Trump’s War on China Catches Silicon Valley’s Chinese Community in the Crossfire
Silicon Valley is increasingly uncomfortable for Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans. That’s a problem for the United States.
--
On a Sunday afternoon in July, Spoon, a Korean bistro in a strip mall in Fremont, California, offers a snapshot of Silicon Valley diversity. The restaurant is a jumble of languages, packed to capacity with people of South Asian and East Asian descent digging into bowls of kimchi fried rice and spicy pork belly.
I am here to speak with a young woman who works for a Chinese technology firm with offices in the Valley, about the impact of Trump’s trade war on Chinese American and Chinese immigrant tech workers. Because she’s concerned about protecting her identity, I’ve agreed not to name her employer, and refer to her as Susan. Born in China, Susan is a naturalized American citizen who moved to the Valley as a child in the 1990s when her father came here to work in the chip industry. She considers herself both an immigrant and a Chinese American. And like many Chinese tech workers caught in the crossfire of geopolitical tensions, she is not particularly enthusiastic about talking to a reporter.
But she makes no attempt to hide her exasperation at the current state of affairs.
“I feel angry at the whole situation,” she says.
Relations between the United States and China are rockier than they have been in decades. The Trump administration has tightened visa requirements for Chinese nationals, placed sanctions against Chinese technology companies, and orchestrated an ongoing crackdown on ethnic Chinese scientists at federally funded research institutions that has the entire community feeling under threat. Asian American civil rights activists are up in arms about what they see as a new wave of discrimination targeting American citizens on the basis of their ethnicity. When FBI Director Christopher Wray said in testimony at a Senate intelligence committee hearing in February 2018 that the U.S. faces a “whole-of-society threat” from China, long-buried memories of the Chinese Exclusion Act started to resurface.
