The U.S. Government Secretly Spied on Chinese American Scientists, Upending Lives and Paving the Way for Decades of Discrimination
Harry Sheng, a former mechanical engineer for Sparton Corporation,
photographed in the 1960s. Photo: Courtesy of Ling Woo Liu
February 2 2020
Harry Sheng FBI Files FOIA OCR300DPI (2) 271 page
Sheng was baffled. He had served in the marines for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces in the Chinese Civil War, against Mao’s Liberation Army, and had no desire to live under Communist rule. The FBI sometimes investigated undocumented immigrants, including in San Francisco’s Chinatown, but Sheng had married a white woman from Iowa, and he knew few other Chinese Americans in the Grand Rapids area. Sheng flew the American flag outside his house, and in his encounters with federal agents, he had seemingly done everything right. In a 1973 interview, an FBI agent asked him what he would do if the Communists pressured his relatives living in China. Sheng replied that he would immediately report the matter to the FBI.
He spent years searching for answers, but he never got the one that would have explained all the undue scrutiny: He was one of what appear to have been hundreds of people surveilled under a previously unreported FBI program that targeted ethnic Chinese scientists and students living in the United States. Titled “Chinese Communist Contacts with Scientists in the U.S.” and listed under the umbrella “IS-CH,” or Internal Security-China, the classified program dates to the late 1960s, when Chinese weapons development spurred intense anxiety within the U.S. government. It continued until at least 1978. The program’s targets included several prominent scientists and scholars, most notably physicist Chang-Lin Tien, who later became chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.
Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI pursued a slew of misguided counterintelligence investigations, hounding civil rights activists, feminist groups, and left-leaning scholars. The bureau’s broader surveillance of scientists during the Cold War is well documented; among those targeted was theoretical physicist and Manhattan Project contributor Richard Feynman. The newly obtained documents show that alongside such efforts, the bureau singled out Chinese American scientists because of their ethnicity — and that it did so even after the Senate’s Church Committee, formed in 1975, exposed some of the most egregious intelligence abuses of the era, many involving government surveillance of Americans on U.S. soil.
Program documents that I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, as well as the files of individual scientists who were surveilled, suggest a wide-ranging effort. They also show an early tendency within the U.S. national security establishment to assume that major scientific advances in China were the product of theft — a logic that would inform cases for decades to come. Zuoyue Wang, a historian at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona whose research focuses on U.S.-China scientific relations during the Cold War, said the documents show an inclination to assume that “American scientists with an immigrant background are the primary sources of illicit technological transfers,” when in reality the story of technological advancement is much more complex.
The program’s effects reverberate today, at a moment when combating economic espionage and scientific theft from China are among the FBI’s top priorities. Over the past decade, the Justice Department has brought dozens of cases involving ethnic Chinese scientists. It has also brought a number of cases against non-Chinese, most notably Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard University’s chemistry department, who was charged last week with making false statements in connection to grant money he received from the Chinese government. Critics allege that the broader campaign against intellectual property theft is often informed by the same thinking that drove the Chinese scientist program.
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment about the program or about ongoing complaints of bias against Chinese Americans both within and outside the bureau.
February 2 2020
IN 1973, Harry Sheng was working as a mechanical engineer for Sparton Corporation, a defense contractor in Jackson, Michigan, when his mother got sick back in China. Sheng was among thousands of ethnic Chinese scientists then living in the United States, the early pioneers in what would become a sizable swath of the American research force. A native of Jiangsu province and a naturalized U.S. citizen, he had left home just before Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, and he hadn’t seen his friends or relatives in China since. But now relations between the two countries were improving. In 1971, the U.S. pingpong team had toured the mainland, and the following year, President Richard Nixon had made the historic visit that restored contact between the countries’ leaders. Sheng had just started his job at Sparton, but he loved his mother dearly. He and his wife booked flights.
On Nixon’s trip, the two sides had agreed to set up exchanges in science, which, like pingpong, was seen as a way to improve ties between the United States and China. Washington hoped that rapprochement with China would destabilize the Communist-led independence forces the U.S. military was fighting in Vietnam and increase America’s leverage over the Soviet Union. For Chinese American scientists like Sheng, the thaw presented a simpler opportunity: a chance to return to their hometowns, eat their favorite foods, and hug the parents they had left behind decades earlier.
Sheng was a gentle man who collected coins in his spare time and never missed a church service. Before joining Sparton, he had worked for a decade for the defense contractor Lear Siegler, where he held a secret-level U.S. government security clearance. In 1972, he had been interviewed by an FBI agent in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for an undisclosed purpose. According to an FBI memo, Sheng “declared his anti-communist feelings, his love and patriotism for America” and “denied any contact between himself and Communist agents.” But after Sheng and his wife returned from their 1973 visit to China, the U.S. government’s scrutiny intensified. Agents from the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Defense grilled him about everything he had done on his sightseeing tour, he later said. Sparton inexplicably transferred him to a drafting position — a move that he perceived as a demotion — and then, in 1975, laid him off. He subsequently received two offers from other defense firms, Raytheon and Hazeltine, only to have them suddenly rescinded, he said. He never held a permanent position in his field again.
On Nixon’s trip, the two sides had agreed to set up exchanges in science, which, like pingpong, was seen as a way to improve ties between the United States and China. Washington hoped that rapprochement with China would destabilize the Communist-led independence forces the U.S. military was fighting in Vietnam and increase America’s leverage over the Soviet Union. For Chinese American scientists like Sheng, the thaw presented a simpler opportunity: a chance to return to their hometowns, eat their favorite foods, and hug the parents they had left behind decades earlier.
Sheng was a gentle man who collected coins in his spare time and never missed a church service. Before joining Sparton, he had worked for a decade for the defense contractor Lear Siegler, where he held a secret-level U.S. government security clearance. In 1972, he had been interviewed by an FBI agent in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for an undisclosed purpose. According to an FBI memo, Sheng “declared his anti-communist feelings, his love and patriotism for America” and “denied any contact between himself and Communist agents.” But after Sheng and his wife returned from their 1973 visit to China, the U.S. government’s scrutiny intensified. Agents from the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Defense grilled him about everything he had done on his sightseeing tour, he later said. Sparton inexplicably transferred him to a drafting position — a move that he perceived as a demotion — and then, in 1975, laid him off. He subsequently received two offers from other defense firms, Raytheon and Hazeltine, only to have them suddenly rescinded, he said. He never held a permanent position in his field again.
Harry Sheng FBI Files FOIA OCR300DPI (2) 271 page
Sheng was baffled. He had served in the marines for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces in the Chinese Civil War, against Mao’s Liberation Army, and had no desire to live under Communist rule. The FBI sometimes investigated undocumented immigrants, including in San Francisco’s Chinatown, but Sheng had married a white woman from Iowa, and he knew few other Chinese Americans in the Grand Rapids area. Sheng flew the American flag outside his house, and in his encounters with federal agents, he had seemingly done everything right. In a 1973 interview, an FBI agent asked him what he would do if the Communists pressured his relatives living in China. Sheng replied that he would immediately report the matter to the FBI.
He spent years searching for answers, but he never got the one that would have explained all the undue scrutiny: He was one of what appear to have been hundreds of people surveilled under a previously unreported FBI program that targeted ethnic Chinese scientists and students living in the United States. Titled “Chinese Communist Contacts with Scientists in the U.S.” and listed under the umbrella “IS-CH,” or Internal Security-China, the classified program dates to the late 1960s, when Chinese weapons development spurred intense anxiety within the U.S. government. It continued until at least 1978. The program’s targets included several prominent scientists and scholars, most notably physicist Chang-Lin Tien, who later became chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.
Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI pursued a slew of misguided counterintelligence investigations, hounding civil rights activists, feminist groups, and left-leaning scholars. The bureau’s broader surveillance of scientists during the Cold War is well documented; among those targeted was theoretical physicist and Manhattan Project contributor Richard Feynman. The newly obtained documents show that alongside such efforts, the bureau singled out Chinese American scientists because of their ethnicity — and that it did so even after the Senate’s Church Committee, formed in 1975, exposed some of the most egregious intelligence abuses of the era, many involving government surveillance of Americans on U.S. soil.
Program documents that I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, as well as the files of individual scientists who were surveilled, suggest a wide-ranging effort. They also show an early tendency within the U.S. national security establishment to assume that major scientific advances in China were the product of theft — a logic that would inform cases for decades to come. Zuoyue Wang, a historian at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona whose research focuses on U.S.-China scientific relations during the Cold War, said the documents show an inclination to assume that “American scientists with an immigrant background are the primary sources of illicit technological transfers,” when in reality the story of technological advancement is much more complex.
The program’s effects reverberate today, at a moment when combating economic espionage and scientific theft from China are among the FBI’s top priorities. Over the past decade, the Justice Department has brought dozens of cases involving ethnic Chinese scientists. It has also brought a number of cases against non-Chinese, most notably Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard University’s chemistry department, who was charged last week with making false statements in connection to grant money he received from the Chinese government. Critics allege that the broader campaign against intellectual property theft is often informed by the same thinking that drove the Chinese scientist program.
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment about the program or about ongoing complaints of bias against Chinese Americans both within and outside the bureau.
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