In January 1950, the American public’s deepest fears were confirmed when Dr. Klaus Fuchs, a British atomic scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, was arrested for passing secrets to the Soviets. The Chinese Communist revolution and the developing Sino-Soviet alliance subjected the Chinese American community to the same suspicions of disloyalty.
The following month, February, Senator Joseph McCarthy capitalized on the national mood by proclaiming he had a list of 105 card-carrying Communists in the State Department—a claim he never substantiated, but which provoked a frenzy of finger-pointing. McCarthy’s accusations fueled suspicions in Washington that the government was infested with subversives who had assisted China’s fall to communism. Supporters of Chiang Kai-shek demanded to learn who “lost” China, and Republicans in Congress called for a wholesale purge of the State Department, accusing the Far East experts of “sabotage,” treason, and conspiracy to oust the Nationalists from the mainland. The inquisition destroyed the careers of several prominent China specialists in the State Department, who were scapegoated for international events far beyond their control.
National paranoia permitted almost limitless excesses, as long as their ultimate goal was defending America against communism. In what is now known as the McCarthy era, anti-Communist investigations in the U.S. Senate and House ravaged Hollywood, the media, academe, and government. The Communist Party was outlawed, loyalty tests were established, mail-opening and wire-tapping operations were conducted by the CIA and FBI. During this period of national hysteria Chinese were particularly vulnerable, because they looked foreign and were presumably linked to a country that had chosen communism over freedom.
In Chinatowns, U.S. government surveillance of left-wing organizations began as soon as the People’s Republic was founded. Federal authorities bugged the headquarters of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance and kept close watch over liberal Chinese American organizations, like the China Youth Club and the China Daily News. If during World War II China was America’s great friend, the cold war thrust it into the role of Communist ally of the Soviet Union—and potential enemy.
(Chang, 247-248)