The CCP and US Policy on Chinese Immigrants and Espionage. Part I
The following is an article that I was asked to submit to a journal, and the following posts will detail the subsequent review process that ultimately led to my withdrawal of the submission. I feel that the article was thoughtful but certainly needed some help and direction. You’ll see the editor agreed with some of that assessment. The difficulties came when the direction of the editor and my original thesis diverged. So, I’ve waited a few months and am now positing the entire article and conversation with the editor here. I have also added an epilogue that reflects some of the continued concerns and issues facing Chinese and the US/China relationship.First the article, and then the editor's comments, and finally the epilogue--three separate posts over the next few days.Original Article
David Dayton, is a Ph.D candidate in Global Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University, and is currently conducting dissertation research into Chinese corporate cultures in Thailand. He has a MA in Asian Studies focusing on Thai urban religious practices and an MA in Southeast Asia Cultural Anthropology focusing on Thai corporate cultures. He is a consultant for Silk Road International and has more than 20 years of professional experience in Greater China and Thailand.
The CCP and US Policy on Chinese Immigrants and Espionage.
The Foreign Policy (FP) article Don’t Close the Door on Chinese Scientists like me (Foreign Policy, June 4, 2018), has appropriately received much attention for its well written and impassioned plea for a better system of immigration to the US. I whole heartedly agree with the expressed sentiment and empathize with the writer’s plight. I am very sympathetic to Chinese immigration and the struggles of living with uncertain status in America and navigating the process of becoming an American citizen.
Problems with immigration to the US have certainly impacted the quantity and quality of applicants and have made the process more daunting than is necessary for all involved. I strongly believe that there should be significantly more opportunities for families and educated professionals from all countries to legally immigrate to the US. At its core, the greatness of the US has always been found in those immigrants who arrive specifically to make their own lives better—and in the process make the US better as well. In my opinion, the opportunity to immigrate to the US should be enhanced and incentivized and opened up.
US IMMIGRATION ISSUES
My own life has been directly blessed by immigrants to the US. In 1913 my great grandmother, at age 13, immigrated from Denmark through Ellis Island. As a child, I remember her teaching me Danish songs and rhymes and telling stories about her life before America. Additionally, my wife is originally from China and is now a US citizen. Like many, her citizenship process was straightforward and just took a prescribed amount of time to complete. Both of these wonderful women have loved both their home countries and their adopted home.
My family and friends have also experienced some of the horrors of US immigration as well. My adopted daughter is also from China and is still working through the citizenship process. Unlike my wife’s application though, my daughter’s immigration process has been tortuously difficult, expensive, and at times actually terrifying. In one communication with USCIS, we were accused of violating the Hague Convention on human trafficking! Additionally, the paperwork for one of my biological sons, who was born in China, required paternity tests (plural), multiple interviews (arguments) with embassy staff, and weeks of delays in getting his Certificate of Birth Abroad. Just this last year, a colleague had to quickly arrange emergency flights back to China for his family rather than them being formally deported due to paperwork mistakes—mistakes made by US immigration officials. His family was thus forcibly separated for months.
An immigration officer at LAX once put his hand on his gun, stepped in between my wife and I, bumped my chest, and told me to “step back” as I was translating questions from the immigration staff to my wife on one of her first visits to the US. He then, in Cantonese, threatened my wife saying that if I talked to her again we would both be put into a holding room and would miss our connecting flight. I told him that I understood what he had said and would file a report on his comments and behavior. He responded by telling me that this was my “last warning” and if I spoke again I would be detained.
Transnational Chineseness
Though immigration proceedings in the US can be a scary, horrible mess, policy is not formulated in a vacuum. Specifically, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is making the immigration process increasingly and unnecessarily difficult for both individual Chinese as well as extended Chinese families. The current global context for citizens of The People’s Republic of China (PRC) abroad can be summarized as government, rather than individual, centric (Ng, 2018). "For the Communist Party, there is no distinction between its business executives, spies, police chiefs, media stars, crime bosses and its politicians. The same people play multiple roles. Everyone, ultimately, is on the same team (Foxall and Hemmings, 2018).”
Recent events in Australia and New Zealand specifically highlight how denying that the CCP under Xi Jinping has actively mobilized its transnational population of professionals, students and corporations (Dickson, 2013) is naiveté at least (Ohlberg, 2016) and willful ignorance at best (Brady, 2017). Since Xi’s ascension to power, the CCP has purposefully blurred the lines of what it means for individuals and non-governmental organizations to represent China and the CCP (Human Rights Watch, 2017). The CCP is purposely weaponizing its own citizenry via language and the definitions of China (Yang, 2008; To, 2014) and “Chinese” (Suryadinata, 2017), ethnicity (Zuo, 2018), media (Bandurski, 2018; Hilton, 2018; e.g. purchase of SCMP; SCO media forum), scholarship (Peterson, 2017), student activities (Allen-Ebrahimian, 2018; ), educational grants and investments (Johnson, 2018), economic and professional incentives (Leng, 2018), coercion and force (Dorfman, 2018; Economist, 2018; Palmer, 2018), corporate influence (Philipp, 2015; e.g. US Congressional fears over ZTE’s & Huawai’s government connections) and the nationalization of Chinese companies listed abroad (e.g. Angbang, et al), social movements abroad (e.g. 2008 Olympic torch demonstrations; Monk and Barme, 2008), extensive surveillance (Mitchell, 2018), and actual espionage (Myre, 2018; Miiller, 2018).
There are currently more than 350,000 Chinese students in the US, more than 3.3 million total Chinese-born immigrants in the US (2010 US census), and the Chinese are now the largest single annual arrival population in the US (Lee, 2015). The author of the FP article calls for the US to avoid policies that police all Chinese, and instead suggests that the US should wait for individual “actions” to happen before targeting individual Chinese citizens. This call is both in line with traditionally espoused western legal values of equality and fairness and a more humanitarian approach—as well as being constant with current US policy (Williams, 2018).
But it’s also too late.
As the citations above indicate, extensive “actions” by the Chinese government and Chinese citizens in the US have already happened (Ignatius, 2018). News outlets have, as recently as this month (Wise 2018; Bing, 2018), detailed the depth and breadth of Chinese espionage in the US (Auslin, 2018). In a speech in Salt Lake City for China Town Hall 2017, former White House Fellow and Special Assistant to the US Attorney General Nelson Dong stated that there has been an “explosion of Chinese espionage cases in the US the last 5 years” (Dong, 2017).
Closer to my home, security briefings for military personnel in Utah in 2017 and 2018 included information about land sales to overseas Chinese buyers in north western Utah County (Lehi city area). Security officials claimed that there was a dramatic increase in home purchases by Chinese buyers immediately after the announcement of the NSF facility—a facility with virtually no employees (personal communication, 2018).
The activities of individual citizens is an issue because the CCP doesn’t treat individuals or corporations as private, but rather as “Chinese” (Suryadinata, 2017). As the recent concerns about Huawei and ZTE highlight, private Chinese companies are often not exclusive private. In China, corporate ownership is rarely transparent or straight forward and as much as 51% of ownership of private enterprises can be held by local, regional, and national governments, State Owned Enterprises (SOE), or other state actors (Dickson 2008; Huang 2008). Most successful business people are members of the CCP as well (Dickson 2010). And as early as the 1990s it was recognized that China was using students and academics for political purposes abroad (Bachelard, 2017).
More recent accusations against both Confucian Institutes and “private” Chinese media corporations (Brunnstrom, 2017) show that the CCP has increased their use of these tactics in subsequent years (Brady, 2015).
Many Chinese join the CCP in China for the networking (Zhang 2018) and other advantages that membership provides (e.g. access to loans and to powerful individuals, as well as better social credit scores). But after joining the CCP there are expectations for party members (Dickson, 2010). Since successful businesses in China still often rely on influential relationships, many Chinese claim practicality as the initial impetus for joining the CCP (Browne, 2014). Anyone planning on a professional future in China will need to maintain these practical party relationships. This same sense of pragmatism also becomes the impetus for continued participation in CCP sponsored actives overseas (Seo, 2018). And once a member, always a member as one can never resign from the CCP (Brady, 2017).
Reducing the number of visas for Chinese in the US will, as the FP author points out, likely increase the exodus of Chinese graduates from the US, enflame tensions between the two already-feuding countries, encourage China’s nationalistic drive for independence in technology, not to mention increase incidents of racism in both countries. Some observers are already calling the ZTE case China’s “Sputnik moment” (Yuan, 2018). If this is indeed the result, likely more Chinese will be returning to China to support “Made in China 2025” regardless of US policy.
But US immigration isn’t the singular culprit in a loss of China’s best and brightest—the US wasn’t retaining Chinese graduates or professionals even before this recent spat. Since 2013 the numbers of Chinese students staying the in the US after graduation has dropped from 92% to 45% (Forbes, Jan 2018). The massive economic opportunities in China, as well as significantly weaker research regulations (Bloomberg News, 2018) and China’s call for their own foreign students and professionals to return (Kelly, 2018) has influenced the return migration of tens of thousands of Chinese graduates.
"On June 27, 2018, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reported on how China’s own laws affect how businesses and individuals must interact overseas, “First, China’s cyber security preferences are impacted by its own National Intelligence Laws. These national laws require that: ‘All organizations and citizens shall, in accordance with the law, support, cooperate with, and collaborate in national intelligence work, and guard the secrecy of national intelligence work they are aware of. The state will protect individuals and organizations that support, cooperate with, and collaborate in national intelligence work.’”" (Chinascope, 2018) (This paragraph was added after the editing conversation.)
Building on these laws, President Xi and the CCP have specifically told Chinese students and academics (Fuze and Lim, 2017), business people and influencers (Anderlini and Smyth, 2017), corporations (Laskai, 2018), and international organizations (e.g. World Internet conference, World Overseas Chinese Entrepreneurs Conference, SCO,), that they are expected to support the homeland and follow the party (Economist, 2017; Suryadinata, 2017) and “tell China stories well” (Xinhua, 2016). According to one of my Chinese interviewees, this means that Chinese “feel a responsibility to only say good things about China” (personal communication, 2018). Furthermore, CCP policies and practices are directly influencing corporate decision making (Lim and Smith, 2018) as well as individual Chinese (Ching, 2016) living abroad, and consequently, the governments of the countries they are living in. The combination of this complex Chinese identity and nationalism (Johnston, 2016) cum espionage increasingly affects foreign policy and the lives of Chinese individuals and families.
In the NBC interview that the original FP article was responding to, FBI Director Wray said, "To be clear, we do not open investigations based on race, or ethnicity, or national origin,” he said. "But when we open investigations into economic espionage, time and time again, they keep leading back to China”” (Williams, 2018).
Regardless of country of origin, immigration policy based on race is wrong. Period. By pointing out issues with the CCP I’m not defending US immigration policy and I specifically do not want to see a return to the past racist policies of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The FP author clearly and correctly points out that significant and systemic mistakes have been made in US immigration policy regarding Chinese in the past. But the CCP is also actively exploiting the cultural loophole of US opposition to race-based immigration policies. In that light, and within the context of increased global Chinese espionage, the US must find a better immigration policy as well as more effective measures to counter the CCP influence.
Because of my family’s own experiences, I can truly empathize with and I hurt for those caught up in the current disaster that is US/China immigration policy. I’m not sure that there is a perfect or even practical answer, but a starting point would be to clarify current policy provisions that seem exclusionary and racist. Another step could be to consider treating Chinese individuals that are members of the CCP the same way that corporations with ties to the Chinese government are currently treated—with appropriate suspicion and scrutiny. Whatever the specifics ultimately turn out to be, something must change with US immigration policy or the loss of scientists and other quality Chinese individuals will be the least of the US’s concerns.
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