Chinese in U.S. Say Spying Case Casts Doubt on Their Loyalties

May 16, 1999

Chinese in U.S. Say Spying Case Casts Doubt on Their Loyalties

By FOX BUTTERFIELD and JOSEPH KAHN

any Chinese scientists and engineers in the United States fear they are being tarnished and their careers threatened by accusations that another scientist, Wen Ho Lee, stole the design of America's most advanced nuclear warhead and gave it to China.

ESPIONAGE IN LOS ALAMOS

Recent Coverage
China Is Installing a Warhead Said to Be Based on U.S. Secrets (May 14)

Lawyer Issues Denial for Los Alamos Scientist Suspected of Spying for Beijing (May 8)

1998 Report Told of Lab Breaches and China Threat (May 2)

Unsecure Codes Are Recipes for A-Bombs, Experts Say (Apr. 29)

Report Warns of Big Gains to Chinese From Spying (April 22)

Intelligence Report Points to Second China Nuclear Leak (April 8)

Suspect Scientist Led Key Los Alamos Program (March 24)

Nuclear Lapses Known in '96, Aides Now Say (March 17)

President Denies Ignoring Evidence of Nuclear Spying (March 12)

China Stole Nuclear Secrets From Los Alamos, U.S. Officials Say (March 6)

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Statement by Suspect's Lawyer: He Assisted FBI (May 8)

Chronology
The Data Trail, and the FBI's Route to Suspicion (May 8)

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Weapons of Mass Destruction

China's Future

The accusations against Lee, a computer scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, may prove to be true. But Chinese intellectuals in the United States point out that Lee has not been arrested despite a three-year investigation by the FBI, and many are troubled by what they call the circumstantial nature of the accusations, especially the suggestion that Lee had the opportunity to divulge classified information because he traveled to scientific conferences in China.
That puts Chinese scientists and engineers in an awkward position, because many of them, like Lee, hold significant jobs in government, corporate or university laboratories, have relatives and friends in China, and travel there regularly to maintain contacts and participate in academic conferences.
Until recently, little of this would have provoked suspicion. But news reports of Chinese spying and attempts to buy political influence have changed the political climate, and NATO's bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and subsequent protests in Beijing have also charged the atmosphere.
"In this climate, many Chinese feel they are being watched all the time, as if they are not full citizens," said Chang-Lin Tien, the former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley.
They have not forgotten the case of Qian Xueshen, a brilliant immigrant scientist who was accused without proof during the McCarthy era of being a Communist and held under house arrest for five years, said Tien, the first Chinese-American to head a major research university, and now a professor of mechanical engineering at Berkeley. Qian, who had helped develop the American rocket program, was finally deported to China. There, he led Beijing's missile program and became an icon in the country's quest to build a modern military.
The changed climate, Tien said, "makes many people think twice about working for the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy or national labs."
"We can't tolerate spies," he said. "But we need to be sensitive and careful. Mistakenly blaming the whole community for one person's action cannot be tolerated."
Xenophobia was the topic this month at a meeting of prominent Chinese-Americans and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose department supervises America's nuclear research laboratories. The meeting, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, drew a mixed crowd of Asian-Americans, including natives of the Chinese mainland, people who were born in Taiwan and Hong Kong and even Japanese-Americans.
Raymond Ng, a Chinese-American engineer at the Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., told Richardson that Americans who trace their roots to any part of Asia, from India to Japan, were under suspicion in their work places.
"Because of the incident at Los Alamos," Ng said, "promotions are being held back, we are concerned about discrimination in hiring, and a cloud of suspicion appears to hang over all Asian-Pacific Americans as a group."
Richardson told the group that he would not allow racial discrimination at the nuclear laboratories, but he acknowledged an atmosphere of distrust.
"I understand that Asian-Pacific Americans are concerned that their loyalty and patriotism are being challenged," he said, adding, "I want to assure you that racial profiling will not be permitted."
To some extent, the suspicions of spying and political influence-buying by Chinese "are a hangover from history," said Stanley Karnow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who is writing a book on the Asian experience in America. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, barring Chinese immigration, was the only law in American history that singled out a nationality, Karnow said. "We've always had this lingering suspicion of sinister Chinese skulking about."
But the charges of espionage at Los Alamos also raise uncomfortable questions about divided loyalty for some Chinese in the United States.
"Frankly, when I bring it up in class, I can see my Chinese students squirm, especially those from the mainland," said Merle Goldman, a professor of history at Boston University and an expert on Chinese intellectuals.
"Loyalty is a big dilemma for Chinese intellectuals," Goldman said. "They want to do everything to help their country regain its greatness, and part of that involves making China a great economic and military power."
Other experts caution that the overwhelming majority of the 2.5 million Chinese in the United States are patriotic Americans.
"One always has divided loyalties in a way, because you want your native country to thrive, but I don't sense that I have divided loyalties at all, because my loyalties are for the people, the language and the art, things that don't come in conflict with my new home in America," said Betty Bao Lord, the author of the best seller "Spring Moon," and wife of the former ambassador to China, Winston Lord.
This division of loyalties fits a traditional distinction made by Chinese scholars in past centuries, a difference between loyalty to China, a kind of cultural loyalty, and loyalty to the dynasty, or political loyalty, said Weiming Tu, a professor of Chinese history and philosophy at Harvard University and director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute.
The complex emotions of many Chinese-Americans were on display at a banquet in Los Angeles for China's prime minister, Zhu Rongji, during his recent visit to the United States. Many of the 1,500 Chinese-Americans there wore Chinese outfits like silk gowns or the slit dress known as a qipao. Most speeches were in Mandarin, with little translation. Musicians played the Chinese national anthem. The two masters of ceremonies referred to Zhu as "our premier."
Such expressions of support for China do not strike Chinese-Americans as disloyal. Many at the banquet complained about the accusations of spying against Lee, saying that news reports tended to tar Chinese scientists in sensitive positions with the same brush.
Collin Lai, a retired aerospace engineer who was among the guests, said he was furious about news reports on the Lee case. In some aerospace companies, "the unofficial language is Mandarin," Lai said, adding, "What are you going to do, throw us all out?"
In fact, many university physics departments are dependent on graduate students from China. Overall, students from mainland China account for 21 percent of foreign graduate students in physics departments, and this year foreign students make up half of all physics graduate students, said Roman Czujko of the American Institute of Physics.
A scientist from mainland China who works for Xerox Corp. in Syracuse, N.Y., said that the espionage charges had made him and his wife rethink their view of America.
"When we came here 10 years ago," he said, "we thought about staying here forever. After this incident, you really think that maybe this is not your homeland. If people don't like you here, why stay?"
The scientist said he was particularly outraged at the way some news reports described the Los Alamos accusations as "Chinese espionage," lumping together the Communist government in Beijing and all Chinese everywhere, whatever their background, with little hard evidence.
Lee, the computer expert at Los Alamos, was born on Taiwan, where most residents are opposed to the Communist government of mainland China.
To further complicate the situation, China does spy on the United States, just as the United States spies on China, and some spies for China have been caught and convicted.
In 1997, Peter Lee, a naturalized citizen from Taiwan who worked at Los Alamos, pleaded guilty to telling classified nuclear weapons information to Chinese scientists during a conference in Beijing, a set of facts much like the current accusations against Wen Ho Lee.
And China painstakingly trains spies for missions in the United States, according to a book to be published this year by Larry Engelman and his wife, Meihong Xu, a former lieutenant in intelligence in the Chinese army. In the book, "Daughter of China: A True Story of Love and Betrayal" (John Wiley & Sons), Ms. Xu describes how she and other attractive young women were selected to be sent abroad, adopt new identities, get jobs, marry and then, years later, surface as spies for China.
Another factor that contributes to misunderstanding, Chinese say, is the inability of the American public, politicians and the news media to distinguish among different groups of Chinese in the United States.
The first immigrants from China were poor peasants who came in the 1850s to work in the gold mines or build the transcontinental railroads. Better-educated Chinese came as students in the 1930s, or as refugees from the Communists in the 1940s.
Until President Johnson changed the immigration law in 1965, the total number of Chinese in the United States remained small, about a quarter of a million, according to the Census Bureau. But since then there has been an explosion of immigration -- graduate students from Taiwan, intellectuals from the mainland and working-class people from southern China, near Hong Kong -- so that the total is now about 2.5 million, the Population Reference Bureau says.
Tien and others are concerned that Washington and the news media have been too quick to conclude that all of these people are subject to pressure from the Communist government in Beijing, just because they are ethnically Chinese.
In both the campaign finance scandal, involving John Huang and Johnny Chung, and the Wen Ho Lee spy case, Tien said, Americans have made the assumption that these individual Chinese were part of a plot orchestrated by top authorities in Beijing, despite a lack of hard evidence.
But Tien also sees some progress.
"I came to the United States as a poor, penniless student, and I made it to become chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley," he said. "There has been tremendous improvement in civil rights in America. So we should be careful not to draw too sweeping a conclusion from those incidents."

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