceful document ever produced by Congress have been pretty thoroughly reviewed and dismissed by many from the left, middle and the right. I won't get into them here today, though I would be glad to send an email on my detailed analysis of the report upon request. The report makes a big deal about rampant espionage conducted in the U.S. by China. Yet the only culprit the report can cite is some Chinese American sentenced to 12 months in a halfway house, paid a fine and made to perform certain hours of community service. Does this sound like a dastardly spy that sold out his country?
Congressman Cox has repeatedly assured his Asian American constituent that racial profiling of Asian Americans is the last thing on his mind. (If in his efforts to topple the Clinton Administration, a few Chinese Americans get tarred, well so sorry.) Yet his report suggests this spying is so pervasive that the only explanation, as offered by Senator Shelby of Alabama among many others, is mosaic espionage, whereby every Chinese American by virtue of his/her cultural affinity is a potential intelligence gatherer for China. This, by the way, is the explanation being offered by a retired FBI official who spent 20 fruitless years in counter-espionage and did not catch one single spy for China. I find it infuriating that he should make up for his incompetence by broad brushing the entire population of Chinese Americans. I find it even more appalling that he can actually find an outlet for this stuff by appearing in various talk shows and in the printed media.
Now we come to the case of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, heretofore an American making important contribution to national defense--our American national defense by the way--who’s only known infraction is to download computer files onto his unsecured desktop computer. This happens to be a common albeit not sanctioned practice for the sake of higher productivity. Former CIA Director, John Deutsch, even downloaded secret files into his laptop so that he can take them home. None have been accused of disloyalty and summarily dismissed until Dr. Lee. FBI investigating Dr. Lee calls their investigation as "Operation Kindred Spirit" which should tell you volumes about where this case is coming from.
What about the question of cultural affinity, does it lead to dual loyalty? I have met a young author in Los Angeles who has written several books. Looking at her red hair and pale freckled face, you would never guess that her great grandfather is Chinese. But she thinks of herself as Chinese and her first book is about the Chinese side of her family tree. Some of you may know her, Lisa See, and her book, Return to Gold Mountain. I have not had the opportunity to ask her why she identifies so strongly with her Chinese heritage. My guess is that the attraction is in the richness of the enduring Chinese culture.
Of course the Chinese culture has fascinated the West for centuries. For such people as John Fairbanks, Jonathan Spence, Michel Oksenberg, Douglas Paal, Winston Lord, Ken Lieberthal and many others that are not ethnic Chinese, this fascination has translated into jobs as professors, pundits, ambassadors, spooks and as presidential advisors. Never, to my knowledge, has any of these gentlemen ever been suspected or accused of disloyalty because of their "cultural affinity." Conversely, any ethnic Chinese, even if they are born in America with little or no empathy for China, are still suspects.
So Mr. FBI and Senator Shelby and all the others out there, I say stop hiding behind this hypocrisy and start calling a spade a spade. Cultural affinity has nothing to do with your accusations. In your mind, if the person looks Chinese, he or she is a possible suspect. Period.
We have seen this mentality before when Japanese Americans were interred for suspected disloyalty for no other grounds than their ethnicity. It took decades to overturn this gross injustice and we thought never again. But this attitude is flaring up again. In some ways, this time around the discrimination is even worse because of its subtlety. Then Japan was the clear aggressor and one can at least claim panic under siege for the error in judgment, though that's hardly an appropriate excuse. Now China is cast as the demon offshore even though China has made no aggressive act--unless putting their embassy in harm's way is considered a hostile act.
There are forces in this country determined to turn China into a target for venom and hate. Each group has their own agenda for targeting China. Those on the right disapprove of China's population control policies, the left on supposed human rights violations, and the organized labor on illusory threats to American jobs and still others thrive on bilateral friction as a means of livelihood. This is a vast subject for another day. Suffice it to say that the critics have one common ground. They make no attempt to understand where China is today; they insist on measuring China by their own comfortable frame of reference which may be totally irrelevant; and, they have no interest in being objective.
I will simply mention one example. The Cox Report would have you believe that every significant piece of military technology owned by China has been stolen from the U.S. Let me simply mentioned these historical facts. China successfully fired their first guided missile on June 29, 1964. Exploded their first atomic bomb on October 16, 1964 and less than three years later on June 17, 1967 detonated their first hydrogen bomb. On April 24, 1970, China lofted its first man-made satellite. The time China took to develop the H-bomb from the A-bomb was less than half the time of any other member nations of the nuclear club. The time for them to send the first satellite aloft from concept to launch was five years.
Do I need to remind the audience that these events took place long before ping-pong diplomacy and Nixon's historic meeting with Mao in 1972? They took place while China was a hermit kingdom sealed not only from the West but had severed relations with the Soviet Union. What are we to conclude from the Cox Report? That the Chinese became dazzled by the superiority of the West, stop thinking for themselves and steal their way to the next level of military might? Recently a book called "OSS in China" came to my attention. Thoroughly researched and taking advantage of recently declassified material about the U.S. intelligence efforts in China during WWII, I am struck by one permeating theme. The bumbling efforts of OSS in China were due to the ignorance of Chinese culture and patronizing condescension of the Americans in charge. Parenthetically, I should mention that they were also hampered by internal politics and bitter infighting. I don't think things have changed much since that time.
The demonizing of China and consequent broad brush tarring of all Chinese Americans has a serious consequence for America. At any one time, there are approximately 150,000 Chinese Americans working in universities, national and private laboratories advancing America's scientific and technological edge. Senator Shelby thinks it would be a good thing to get rid of them and open up some vacancies for "real" Americans. What do you think? A Chinese American invented the Apollo space suit. A Chinese American developed the atomic clock necessary for the global positioning system. A team of Chinese Americans developed the principles of hypersonic flow, which pave the way for easing entry of ICBMs and spacecraft into the atmosphere. The list goes on. Anybody think Senator Shelby is on the right track?
During the hysteria of the Joe McCarthy era, a founder of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab and a pioneer of America's missile technology was accused of disloyalty and put under house arrest for five years. He, Qian Xue Sen, was allowed to go to China in 1955 where a year later he headed China's missile development program. On June 29, 1964, China successfully launched their first guided missile. Is this the direction we want to go?
I was in Beijing on December 16, 1978 when normalization of the relations with the U.S. was announced in an extra edition of the People's Daily, printed in red ink instead of the usual black. The only other time the People's Daily ever ran an extra edition was when China detonated their first atomic bomb. That was an indication of the importance China attached to the bilateral relations. As a Chinese American I was ecstatic. I bought a copy of the extra and had it framed, as what I thought would be a historic document. Unfortunately, if you read Patrick Tyler's recently released book, A Great Wall, the U.S. side has always subject the relationship to petty domestic squabbles rather treating it with statesman-like respect and linking it to the long term interest of the U.S.
Ladies and gentlemen, I hope I have made a case that the title of my talk is not simply a rhetorical question. Now I would like to open the floor for discussion on where do we go from here, because frankly, I don't have very good answers. Thank you very much.
I am grateful for this opportunity to present to you some serious concerns of mine which I also believe should be serious concerns for anyone that cares about the future of this country. When Mr. Shepler asked me to speak a few months ago, we came up with a deliberately provocative title. Is Racial Profiling Necessary in U.S. China Relations? I want to thank you for coming and I hope to convince you that the title is not merely a rhetorical question.
First I would like to establish beyond any doubt that racial profiling of Chinese Americans and by extension all Asian Americans still run deep in this country. Then I hope we can engage in a discussion on what can be done about this matter. I sincerely believe that if this prejudice is not overcome, what makes this country so strong and unique will erode away and the future of this nation will be in peril.
I would like to review some events with you in reverse chronological order. Now that I work for Deloitte & Touche, I have learned to say "LIFO," that is last in, first out.
I came back recently from Beijing and Shanghai where I attended the national day celebration. China has not had a celebration on this grand a scale since their 35th anniversary in 1984. Somehow I became
part of a Taiwan group of guests attending the celebration on Tiananmen Square. We all stayed at Minzu Hotel on the main drag and there were ten busloads of us, slightly fewer than 300 in numbers. Half came directly from Taiwan and the other half came from all over the world but lived at one time in Taiwan-except me and perhaps a handful of others.
As tanks, armor vehicles, missile launchers and intercontinental ballistic missiles rumbled by on national day parade, the common murmur among this crowd was "look at that, all made in China." There was obvious pride among these overseas Chinese in a strong China able to defend itself. This brings up the dual loyalty question, which I hope to come back to later.
The point I want to make now is that this is single most watched event in China and a headliner event in rest of Asia. At the lobby of Minzu Hotel, I bumped into a couple checking out after the parade was over. The husband approached me to find out where I was from and I asked him in turn. He said he is a local citizen and just spent a month salary to spend one night at the Minzu just so that he can watch the parade. It was worth it, he said, because there is only one 50th anniversary. He also said somewhat ruefully that he wished he had gotten a higher floor so as to get an unobstructed view. I felt bad because overseas guests took all the higher floors.
CNN in Asia ran a "Visions of China" program for 30 days leading up to October 1. The visions program related China's history and explained how today's China came to be, and included interviews of academicians, historians, businessmen in and outside of China, officials, dissidents, and just persons on the street. I did not see all of them, but the ones I saw were balanced, informative and interesting. I understand the program did not run in the West. This is an unfortunate catch 22. Where the audience is most ignorant and needs to be informed most, is where there is not enough viewing interest to justify commercial support needed to run the program.
The print media in the West by and large gave cursory coverage to China's national day celebration. A few days later, the front page of San Jose Mercury News ran an article on how officials in Beijing swept away all the undesirables and made them go away in preparation for the celebration. I don't understand why this is front page news except that it fits with the image we have of China in the West. As my friend, Professor Norm Matloff commented, has any newspaper ever investigated as to how many prostitutes and panhandlers are permitted to ply their trade on Pennsylvania Avenue during the presidential inauguration?
Now a few words about the Cox Report, the best seller of the right wing press. The outlandish claims and exaggerations contained in what has to be the most disgraceful document ever produced by Congress have been pretty thoroughly reviewed and dismissed by many from the left, middle and the right. I won't get into them here today, though I would be glad to send an email on my detailed analysis of the report upon request. The report makes a big deal about rampant espionage conducted in the U.S. by China. Yet the only culprit the report can cite is some Chinese American sentenced to 12 months in a halfway house, paid a fine and made to perform certain hours of community service. Does this sound like a dastardly spy that sold out his country?
Congressman Cox has repeatedly assured his Asian American constituent that racial profiling of Asian Americans is the last thing on his mind. (If in his efforts to topple the Clinton Administration, a few Chinese Americans get tarred, well so sorry.) Yet his report suggests this spying is so pervasive that the only explanation, as offered by Senator Shelby of Alabama among many others, is mosaic espionage, whereby every Chinese American by virtue of his/her cultural affinity is a potential intelligence gatherer for China. This, by the way, is the explanation being offered by a retired FBI official who spent 20 fruitless years in counter-espionage and did not catch one single spy for China. I find it infuriating that he should make up for his incompetence by broad brushing the entire population of Chinese Americans. I find it even more appalling that he can actually find an outlet for this stuff by appearing in various talk shows and in the printed media.
Now we come to the case of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, heretofore an American making important contribution to national defense--our American national defense by the way--who’s only known infraction is to download computer files onto his unsecured desktop computer. This happens to be a common albeit not sanctioned practice for the sake of higher productivity. Former CIA Director, John Deutsch, even downloaded secret files into his laptop so that he can take them home. None have been accused of disloyalty and summarily dismissed until Dr. Lee. FBI investigating Dr. Lee calls their investigation as "Operation Kindred Spirit" which should tell you volumes about where this case is coming from.
What about the question of cultural affinity, does it lead to dual loyalty? I have met a young author in Los Angeles who has written several books. Looking at her red hair and pale freckled face, you would never guess that her great grandfather is Chinese. But she thinks of herself as Chinese and her first book is about the Chinese side of her family tree. Some of you may know her, Lisa See, and her book, Return to Gold Mountain. I have not had the opportunity to ask her why she identifies so strongly with her Chinese heritage. My guess is that the attraction is in the richness of the enduring Chinese culture.
Of course the Chinese culture has fascinated the West for centuries. For such people as John Fairbanks, Jonathan Spence, Michel Oksenberg, Douglas Paal, Winston Lord, Ken Lieberthal and many others that are not ethnic Chinese, this fascination has translated into jobs as professors, pundits, ambassadors, spooks and as presidential advisors. Never, to my knowledge, has any of these gentlemen ever been suspected or accused of disloyalty because of their "cultural affinity." Conversely, any ethnic Chinese, even if they are born in America with little or no empathy for China, are still suspects.
So Mr. FBI and Senator Shelby and all the others out there, I say stop hiding behind this hypocrisy and start calling a spade a spade. Cultural affinity has nothing to do with your accusations. In your mind, if the person looks Chinese, he or she is a possible suspect. Period.
We have seen this mentality before when Japanese Americans were interred for suspected disloyalty for no other grounds than their ethnicity. It took decades to overturn this gross injustice and we thought never again. But this attitude is flaring up again. In some ways, this time around the discrimination is even worse because of its subtlety. Then Japan was the clear aggressor and one can at least claim panic under siege for the error in judgment, though that's hardly an appropriate excuse. Now China is cast as the demon offshore even though China has made no aggressive act--unless putting their embassy in harm's way is considered a hostile act.
There are forces in this country determined to turn China into a target for venom and hate. Each group has their own agenda for targeting China. Those on the right disapprove of China's population control policies, the left on supposed human rights violations, and the organized labor on illusory threats to American jobs and still others thrive on bilateral friction as a means of livelihood. This is a vast subject for another day. Suffice it to say that the critics have one common ground. They make no attempt to understand where China is today; they insist on measuring China by their own comfortable frame of reference which may be totally irrelevant; and, they have no interest in being objective.
I will simply mention one example. The Cox Report would have you believe that every significant piece of military technology owned by China has been stolen from the U.S. Let me simply mentioned these historical facts. China successfully fired their first guided missile on June 29, 1964. Exploded their first atomic bomb on October 16, 1964 and less than three years later on June 17, 1967 detonated their first hydrogen bomb. On April 24, 1970, China lofted its first man-made satellite. The time China took to develop the H-bomb from the A-bomb was less than half the time of any other member nations of the nuclear club. The time for them to send the first satellite aloft from concept to launch was five years.
Do I need to remind the audience that these events took place long before ping-pong diplomacy and Nixon's historic meeting with Mao in 1972? They took place while China was a hermit kingdom sealed not only from the West but had severed relations with the Soviet Union. What are we to conclude from the Cox Report? That the Chinese became dazzled by the superiority of the West, stop thinking for themselves and steal their way to the next level of military might? Recently a book called "OSS in China" came to my attention. Thoroughly researched and taking advantage of recently declassified material about the U.S. intelligence efforts in China during WWII, I am struck by one permeating theme. The bumbling efforts of OSS in China were due to the ignorance of Chinese culture and patronizing condescension of the Americans in charge. Parenthetically, I should mention that they were also hampered by internal politics and bitter infighting. I don't think things have changed much since that time.
The demonizing of China and consequent broad brush tarring of all Chinese Americans has a serious consequence for America. At any one time, there are approximately 150,000 Chinese Americans working in universities, national and private laboratories advancing America's scientific and technological edge. Senator Shelby thinks it would be a good thing to get rid of them and open up some vacancies for "real" Americans. What do you think? A Chinese American invented the Apollo space suit. A Chinese American developed the atomic clock necessary for the global positioning system. A team of Chinese Americans developed the principles of hypersonic flow, which pave the way for easing entry of ICBMs and spacecraft into the atmosphere. The list goes on. Anybody think Senator Shelby is on the right track?
During the hysteria of the Joe McCarthy era, a founder of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab and a pioneer of America's missile technology was accused of disloyalty and put under house arrest for five years. He, Qian Xue Sen, was allowed to go to China in 1955 where a year later he headed China's missile development program. On June 29, 1964, China successfully launched their first guided missile. Is this the direction we want to go?
I was in Beijing on December 16, 1978 when normalization of the relations with the U.S. was announced in an extra edition of the People's Daily, printed in red ink instead of the usual black. The only other time the People's Daily ever ran an extra edition was when China detonated their first atomic bomb. That was an indication of the importance China attached to the bilateral relations. As a Chinese American I was ecstatic. I bought a copy of the extra and had it framed, as what I thought would be a historic document. Unfortunately, if you read Patrick Tyler's recently released book, A Great Wall, the U.S. side has always subject the relationship to petty domestic squabbles rather treating it with statesman-like respect and linking it to the long term interest of the U.S.
Ladies and gentlemen, I hope I have made a case that the title of my talk is not simply a rhetorical question. Now I would like to open the floor for discussion on where do we go from here, because frankly, I don't have very good answers. Thank you very much.
Tuesday, January 17, 1995
Apple China Forum
Godd afternoon, ladies and gentleman. It is a pleasure to participate at this Apple China Forum and a honor indeed to be part of this distinguished body. Parenthetically, I should admit that I am glad that the 49'ers played yesterday.
As recently as 15 months ago, when I chaired a conference in Silicon Valley sponsored by the Asian American Manufacturers Association on fastest growing economies of Asia, it was still necessary to declare that China has become the world's hottest and fastest growing market for just about anything. Now that has become common knowledge. Those of us that have been active in China has seen the list of items that every household hungers for changed from the bicycle and sewing machine to color TV and refrigerator; now its VCR, camcorder, CD player and home karaoke sets. The family car and the personal computer are likely to be next on the desired list.
As you can see from this chart, courtesy of Dataquest, sale of personal computer, since 1992, is already beginning to take off in China. I believe, however, that so far virtually all of the sales are outside of the home market. But there is a lot of market left. One way of looking at China's market potential of China is to compare to that of the U.S. Even if we consider only the urban population which is roughly 25% of the total population, the per capita concentration of PCs in China is about 1/40th of the U.S.
So if you decide to enter this market, what do you need to know about China? Where are the potholes on this silk road to Cathay? In addition to the usual parameters in entering any new market, there are some that are peculiar to China. My fellow panelists will no doubt add others.
A big reason for the complexities of the China market is because China is still in transition from a state-controlled allocation system to a distribution that is unevenly determined by market forces. Some organizations can import directly; others still have go through state authorized trading corporations. Some dealers have powerful backers; others operate in briefcases that were here yesterday but gone today. Some specialize in soft currency transactions to organizations loaded with Rmbs but no dollars.
As recently as 15 months ago, when I chaired a conference in Silicon Valley sponsored by the Asian American Manufacturers Association on fastest growing economies of Asia, it was still necessary to declare that China has become the world's hottest and fastest growing market for just about anything. Now that has become common knowledge. Those of us that have been active in China has seen the list of items that every household hungers for changed from the bicycle and sewing machine to color TV and refrigerator; now its VCR, camcorder, CD player and home karaoke sets. The family car and the personal computer are likely to be next on the desired list.
As you can see from this chart, courtesy of Dataquest, sale of personal computer, since 1992, is already beginning to take off in China. I believe, however, that so far virtually all of the sales are outside of the home market. But there is a lot of market left. One way of looking at China's market potential of China is to compare to that of the U.S. Even if we consider only the urban population which is roughly 25% of the total population, the per capita concentration of PCs in China is about 1/40th of the U.S.
So if you decide to enter this market, what do you need to know about China? Where are the potholes on this silk road to Cathay? In addition to the usual parameters in entering any new market, there are some that are peculiar to China. My fellow panelists will no doubt add others.
A big reason for the complexities of the China market is because China is still in transition from a state-controlled allocation system to a distribution that is unevenly determined by market forces. Some organizations can import directly; others still have go through state authorized trading corporations. Some dealers have powerful backers; others operate in briefcases that were here yesterday but gone today. Some specialize in soft currency transactions to organizations loaded with Rmbs but no dollars.
Friday, May 13, 1994
Sietar Keynote Speech, 5/13/94
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a pleasure and an honor to be invited to speak before you. It is a double honor to share the stage with State Assemblyman John Vasconcellos. Mr. Vasconcellos in my humble opinion is one of those rare independent thinkers who genuinely take the best interest of his constituents, his state and his country to heart. The highest tribute that I can pay to John is to say that he doesn't think and act like a politician.
I believe this is a particularly appropriate time to have as the theme of this conference, intercultural understanding around the Pacific Rim. The world has changed dramatically in the most recent decade. With television and the likes of omnipresent CNN, the world is a much smaller and compact place. Words and values as well as action get passed around with the speed of light. Americans cannot afford to remain in the dark about any other part of the world and about other cultures and ethnic groups.
With the dissolution of big bad bear used to be known as the USSR, America is no longer look upon as the standard bearer of the good guys. Maybe it is ungrateful of the Asian nations but they seem to consider themselves more as peers to America now than as dependents. This means that the days when America speaks and Asia listen are gone and probably not ever coming back. Now the communication will have to be in both directions. Consequently it is going to be vitally necessary for America to recast their role, and to do so, it will be necessary to understand the cultures around the Pacific Rim and how they differ from the western values embraced by the U.S..
Finally the U.S. cannot ignore the economic boom that is taking place in East Asia. For the first time last year, Japan's trade within East Asia has exceeded its trade with North America. Similar trend can be seen in China and other Asian states. The East Asian nations are becoming more regionally interdependent. If the U.S. does not want to be a second fiddle in this arena, then it will have to learn and master intercultural communication and exchange around the Pacific Rim.
While the rest of the conference will deal with the specific subject areas that make up intercultural understanding, I would like to make some observations of intercultural differences between the East and West. I should hasten to add that I do not consider myself any sort of intercultural expert. My vantage point is that of a business consultant who has been helping American companies develop durable relationships in Asia. I find that I frequently do things more intuitively and without conscious intent. In any case I hope you would find my random remarks relevant to this conference.
First of all, and I wish with the bottom of my heart that this is not true, but from what I can see, the Clinton Administrations approach to East Asia is as wrong-headed as it can be. A real disaster. The style is best exemplified by trade negotiator Mickey Kantor who is the very personification of a super American attorney. In other words, a hard nosed, confrontational, aggressive, in-your-face kind of guy. Whether the issue is human rights in China, numerical targets for markets in Japan, nuclear weapons in North Korea or the tender buttocks of a teen age graffiti artist in Singapore, the approach of the Clinton Administration has been to favor very public demand over behind-the-scenes diplomacy.
Take the case of Michael Fay. If the original intent was to intercede on his behalf, publicly condemning caning as cruel and unusual punishment was not going get him off, and it didn't. The Asians could not understand why the President of United States would on account of one mere individual of dubious upbringing elect to publicly embarrass another sovereign state and government. This was not an action they could understand. To Asians, the most powerful leader in the world presumably had more important matters to worry about.
By reducing the sentence by two strokes, the Singaporean government was in their own way returning the insult. In effect they are saying that the prestige of the U.S. Presidency was worth two strokes on Young Fay's buttocks. Of course with a martial arts master manning the cane, there is a great deal of latitude on just how much damage one or six full strokes can do. The proper approach, in my opinion, assuming that any approach was warranted, and I am not convinced that it was, would have been for the White House to write a private (let me emphasize: private) letter to the head of state of Singapore asking for leniency on behalf of Fay. That way face would not be involved and both sides have a chance to get off gracefully.
Michael Fay's father's insistence to carry on the dispute after the fact was also interesting. If Fay had been an Asian, his father's anguish would have been equally heart felt except a lot of it would be caused by chagrin and embarrassment that somehow he had failed to bring his son up properly. In fact the father of the boy from Hongkong from the same gang who received 12 strokes was quoted to have said, "Singapore is a good place except for that."
You see, in the U.S., family values became a battle cry of sorts in recent political history. But it turns out that the former vice president Quayle and candidate Pat Buchanan was more interested in knocking down the rating of a popular TV program than showing any real understanding of what family values really means. The Asians, on the other hand, have been guided by their sense of family values since the days of Confucius, or about 600 years before the common era. (That's BC for those of you that haven't gone to see the Dead Sea scrolls exhibit.) The Asian sense of right and wrong and daily conduct is guided by the strictures of the family. By the desire not to bring shame to the family, by the sense of obligation to the common good of the family, by the need to bring honor to the family name. This set of values is why in Asia caning can replace the need for overflowing jail. The public embarrassment of having to endure the caning is far more difficult than to be quietly spending time in jail. I don't think the "Three strikes and your out" advocates in this country would understand this difference.
We all heard about Secretary Warren Christopher's recent disastrous trip to China, ostensibly to tell China on how they should behave as related to human rights. What we heard was the rebuff he received from the Chinese. We didn't hear much about what actually happened. According eyewitnesses, upon arrival at the Beijing airport, he immediately encountered an impasse because of his insistence to bring a police dog into town as part of his entourage for security reasons. As is common in many countries, the Chinese insisted that the dog stay at the airport in quarantine and there can be no exception. Just from the slogans of old about Yankee running dogs, one would know that dog are not look upon quite the same way in China.
After relenting, he then insisted on riding in from the airport with the American ambassador to get an early briefing rather with the vice foreign minister in the lead limousine. Then instead of staying at Diaoyutai, the State guest house, where all foreign dignitaries are put up, Secretary Christopher insisted on staying at a hotel to allow easier access with the staff of the American embassy. May be the secretary have good reasons for these decisions, but they certainly were not diplomatic and must have added considerably to the frosty atmosphere.
Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, the self-annointed champion of human rights in China, committed an even more atrocious gaff in my opinion. In 1991 she went to Beijing as part of a delegation that were guests of the Chinese government, ostensibly to see for themselves as to the conditions in China. Of course their schedule was arranged by the Chinese host. One day she excused herself for being too tired and was thought to return to the hotel. Next thing you know, she appeared at Tiananmen Square in front of a battery of TV cameras that by some strange coincidence seemed to be waiting there. She unfurled a banner protesting human rights conditions in China. Of course she gained considerable political capital back home even if at the expense of her relationship with her host in China.
This is probably not the right forum to get into this, but I am not in favor of mixing the human rights issue which most favored nation status, which is a trade issue. I think the Clinton has been giving so many mixed and confusing signals on this matter that it is doubtful that the U.S. has any longer any kind of leverage on China. Suffice it for me to quote the late President Nixon on this matter. He said in his last book: "Within two decades...., the Chinese may threaten to withhold MFN status from the U.S. unless we do more to improve living conditions in Detroit, Harlem and South Central Los Angeles."
At a recent keynote speech in the Bay area, Milton Friedman said political freedom has nothing to do with economic freedom. The two are not related and having democracy does not necessary lead to better off economies. Improving economies does lead to liberalization of human lives.
We have been too long in the position of calling the shots. Now, even though other nations are no longer in the mood to just listen and abide, we have not gotten out of the habit. In order to maintain our prestige and our influence it will be necessary for us to modify our behavior to be in sync with the changing times.
Let me conclude with a couple of anecdotal stories that more or less exemplify moderate behavior mixed with intercultural understanding.
A group from Shanghai recently paid a return visit to a company in Tennessee. It was to be their first visit to the U.S. The American host, having visit China first, understood that Chinese are accustomed to drinking hot tea all day long. Since American hotels do not normally provide boiling water for tea, the executive provided electric kettles for heating water in each room. He also bought mason jars for each of the visitor! In case, some of you don't know, mason jars are used for home canning. From his visit to China he noticed that taxi drivers use jars to hold their tea, from which they would sip all day long. So he concluded that Chinese like to drink tea from glass jars.
Actually Tang, the breakfast drink is popular in China and the empty bottle with the lid is just right for holding tea while the lid keeps the contents from spilling in the taxi. So you see virtually all the cab drivers with the Tang bottles. I had to keep from laughing when I explained that regular mugs would have done the job nicely. But it turns out the joke was on me. The executive had found some with mason jars with handles so that they really were for drinking. The Chinese loved them because they also could be used to make instant noodles which they preferred to Western breakfast.
On Huaihai Road, which is one of the two busiest and glitziest commercial streets in Shanghai, there is a busy and popular fast food restaurant decked out in golden yellow and orange red. It's called Nancy's Fast Food and its trade mark is the letter "N" which is represented by one and one half of golden arch. Can you picture this: one and half golden arches on a reddish orange background? Now if Nancy's fast food is in the U.S., what would you do if you are MacDonalds? You would hire a lawyer, of course. But you are in China and the owner on Nancy's is related to the mayor, arguably the most powerful man in the town of 14 million, what do you do? You could protest via Washington. You could ignore it or in this actual case, MacDonald is opening its first restaurant in Shanghai just a few storefronts away from Nancy's. It is going to be very interesting to see what if anything will happen to the business volume of either stores.
I believe to be successful in this modern world, it is necessary to understand other cultures and know how to communicate effectively across cultural gaps and mismatches. Those that do will be successful. Those that do not, will be frustrated all the time. I wish all of you success in your participation in the remainder of this conference. Thank you very much for your attention.
It is a pleasure and an honor to be invited to speak before you. It is a double honor to share the stage with State Assemblyman John Vasconcellos. Mr. Vasconcellos in my humble opinion is one of those rare independent thinkers who genuinely take the best interest of his constituents, his state and his country to heart. The highest tribute that I can pay to John is to say that he doesn't think and act like a politician.
I believe this is a particularly appropriate time to have as the theme of this conference, intercultural understanding around the Pacific Rim. The world has changed dramatically in the most recent decade. With television and the likes of omnipresent CNN, the world is a much smaller and compact place. Words and values as well as action get passed around with the speed of light. Americans cannot afford to remain in the dark about any other part of the world and about other cultures and ethnic groups.
With the dissolution of big bad bear used to be known as the USSR, America is no longer look upon as the standard bearer of the good guys. Maybe it is ungrateful of the Asian nations but they seem to consider themselves more as peers to America now than as dependents. This means that the days when America speaks and Asia listen are gone and probably not ever coming back. Now the communication will have to be in both directions. Consequently it is going to be vitally necessary for America to recast their role, and to do so, it will be necessary to understand the cultures around the Pacific Rim and how they differ from the western values embraced by the U.S..
Finally the U.S. cannot ignore the economic boom that is taking place in East Asia. For the first time last year, Japan's trade within East Asia has exceeded its trade with North America. Similar trend can be seen in China and other Asian states. The East Asian nations are becoming more regionally interdependent. If the U.S. does not want to be a second fiddle in this arena, then it will have to learn and master intercultural communication and exchange around the Pacific Rim.
While the rest of the conference will deal with the specific subject areas that make up intercultural understanding, I would like to make some observations of intercultural differences between the East and West. I should hasten to add that I do not consider myself any sort of intercultural expert. My vantage point is that of a business consultant who has been helping American companies develop durable relationships in Asia. I find that I frequently do things more intuitively and without conscious intent. In any case I hope you would find my random remarks relevant to this conference.
First of all, and I wish with the bottom of my heart that this is not true, but from what I can see, the Clinton Administrations approach to East Asia is as wrong-headed as it can be. A real disaster. The style is best exemplified by trade negotiator Mickey Kantor who is the very personification of a super American attorney. In other words, a hard nosed, confrontational, aggressive, in-your-face kind of guy. Whether the issue is human rights in China, numerical targets for markets in Japan, nuclear weapons in North Korea or the tender buttocks of a teen age graffiti artist in Singapore, the approach of the Clinton Administration has been to favor very public demand over behind-the-scenes diplomacy.
Take the case of Michael Fay. If the original intent was to intercede on his behalf, publicly condemning caning as cruel and unusual punishment was not going get him off, and it didn't. The Asians could not understand why the President of United States would on account of one mere individual of dubious upbringing elect to publicly embarrass another sovereign state and government. This was not an action they could understand. To Asians, the most powerful leader in the world presumably had more important matters to worry about.
By reducing the sentence by two strokes, the Singaporean government was in their own way returning the insult. In effect they are saying that the prestige of the U.S. Presidency was worth two strokes on Young Fay's buttocks. Of course with a martial arts master manning the cane, there is a great deal of latitude on just how much damage one or six full strokes can do. The proper approach, in my opinion, assuming that any approach was warranted, and I am not convinced that it was, would have been for the White House to write a private (let me emphasize: private) letter to the head of state of Singapore asking for leniency on behalf of Fay. That way face would not be involved and both sides have a chance to get off gracefully.
Michael Fay's father's insistence to carry on the dispute after the fact was also interesting. If Fay had been an Asian, his father's anguish would have been equally heart felt except a lot of it would be caused by chagrin and embarrassment that somehow he had failed to bring his son up properly. In fact the father of the boy from Hongkong from the same gang who received 12 strokes was quoted to have said, "Singapore is a good place except for that."
You see, in the U.S., family values became a battle cry of sorts in recent political history. But it turns out that the former vice president Quayle and candidate Pat Buchanan was more interested in knocking down the rating of a popular TV program than showing any real understanding of what family values really means. The Asians, on the other hand, have been guided by their sense of family values since the days of Confucius, or about 600 years before the common era. (That's BC for those of you that haven't gone to see the Dead Sea scrolls exhibit.) The Asian sense of right and wrong and daily conduct is guided by the strictures of the family. By the desire not to bring shame to the family, by the sense of obligation to the common good of the family, by the need to bring honor to the family name. This set of values is why in Asia caning can replace the need for overflowing jail. The public embarrassment of having to endure the caning is far more difficult than to be quietly spending time in jail. I don't think the "Three strikes and your out" advocates in this country would understand this difference.
We all heard about Secretary Warren Christopher's recent disastrous trip to China, ostensibly to tell China on how they should behave as related to human rights. What we heard was the rebuff he received from the Chinese. We didn't hear much about what actually happened. According eyewitnesses, upon arrival at the Beijing airport, he immediately encountered an impasse because of his insistence to bring a police dog into town as part of his entourage for security reasons. As is common in many countries, the Chinese insisted that the dog stay at the airport in quarantine and there can be no exception. Just from the slogans of old about Yankee running dogs, one would know that dog are not look upon quite the same way in China.
After relenting, he then insisted on riding in from the airport with the American ambassador to get an early briefing rather with the vice foreign minister in the lead limousine. Then instead of staying at Diaoyutai, the State guest house, where all foreign dignitaries are put up, Secretary Christopher insisted on staying at a hotel to allow easier access with the staff of the American embassy. May be the secretary have good reasons for these decisions, but they certainly were not diplomatic and must have added considerably to the frosty atmosphere.
Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, the self-annointed champion of human rights in China, committed an even more atrocious gaff in my opinion. In 1991 she went to Beijing as part of a delegation that were guests of the Chinese government, ostensibly to see for themselves as to the conditions in China. Of course their schedule was arranged by the Chinese host. One day she excused herself for being too tired and was thought to return to the hotel. Next thing you know, she appeared at Tiananmen Square in front of a battery of TV cameras that by some strange coincidence seemed to be waiting there. She unfurled a banner protesting human rights conditions in China. Of course she gained considerable political capital back home even if at the expense of her relationship with her host in China.
This is probably not the right forum to get into this, but I am not in favor of mixing the human rights issue which most favored nation status, which is a trade issue. I think the Clinton has been giving so many mixed and confusing signals on this matter that it is doubtful that the U.S. has any longer any kind of leverage on China. Suffice it for me to quote the late President Nixon on this matter. He said in his last book: "Within two decades...., the Chinese may threaten to withhold MFN status from the U.S. unless we do more to improve living conditions in Detroit, Harlem and South Central Los Angeles."
At a recent keynote speech in the Bay area, Milton Friedman said political freedom has nothing to do with economic freedom. The two are not related and having democracy does not necessary lead to better off economies. Improving economies does lead to liberalization of human lives.
We have been too long in the position of calling the shots. Now, even though other nations are no longer in the mood to just listen and abide, we have not gotten out of the habit. In order to maintain our prestige and our influence it will be necessary for us to modify our behavior to be in sync with the changing times.
Let me conclude with a couple of anecdotal stories that more or less exemplify moderate behavior mixed with intercultural understanding.
A group from Shanghai recently paid a return visit to a company in Tennessee. It was to be their first visit to the U.S. The American host, having visit China first, understood that Chinese are accustomed to drinking hot tea all day long. Since American hotels do not normally provide boiling water for tea, the executive provided electric kettles for heating water in each room. He also bought mason jars for each of the visitor! In case, some of you don't know, mason jars are used for home canning. From his visit to China he noticed that taxi drivers use jars to hold their tea, from which they would sip all day long. So he concluded that Chinese like to drink tea from glass jars.
Actually Tang, the breakfast drink is popular in China and the empty bottle with the lid is just right for holding tea while the lid keeps the contents from spilling in the taxi. So you see virtually all the cab drivers with the Tang bottles. I had to keep from laughing when I explained that regular mugs would have done the job nicely. But it turns out the joke was on me. The executive had found some with mason jars with handles so that they really were for drinking. The Chinese loved them because they also could be used to make instant noodles which they preferred to Western breakfast.
On Huaihai Road, which is one of the two busiest and glitziest commercial streets in Shanghai, there is a busy and popular fast food restaurant decked out in golden yellow and orange red. It's called Nancy's Fast Food and its trade mark is the letter "N" which is represented by one and one half of golden arch. Can you picture this: one and half golden arches on a reddish orange background? Now if Nancy's fast food is in the U.S., what would you do if you are MacDonalds? You would hire a lawyer, of course. But you are in China and the owner on Nancy's is related to the mayor, arguably the most powerful man in the town of 14 million, what do you do? You could protest via Washington. You could ignore it or in this actual case, MacDonald is opening its first restaurant in Shanghai just a few storefronts away from Nancy's. It is going to be very interesting to see what if anything will happen to the business volume of either stores.
I believe to be successful in this modern world, it is necessary to understand other cultures and know how to communicate effectively across cultural gaps and mismatches. Those that do will be successful. Those that do not, will be frustrated all the time. I wish all of you success in your participation in the remainder of this conference. Thank you very much for your attention.
Wednesday, October 20, 1993
AAMA Annual conference, 1993
Opening remarks as Chairman of the 1993 annual conference, the fourth in succession of annual conferences that I chaired going back to 1990.
Since this conference is located in the now world famous Silicon Valley, I thought we would kick off the conference with the help of some state-of-the-art high tech presentation gadget. This device is called Media Pro and is on loan from nView of Newport News, Va. The technical brochure is available in the literature handout area for those interested in knowing more. My colleague Jon Goldman is the creator of ths presentation.
Over the past three years or so, the world has been engrossed by the rapidly changing Easern Europe and may have wondered about the business opportunities in that part of the world.
Frequently overlooked has been one part of the world which has been growing steadily and some would say spectacularly for the last two decades. We are referring to Asia of course, and paticularly East Asia.
Since one of the mission of AAMA is to act as the bridge enhancing greater understanding and cooperation between the East and West, we have accordingly decided to concentrate on "Keys to Asia's New Economies" as the topic for the conference for the next two days. To paraphrase a local TV channel, you have questions, we try to provide answers. As you will see, we have invited speakers who understand and have been successful in that part of the world and others from that part of the world to tell you what changes are taking place, what opportunities these changes protend, and how to participate there.
We had originally hope to invite an official from the World Bank to present an overview of that region. Unfortunately, they have other travel commitments, but they were most gracious in sending us the latest compilation of economic data so that we can pretend to be an economist for next five minutes.
The reason for throwing up this slide on Japan's export history is to show that since 1991, Asia has taken over from the U.S. as its largest trading partner. And as you can see, while the export to the U.S. is static, the trend with Asia is steadily climbing. In fact, in 1992 China alone has become Japan's second largest trading partner, second only to the United States. To give you another indication of the growing importance of Asia and China in particular to Japan, last year Japanese companies initiated 1800 new investments in China, equal to the sum total for the preceding 13 years. What is it that the Japanese know that we in the U.S. still don't know or at least fully appreciate? One of the business books Japanese were reading this summer was "China: Japan's only escape route from America's impending bankruptcy."
If you consider what rate of growth for the gross domestic product or gross national product (to us non-economists GDP and GNP are practically the same) has been for the Asian countries compared to the developed economies like the U.S. and Japan, then Japan's interest in Asia becomes easy to understand. As you can see from this slide, the GDP for Asia outside of Japan has been growing at 5-10% per year and is expected to continue. While for the U.S. and Japan, the growth rate when it is not negative, has been in the 1-2% per year. The forecast for the U.S. here may be by a particularly optimistic economist.
If you compare the per capita GDP of the established economies to the Asian countries by the traditional yardsticks, the difference seemed to be vast (for instance the annual per capita GDP of China is only $370 which is considered barely above poverty level) and one would wonder what markets and business opportunities could possibly exist in these countries. Trouble is traditional yardsticks are not comparing apples with apples and has been misleading.
Recently the United Nations and International Monetary Fund has been adjusting the local GDPs by the purchasing power parity. PPP is economist talk and we do not need to go into it here. Suffice it to say that the same dollar can buy a lot more or less from country to country and the buying power needs to be taken into account. When that's done, all the previously mentioned Asian countries have significant GDPs and indeed the consumer habits and existence of markets more closely reflect the adjusted GDPs that the traditional ones.
In fact according to the UN, when looked upon in that manner, China and India are among the 5 largest economies in the world ahead of all of the developed Western European countries. In light of these findings, Asia should no longer be considered as just a place for low cost labor. Asia represents the most vibrant part of the world.
We have invited some of the most qualified speakers to address the theme of this conference. I am guessing that their recommendations will have certain things in common: The market is global. You need to be there. To be there you need to have an open mind, willing to listen and learn, and ready to be flexible to find ways that will enable you to succeed in each and every local market.
----------------------------------
Note by blogger: These remarks were made almost 15 years ago and still resonates in 2008.
Since this conference is located in the now world famous Silicon Valley, I thought we would kick off the conference with the help of some state-of-the-art high tech presentation gadget. This device is called Media Pro and is on loan from nView of Newport News, Va. The technical brochure is available in the literature handout area for those interested in knowing more. My colleague Jon Goldman is the creator of ths presentation.
Over the past three years or so, the world has been engrossed by the rapidly changing Easern Europe and may have wondered about the business opportunities in that part of the world.
Frequently overlooked has been one part of the world which has been growing steadily and some would say spectacularly for the last two decades. We are referring to Asia of course, and paticularly East Asia.
Since one of the mission of AAMA is to act as the bridge enhancing greater understanding and cooperation between the East and West, we have accordingly decided to concentrate on "Keys to Asia's New Economies" as the topic for the conference for the next two days. To paraphrase a local TV channel, you have questions, we try to provide answers. As you will see, we have invited speakers who understand and have been successful in that part of the world and others from that part of the world to tell you what changes are taking place, what opportunities these changes protend, and how to participate there.
We had originally hope to invite an official from the World Bank to present an overview of that region. Unfortunately, they have other travel commitments, but they were most gracious in sending us the latest compilation of economic data so that we can pretend to be an economist for next five minutes.
The reason for throwing up this slide on Japan's export history is to show that since 1991, Asia has taken over from the U.S. as its largest trading partner. And as you can see, while the export to the U.S. is static, the trend with Asia is steadily climbing. In fact, in 1992 China alone has become Japan's second largest trading partner, second only to the United States. To give you another indication of the growing importance of Asia and China in particular to Japan, last year Japanese companies initiated 1800 new investments in China, equal to the sum total for the preceding 13 years. What is it that the Japanese know that we in the U.S. still don't know or at least fully appreciate? One of the business books Japanese were reading this summer was "China: Japan's only escape route from America's impending bankruptcy."
If you consider what rate of growth for the gross domestic product or gross national product (to us non-economists GDP and GNP are practically the same) has been for the Asian countries compared to the developed economies like the U.S. and Japan, then Japan's interest in Asia becomes easy to understand. As you can see from this slide, the GDP for Asia outside of Japan has been growing at 5-10% per year and is expected to continue. While for the U.S. and Japan, the growth rate when it is not negative, has been in the 1-2% per year. The forecast for the U.S. here may be by a particularly optimistic economist.
If you compare the per capita GDP of the established economies to the Asian countries by the traditional yardsticks, the difference seemed to be vast (for instance the annual per capita GDP of China is only $370 which is considered barely above poverty level) and one would wonder what markets and business opportunities could possibly exist in these countries. Trouble is traditional yardsticks are not comparing apples with apples and has been misleading.
Recently the United Nations and International Monetary Fund has been adjusting the local GDPs by the purchasing power parity. PPP is economist talk and we do not need to go into it here. Suffice it to say that the same dollar can buy a lot more or less from country to country and the buying power needs to be taken into account. When that's done, all the previously mentioned Asian countries have significant GDPs and indeed the consumer habits and existence of markets more closely reflect the adjusted GDPs that the traditional ones.
In fact according to the UN, when looked upon in that manner, China and India are among the 5 largest economies in the world ahead of all of the developed Western European countries. In light of these findings, Asia should no longer be considered as just a place for low cost labor. Asia represents the most vibrant part of the world.
We have invited some of the most qualified speakers to address the theme of this conference. I am guessing that their recommendations will have certain things in common: The market is global. You need to be there. To be there you need to have an open mind, willing to listen and learn, and ready to be flexible to find ways that will enable you to succeed in each and every local market.
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Note by blogger: These remarks were made almost 15 years ago and still resonates in 2008.
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