In recent reports, US Senator Marco Rubio and FBI Director Chris Wray singled out Chinese students and scholars as a national security threat during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in February on worldwide threats to the US. 

“This isn’t new. There has been anxiety even paranoia about people of Chinese background during the cold war period to the present,” Frank H. Wu, a distinguished professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, commented during an interview with CGTN’s the Point (@thepointwithlx).  

During the exchange, Director Wray said that Chinese professors, scientists, and students studying and working in the US, in almost every discipline, may be covertly gathering intelligence for the Chinese government.  

“There have been numerous cases of false and wrongful prosecutions where people have been accused of being a spy with no evidence… It has been a theme ever since there have been Chinese people in the United States,” Prof. Wu dismissed the stereotyped accusation. 

He recalled that when he was a kid, people used to say that “you all look alike.” “For the average person, they don’t care if you are a sixth generation Californian, you remain a perpetual foreigner… The problem is when (some) people have those attitudes, and they express them openly. They make it clear that they regard all people - students, scholars, people such as my parents, people who are part of the community, who are family members - as potential spies,” he said.

Einar Tangen, an author, columnist and commentator echoed Prof. Wu by saying that this kind of underlining current of anti-Chinese unfortunately targets everyone because he believes, within the United States, people are unable to tell the difference between a Korean, a Chinese, a Japanese or other South East Asian.

“Chinese have been contributing from the building of the transcontinental railroad that united the continent to the tremendous entrepreneurial activities that cross the Pacific Ocean back and forth, to figure skating, to the tragic sacrifice of the young man who gave his life in Florida during the mass shooting. When all Chinese students and scholars in every field, when they are all regarded as a national security threat that undermines not just American ideals but American competitiveness, the free exchange of ideas in the scientific community, the progress we make as humans,” Prof. Wu said. 

He also stressed that China and the United States should be working together and Chinese students, Chinese scholars, Chinese-Americans, Chinese immigrants, Chinese expatriates who eventually return home, they are part of the bridge-building progress. It is positive, not negative.