In addition to the H1-B visa system, another development worked against the interests of the “high-tech” Chinese. The sudden demise of the Soviet Union left a vacuum in the arena of international politics, helping China emerge from the cold war as the second greatest military power in the world after the United States. While the economies of Russia and the former Soviet republics were still paying the price for the arms race the Soviet Union could not afford, the economy of the People’s Republic of China was growing almost exponentially. After Mao’s death, the Chinese gross national product had almost tripled by the 1990s, giving rise to American fears of future competition. During the 1990s, economic experts and historians predicted that the next century would belong to mainland China.

One irony of the 1990s was that the United States would come to view China both as its great business partner and its most powerful rival. While the decade saw an explosion of Sino-American corporate partnerships, it also witnessed the dawn of a new era of suspicion regarding the People’s Republic. The Washington Post reported the emergence of an anti-PRC “Blue Team” in Washington, D.C., “a loose alliance of members of Congress, congressional staff, think tank fellows, Republican political operatives, conservative journalists, lobbyists for Taiwan, former intelligence officers and a handful of academics, all united in the view that a rising China poses great risks to America’s vital interests.” A spate of books published in the late 1990s or shortly afterward by members of this Blue Team—The Coming Conflict with China, by Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro; Hegemon: China’s Plan to Dominate Asia and the World, by Steven W. Mosher; The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America, by Bill Gertz; Year of the Rat and Red Dragon Rising: Communist China’s Military Threat to America, by Edward Timperlak and William Triplett—suggested that a future showdown between the United States and the PRC was inevitable, echoing earlier cold war themes with only the name of the enemy changed.

In 1999, Representative Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) released a seven-hundred-page report accusing mainland China of stealing classified data on American nuclear weapons. Although the report was later denounced by American scientists and missile experts as grossly distorted and erroneous, it received enormous media attention upon its release. In an initial response, Time magazine published a cover story about the possibility of the United States entering a new cold war, this time with China.

With this atmosphere of suspicion came greater scrutiny of ethnic Chinese scientists and engineers, greater fears that they might be potential spies. Historically, the fate of the Chinese American community has always been linked to the health of Sino-American relations, and the 1990s were no exception. Like Tsien Hsue-shen and other Chinese victims of the McCarthy era of the 1950s, Chinese intellectuals who worked in national defense in the 1990s found themselves suspected of espionage because of their racial heritage heritage and their great number within the high-tech industry.

(Chang 355-357)