Originally published in The American Conservative.
Is it racist to think that a Chinese person is more likely to spy for China than someone with no Chinese ancestry who was born in America?
That was the premise of much of the left-wing opposition to the Justice Department’s so-called China Initiative, its investigation of Chinese technology theft that was launched in 2018 and canceled by the Biden administration in 2022 over claims of ethnic profiling. It is the premise of many news articles written about Chinese scientists leaving the United States in increasing numbers, supposedly because they feel targeted by authorities. Yet if you asked the average man on the street, he would say that taking someone’s country of birth into account in an espionage investigation is just common sense.
Where did the Chinese get the idea that playing the race card would be an effective way to fend off reasonable investigations of suspicious conduct? From the precedent set by the case of Wen Ho Lee in 1999.
Helen Andrews 