Bloomberg and the China lobby

As China Anxiety Rises in U.S., Fears of New Red Scare Emerge


Bookmark December 31 2019, 2:30 PM December 31 2019, 6:16 PM (Bloomberg) -- 

The setting was inauspicious: an auditorium at Stanford University, founded by a railroad tycoon who made his fortune off the backs of Chinese immigrants. The subject: a report describing China’s efforts to manipulate American universities, corporations and media 150 years after Leland Stanford celebrated the completion of the first transcontinental line.

The 200-page report, published by Stanford’s Hoover Institution with the Asia Society in November 2018, was well received in Washington. Not so by Chinese Americans, especially at Stanford three months later, when the report’s co-editors presented its findings, the work of a panel of 23 China experts that included Stanford professor Francis Fukuyama and Winston Lord, a former ambassador to China. 

Those findings -- that China is waging a “covert, coercive or corrupting” influence campaign inside the U.S. -- have provided intellectual validation for many of the worst fears about China’s activities. The study has already been cited 19 times in academic articles. At the same time, it has reinforced an image of Chinese Americans as a potential fifth column, vulnerable to blandishments and coerc

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