Seventy-five years ago, in his February 1950 Wheeling speech, Senator Joseph McCarthy alleged that 205 communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department, posing a dire threat to U.S. national security. Although unsubstantiated, his bold claims ignited widespread fears of Soviet espionage within the U.S. government, ushering in an era of pervasive anti-communist hysteria.
McCarthy’s rhetoric, in essence, weaponized the country’s collective anxieties to garner fervent support from Americans already gripped by fears of communist subversion and betrayal. Meanwhile, it fueled ungrounded suspicion and distrust, fracturing workplaces, communities, families, and personal relationships under the long shadow of the Red Scare while setting the tone for the Cold War.
The China-U.S. Trade War and China Initiative
More than seven decades later, the legacies of the Red Scare have resurfaced in the United States with striking historical parallels, albeit this time targeting China – now the world’s second-largest economy after the U.S. – instead of the former Soviet Union. The official prelude to this renewed Red Scare was the first Donald Trump administration’s launch of the China-U.S. trade war in March 2018, citing national security concerns. That decision unleashed a tit-for-tat tariff battle between the two nations. In November 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) introduced its China Initiative, purportedly aimed at addressing potential economic espionage and intellectual property theft linked to the Chinese government.
In a related study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, my collaborators (Yu Xie, Xihong Lin, Ju Li, and Junming Huang) and I found that these DoJ investigations had profound adverse effects on the Asian American scientific community. Conducted in partnership with the Asian American Scholar Forum, our research revealed that a majority of U.S.-based scientists of Chinese descent felt unwelcome and unsafe in the United States. Specifically, 72 percent expressed concerns about professional safety, and 42 percent feared scrutiny for engaging in routine academic activities.
This pervasive climate of fear discouraged many scientists from seeking federal grants or pursuing international collaborations, with some even considering leaving the United States altogether. These trends have driven an increased emigration of scholars to China and other countries, intensifying brain drains that weaken the United States’ current global leadership in science and innovation. By eroding trust and inclusion, the chilling effects of the China Initiative have significantly undermined the foundations of scientific collaboration between the U.S. and China.
Until its official termination in February 2022, the China Initiative had investigated numerous Chinese and Chinese Americans across academia, industry, and other sectors. While some allegations were substantiated, many were misplaced, causing irreversible reputational damage to innocent individuals and perpetuating widespread racial profiling that disproportionately targeted Asian American scholars of Chinese descent. The loyalty of scientists of Chinese origin in the United States were constantly questioned, as many were relegated to the status of perpetual foreigners despite being naturalized American citizens.