Collaborating with China is in America's National Interest

This item was first posted on Asia Times.

As reported in the weekend edition of WSJ, there are two contending schools of thought on how to deal with China’s rise. One school is to raise the pressure in confronting China such as increasing the surveillance flights over South China Sea.

The other is to concede the inevitability of China’s rise and find ways to accommodate China. Perhaps the most developed among this latter line of reasoning is the book in progress by Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister of Australia and visiting scholar at Harvard.

Rudd sees China’s economy sustainable, growing at more than 6% annually and he expects China’s economic, political and foreign policy influence in Asia to continue to grow. China is now a bigger trading partner than is the U.S. with every Asian country.

Forcing the Asian countries to choose between the security of the U.S. military presence and the economic linkage with China would be unwise, Rudd suggests. It would be an all around losing proposition.

I would go further and suggest that finding ways to collaborate with China is in America’s national interest.

North to south, from Ukraine to Afghanistan to Iraq and the Middle East to most of the African continent, roughly one seventh of the earth’s land mass and as many of the population face the daily prospect of death and destruction. This has been more than plenty for the U.S. to deal with.

Just Afghanistan and Iraq has cost the U.S. north of $3 trillion—depending on how expenditures are counted—and still no end in sight. The U.S. national debt is over $18 trillion and no sign of shrinking. To freely pick up the option of adding China to the list of adversaries makes no fiscal sense.

In Xi Jinping, China’s new leader, Rudd sees a strong leader impatient for China to take its place on the world stage.

According to Rudd’s report, “Xi does see potential value in strategic and political collaboration with the United States. I argue that Xi is capable of bold policy moves, even including the possibility of grand strategic bargains on intractable questions such as the denuclearization and peaceful re-unification of the Korean Peninsula.“

In other words, by collaborating with China, it would be possible to resolve certain knotty problems that the U.S. despite its military might cannot solve.

With its $4 trillion in reserve, China has been going around the world making friends by proposing win-win infrastructure investments. Recently, Premier Li Keqiang while in Peru proposed building a railroad from Peru traversing through the Amazon to Brazil. It would be a land bridge from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

It is bold and it is visionary but China has the experience and expertise to undertake and bring to completion such vast projects.

With the “one belt, one road” initiative, China proposes to invest in a string of ports from China’s east coast all the way through the Mediterranean to Greece and Italy and high speed rail through Central Asia to the seaports of Western Europe.

Even countries that are wary of China such as India, Philippines and Vietnam have sign on to be part of the initiative because they can see the value of becoming part of the economic integration that the initiative promises for the future.

Only the U.S. has been slow on the uptake. The Obama Administration wasted political capital trying to convince nations not to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank on the soothsaying (and lame) concern that the bank would not be transparent.

Figuratively speaking, 57 nations broke the door down and trampled Treasury Secretary Jack Lew in the rush to join the bank. The founding nations recently met in Singapore and quickly drafted the articles of incorporation.

Unlike the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, nonpaid and non-resident board of directors will oversee the bank. And, unlike the stodgy predecessors, the new bank will aim for high standards of efficiency and transparency.

Each nation will have votes related to their capital contribution. China with the largest contribution will have the highest number of votes but will not have veto power. Smaller Asian nations will have more say in this bank than they ever did at the World Bank or the ADB.

China’s national interest is to be at the heart of global economic integration. Infrastructure investments will enhance the global economy, consistent with their long-term objective. 

Competing with the U.S. militarily or otherwise is not in their interest. It shouldn’t be for the U.S. either. Instead, replacing confrontation with collaboration should be in America’s national interest as well.

Much needed infrastructure improvements in Asia will cause the Asian economy to boom. A growing Asia will be a vital stimulus for the rest of the world. And certainly not least as the world’s second largest economy by then, the U.S. would be a significant beneficiary.

I can offer an illustrative date point in support of this view. Last year, nearly 2.2 million tourists visited the U.S. from China and they spent around $23 billion as compared to 23 million visitors from Canada and they spent $26 billion, about 9 to 1 difference.

China is already the world’s largest source of tourists with the reputation as the biggest per capita spenders. The ten-year, multiple entry visa negotiated last year will greatly facilitate more visitors from China, unless jaundiced geopolitics get in the way.

The path to begin collaboration is not complicated. Washington should stop telling Beijing what to do and stop making accusations in public. Incidents of verifiable cyber incursions and theft of intellectual properties should be discussed and resolved in private and not used for the benefit of fanning domestic antagonism.

The U.S. has long forgotten the practice of the Golden Rule when it comes to international policy. In the case with China, applying the golden rule would simply mean do unto China as America would have China do unto the U.S.


For America to yield to the idea that ratcheting tension with China is the right approach is to concede to the inevitability of the Thucydides Trap, namely that a rising power and a reigning power will always lead to conflict. This outcome might be good for the defense budget and the military industrial complex but tragic for everybody else.

Rules of Conduct for Chinese Working in America

This piece first ran in online Asia Times.

Hard on the heel of dropping espionage charges against Sherry Chen, the Department of Justice announced two more headline grabbing cases of economic espionage.

One case involved 6 Chinese nationals living and working in China and the other involved a naturalized Chinese American who was head of the physics department at Temple University.

Even though much of the facts pertaining to these cases remain as yet undisclosed to the public, there is much we can learn and speculate from what is known. The lessons to be derived will be especially relevant to all ethnic Chinese working in the U.S.

Dr. Hao Zhang was arrested on May 16, 2015 upon his entry into the U.S. via L. A. International airport. His original plan was to attend an international conference in Phoenix. Now he will face arraignment in a federal court in San Jose California. His five co-conspirators are all part of the same semiconductor company in Tianjin.

According to the DOJ press release, Zhang and Wei Pang met as graduate students at USC around 10 years ago. They then went separate ways by joining two American companies developing integrated circuits for the mobile phone.

Subsequently, Zhang and Pang rejoined with faculty positions at Tianjin University and co-founded a company to design and make ICs for the mobile phone. The press release alleged that the two founders stole proprietary technology from their respective U.S. employers prior to returning to China. Zhang will face a 32-count indictment.

In the New York Times article that broke the initial story, Zhang’s arrest was accompanied by the indictment of five others, presently residing in China.  The article goes further to point out that this was the second indictment of the accused in absentia, the first being the indictment of 5 PLA soldiers accused of cyber hacking.

The intent of these high profile announcements was, obviously, copied from the classic book of Chinese stratagems, i.e., “kill the chicken to scare the monkey.” And, all ethnic Chinese whether they are U.S. citizens or not better heed this warning—namely that the American law enforcement authorities are watching and monitoring your every activity.

How did the FBI know to spy on Zhang and Pang when they were students at USC? Because they are Chinese? The feds were certainly patient waiting for the opportunity to pounce.

Should you experience the misfortune of actually getting arrested, as is the case of Dr. Zhang, you are in trouble. Contrary to popular notion that the legal system in the U.S. is fair, the scale of justice is heavily weighed in favor of the government.

As many predecessor cases have shown, if you are Chinese, you are guilty until proven innocent.

The institutionalized racial bias against the Chinese dates back to J. Edgar Hoover, when he opined that the Chinese in America couldn’t be trusted. His minions have since expanded his opinion into a carefully structured theory to justify his bigotry. One of the more popular variant is called the “grains of sand” theory of espionage.

According to these acolytes, China conducts spying far differently from the more traditional means. Instead of money and sex, China fans the sense of loyalty to the motherland and then encourages any Chinese living in America to send any useful information back to Beijing.

Apparently there is a massive super computer sitting in some ministry basement crunching away the collected information, and voila, out comes the intricate design of a missile warhead or design of an integrated circuit or even the latest organization chart of the CIA.

This may sound patently absurd to the person on the street but the FBI finds this rationale useful for seeing all Chinese as potential spies.

Even if you are innocent of any wrongdoing, once FBI or other law enforcement agencies rush to arrest and prosecute, you are doomed. As attorneys who have defended Chinese victims will tell you, the government when facing a case falling apart for lack of proof will offer the defendant a plea bargain deal on lesser charges for the jail time he/she may have already served. Even a democracy like ours does not like to admit a mistake was committed.

You say you want to demand justice and sue the government? They can delay and delay and it could take years for your day in court.

In Sherry Chen’s case, she was fortunate. The federal prosecutor in this case elected to simply drop the charges and not add to her trauma by proposing a plea bargain. We can speculate, perhaps it’s because this prosecutor is an African American and is sensitive to the weaknesses of our judiciary.

In response to Chen’s case, Congressman Ted Lieu and 21 other members of Congress called a press conference and sent an open letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking her to investigate as to whether there is any policy in the federal government that targets government employees on the basis of race.

While Congressman Lieu made it clear that he was concerned with Chinese American citizens being treated fairly in America, there is no reason his concern should not apply to protection from prosecutorial abuse for non-citizens. The idea that aliens do not deserve proper due process would be a step in the direction of Abu Ghraib all over again.

Maybe Zhang will get a break. He will appear before U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila of the Northern District of California. Judge Davila presided over the civil suit Haiping Su filed against the federal government for racial discrimination and the judge ruled in his favor. At least he would be aware that the fed is not above prosecutorial abuse.

Carly Fiorina apparently did make the distinction between Chinese in China and Chinese Americans. She said in Iowa, “They're not terribly imaginative. They're not entrepreneurial. They don't innovate—that's why they're stealing our intellectual property." And, she is running for president?

The case against Professor Xi Xiaoxing, former head of Temple’s physics department, is curiously different from the Zhang Hao case. After his arrest and release on bail, there is virtually no additional media coverage.

We do know that he is a naturalized U.S. citizen and came to the U.S. after having attained his PhD degree from Peking University. Apparently his expertise in superconductivity was already established internationally before he left China.

It would appear that contrary to Fiorina’s view, he was bringing intellectual goods to America rather than the reverse. Apparently some of his email messages sent to China formed a basis for accusing him of fraudulent conduct.

In light of these recent cases, it’s crystal clear that whether you are an American citizen or not, there are certain rules of conduct that you must heed to stay out of legal trouble:

• ·      If you are ethnic Chinese--or even ethnic Asian because sometimes the fed does not make any distinction--you should assume that you are under surveillance.
•  
• ·      Be mindful of what you say on the phone or via the Internet. If what you say can be misinterpreted or misunderstood by the monitoring feds, you need to change the way you express your thoughts.
•  
• ·      The above rules are especially relevant if you work in the technology space. Remember that the presumption is that you are predisposed to sending intelligence to Beijing.
•  
• ·      Do not assume you won’t get in trouble if you send publicly available information to China for the most innocuous reasons. The U.S. is a country of laws and regulations. If the authorities decide that they want you in jail, they can find laws that you have not heard of to justify putting the handcuffs on you.
• 
  
•      If the FBI comes to see you, ostensibly to talk about the weather, before you agree to the conversation, do the American thing. Get a lawyer. You have that right.

The Committee of 100 has available a 3-hour workshop on “Unique Challenges and Risks for Chinese Americans in Science and Technology.” In the interest of public service, the Committee will present this workshop anywhere in the U.S. by cooperating with local Asian organizations. The latter will organize and provide the venue. For more information, contact Ms. Holly Chang, (212) 371-6565 or hchang@committee100.org.

One Asian American View of Affirmative Action

This piece first appeared in Asia Times.

Elite Ivy League schools belong to the elites, right? Turns out the answer is complicated. The lawsuit filed by a consortium of Asian American organizations against Harvard’s admission policy last Friday is attempting to address one facet of this question.

The suit contends that Asian American applicants for admission with same noteworthy academic achievement and evidence of leadership as applicants of other races are more likely to be rejected. If admission criteria were race neutral and based merely on merit, this situation would not exist, so claims the suit.

Asian Americans make up about 5.6% of the U.S. population and 21% of Harvard’s incoming freshman class, but the suit contends that without a quota restriction, the rate of admission for Asian Americans would be even higher. In the case of the University of California where race based quotas are not legal; the presence of Asian American is far higher. At UC Irvine, Asian makes up the majority of the student body.

Aside from not wanting a venerable institution of higher learning that dates back to the 17^th century, like Harvard, overrun by Asians, the admissions office of Harvard and fellow Ivy Leaguers face a real conundrum.  

Some of the seats have to be reserved for the so-called legacy candidates. “Legacy” usually means offsprings of alumni who have been important financial donors to the school. Any student arriving for first day of school in a Ferrari could be presumed to be a legacy admission.

Others in the name of diversity and affirmative action are set aside for ethnic groups that are otherwise under represented, meaning the blacks, Hispanics and native Americans. These applicants would not qualify for admission if based purely on their academic and school activity records.

Unfortunately lowering the bar to admit students without the necessary grounding and academic preparation may not be doing these students any favors. Getting overwhelmed by the rigors of academic demands, they risk dropping out disillusioned and disappointed and never recover from the loss of self-esteem.

It’s fundamentally counter intuitive that under privileged kids subject to 12 years of under preparation and poor academic training can be expected to suddenly catch up and do well when plunged into an elite university. 

Just as not all kids driving a Ferrari got in the back door with a lower bar, not all blacks and Hispanics got in because of special dispensation. Unfortunately for them, others will always wonder if they got on campus on their own merit.

Admittedly questioning that sort of ambiguity is far less consequential than having an affirmative action policy in college admissions—If admitting some under qualified students can give the American society the cover to stop feeling guilty over the social injustice of depriving the kids in the ghetto a chance for a quality K-12 education and a better life.

The real solution, of course, is not at the college admission level. The real solution has to begin at early levels of education. We have to be willing to invest in quality schools at every neighborhood and for every child and give everyone an equal opportunity from the beginning.

If that goal is not realistic and realizable, a compromise solution is to establish a special preparatory school for under privileged students with real potential and desire to succeed. Let these students study intensively for one or two years and be properly primed to succeed in college.

The mission of an elite school is to attract exceptional students and generate outstanding graduates. That’s how they will maintain their reputation as a top school.

Ultimately, whether it’s a Barack Obama or a Jeremy Lin walking on campus, it’s being American to presume that they walked in the front door and belong there.

Full disclosure, my daughter, Denise, attended Harvard and majored in premed biochemistry. However, I don’t think she faced any reverse discrimination because there weren’t as many Asians applying then (about 35 years ago). After Harvard she did go on to medical school but then took on a successful career in public health.

My response to Carly Fiorina

Bloomberg Politics reported part of the speech aspiring presidential candidate, Carly Fiorina, gave in Iowa. My friends and blog readers are quite upset over this and urge me to come up with a response.

Here is what she said, "I've been doing business with the Chinese for decades and I will tell you that yeah the Chinese can take a test, but what they can't do is innovate. They're not terribly imaginative. They're not entrepreneurial. They don't innovate—that's why they're stealing our intellectual property."

Every American politician worth twenty-five cents or more knows full well that trash talking about China is a way to achieve a dollop of notoriety. Carly is not being innovative nor imaginative when she copies that approach to show her credentials as a nascent politician. On the other hand, there isn't much intellect in the property she commandeered. 

Carly's last real job as CEO of H-P was to transform heretofore the most admired iconic company in Silicon Valley into a steady decline towards mediocrity. She definitely left the company in much worse shape than she found it. Even so, she surely should have noticed that H-P and for that matter all the companies in Silicon Valley would be mere shadows of their robust selves if all the Chinese staff were to disappear.

It's a bit startling that for all her education that she had not heard of the Chinese inventions such as paper, gunpowder, compass, iron plough, movable type and many others that were hundreds if not thousands of years ahead of the West. I suspect she was pandering to the farmers of Iowa; it will be interesting to hear what she will have to say when she comes stumping in Silicon Valley. Then again, her campaign may not last that long.

Chinese Americans continue to be victimized by racial profiling

This piece first ran in Asia Times and re-posted in China-U.S. Focus.

America welcomes immigrants and they come from all over the world. For Chinese Americans, the dark side of this land of opportunity is that they continue to be victimized by the law enforcement’s hair trigger inclination to prosecute according to a racial profile.

Rather than compiling evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, the FBI and fellow practitioners will jump at any flimsy thread of possible wrong doing, make a public arrest, sent out a press release on their accusation and put the hapless Chinese American in detention.

When their findings are then subject to scrutiny and fail to pass muster, the charges are quietly dropped. By then, of course, the reputation of the person is in tatters and the victim’s life and finances are in ruin.

The latest such victim was Sherry Chen, a hydrologist working for National Oceanic & Atmosphere Administration. The headline of the New York Times article said it all: “Accused of spying for China until she wasn’t.”

According to published sources, Ms. Chen is from Beijing who immigrated to the U.S. and became a naturalized American citizen in 1997. The second piece of damming evidence against her is that she goes back to China every year, allegedly to see her aging parents. The third piece of evidence is that she has a classmate who is now a vice minister at the Ministry of Water Resources.  He apparently told her that he would like to know how the repair of old dams is financed in the U.S.—a threat to homeland security if ever was one.

She was caught red handed when she promised in her email to see what public information is available on the subject. By any generally accepted definition, public information is non-confidential and non-proprietary and cannot be intelligence related to national security. Unfortunately for Ms. Chen, she asked to borrow a password from an acquaintance to access the database on dams in America.

Worst of all, when she was asked the year she met the official at the ministry, the answer she gave was off by one year. She claimed she was confused. Since she goes back to Beijing every year, the prosecution could have allowed for her confusion but instead they accused her of lying.

As of the date of this report, all the charges against Ms. Chen have been dropped and she is apparently seeking to return to her job at NOAA, a job for which she has received awards and commendations. There was no public information on whether she will seek redress to the injustice done to her.

Anyone thinking that Ms. Chen is entitled to compensation for the shameful government conduct do not know that the scale of American justice is overwhelmingly tilted in favor of the government, misconduct or not, and the wheels of justice grinds at a snail pace.

Take the case against Dr. Bo Jiang. After his PhD degree, he found work as a NASA subcontractor. When his contract expired and he did not get permanent residence to remain in the U.S., he bought a one-way ticket to go home to China--the feds tend to regard a one-way ticket as a tell tale sign of sinister intentions.

The then Congressman Wolf’s gut was convinced that Jiang must be a spy and had him yanked off the plane and incarcerated. Despite violating his civil rights and finding not a shred of evidence to justify putting Jiang in jail, he was released only after agreeing to plead guilty to one misdemeanor count in exchange for the seven weeks of jail time he already served.

He saved the U.S. government’s face but it was doubtful that he got any thanks for his generosity. He won’t be allowed to come back to the U.S. though it would be doubtful that he would want to.

In a June 2013 press release, FBI Executive Assistant Director Richard McFeely expressed satisfaction at their effort to catch spies. He said, “Since 2008, our espionage arrests have doubled, indictments have increased five fold, and convictions have risen eight fold.”

McFeely did not explicitly tie his remarks to Chinese American spies but the release was in the context of trade secret dispute between an American company and one in China. By his way of accounting, Bo Jiang’s conviction would have counted as a win for the FBI. Missing in his remarks was any indication of their record of wrongful arrests.

Dr. Haiping Su came to the U.S. for graduate studies and became a naturalized citizen in 1991. After various job changes, he came to Silicon Valley to work as a NASA subcontractor. The security chief for NASA in Mountain View decided that Su looked suspicious and had him abruptly removed from the Moffat Field premises.

In Su’s case, he sued NASA and the federal government for violating his privacy and civil rights. Amazingly enough, after 6 years of legal wrangling, he actually won his suit and a pittance of a compensation that could hardly compensate him for the mental anguish he endured.

The irony is that Chinese Americans have been punching far above their weight. According to the Migration Policy Institute, “Compared to the overall foreign- and native-born populations, Chinese immigrants are more highly educated, more likely to be employed, and have a higher household income.” Among the approximate 2 million Chinese Americans in the U.S., 47% have bachelors or higher college degrees as compared to 30% for native-born Americans.

According to the Department of Homeland Security Yearbook for 2013, the latest available year, the number of Chinese given lawful permanent residency in the U.S. for the decade from 2004 to 2013 was just over 745,000, second in number to those from Mexico and make up close to 7% of the total granted a green card for the decade.

Yet for the same period, slightly less than 340,000 from China went on to become naturalized citizens, representing only 4.7% of the 7 million plus that became citizens. Between Mexico and the five major Asian countries of origin (India, Philippines, S. Korea and Vietnam), China was the only country with a significant drop in relative percent and failed to maintain their pro rata share of newly naturalized citizens.

It’s not possible to draw too many conclusions without further study. We can speculate, however, that even though Chinese Americans enjoyed on the average a household income 30% higher than national average, many felt the sting of being regarded as perpetual foreigner and potential spy and eventually choose to go back to China.

It may not be as brutal as being shot in the back but those that have been victimized by wrongful arrest and put through the psychological wringer for months can tell you, it’s no fun to see one’s professional career destroyed in one sudden capricious moment.
-----------------
In a follow up story (5/21/15), the New York Times blog reported on the Congressional letter led by Congressman Ted Lieu and 20 some fellow Congressmen and Congresswomen asking the Attorney General to investigate whether systematic racial profiling is part of the operating practice inside the Federal Government. You can find coverage of the press conference here.