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EssayNüStories MagazinePersonal Essay

I work in US policy – being Chinese is now an occupational hazard

BY FRANCES ZHU HISGEN

*Editor’s note: The following story was a runner-up in our first ever annual NüStories personal essay contest. This year’s theme was Chinese identity – read more here.

The man was discussing spies. We were examining a CSV file with tens of thousands of names, a dataset that mapped the individuals and institutions involved in cutting-edge science. They were names like “Julia Wang,” or “Bai Jun,” or “Zhu Xiaoyi.” I pictured the individuals behind the names as people earnestly grappling with the process of discovery: plant biology professors seeking to understand pollination, graduate students experimenting with ways to make novel slippery materials, post docs manipulating machine learning algorithms. My interlocutor, a colleague at a peer institution, referred to the list as “CCP spies,” as if the characteristics the names shared—1) being of Chinese origin, whether immigrant or diasporic or literally situated in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and 2) being engaged professionally in research collaboration with individuals and entities in the United States—made a certain geopolitical activity a foregone conclusion.  

I work as a China policy analyst at a think tank. I use my academic training in Chinese language, history, and culture to produce research and writing about the complexity of the contemporary PRC and its ambitions in the world for an audience of American decision makers. But I also have personal experiences. I am half Chinese, 混血, and a second generation immigrant who grew up between the US, Hong Kong, and China. Mandarin was my first language, learned in that unconscious, babyhood way of listening to my mother’s, grandmother’s, and grandfather’s voices and babbling after them. When I stub my toe, I curse in Cantonese; when I’m traveling away from home, I can only last about three or four days of eating before I develop a fierce, elemental craving for Chinese food. 

And while perhaps it should make logical sense that “being Chinese” should be a qualification for my current professional life, this is not the case. A recent working paper by political scientists Rory Truex and Michael Cerny that sought to assemble a representative sample of American China policy professionals found that 75.6 per cent of their surveyed population identified as White, and only 8.89 per cent identified as Asian. 

These statistics do not surprise me. It is my experience that being Chinese and working on China policy in the US is an occupational hazard. 

I have noticed, in the course of my work, the persistence of a particular rhetorical and analytical mode in American foreign policy discussions: discussing people in other countries primarily through the lens of the value or the risk that they might bring to the US. While this is perhaps understandable as realist geopolitical analysis, it nonetheless represents a form of dehumanization. And as geopolitical tensions between the US and the People’s Republic of China worsen, this is prevalent when discussing Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans. Part of my job then, as a participant in the American foreign policy conversation about China, is to listen as people like me and my family are dehumanized, reduced from individuals with ambitions and fragilities and flaws to pawns in a geopolitical game. It is to confront, daily, the understanding that many of my colleagues in the realm of professional American policy analysis hear Chinese or Chinese American and think potential players on the board for the PRC. 

A story may prove illustrative. I remember accompanying my boss to give a guest lecture at a major American institution offering graduate training in public policy and international relations. After my boss discussed the importance of immigration to America’s innovation enterprise and presented statistics on student visas presented to people of Chinese origin, a student raised their hand to comment on a small blip on the bar chart: the numbers on Chinese students coming to the US for film school. The student argued that the US should of course not allow Chinese students studying in STEM fields to come to this country, but that we should also not allow Chinese people to go to film school here. This was because we couldn’t risk students taking what they learned in the US back to China and applying it to the production of propaganda movies. I felt my face grow hot and my muscles grow tense. My non-Chinese boss had the presence of mind to give a cogent and measured answer about the indigenous strengths of the PRC’s film industry and the impossibility that the PRC would need American training to make propaganda. Meanwhile, I choked down bile and sipped air through pursed lips in an attempt to remain calm and convince my nervous system that the words were not an attack. 

Sometimes, I want my white, American China policy colleagues to experience this feeling of having their loyalty questioned and their humanity denied. I am not proud of this impulse, but I have indulged it. At a dinner engagement recently, the conversation turned towards how to communicate the potential impact of the PRC’s revanchist designs on Taiwan to the American people. The room teased through several ideas, all of which circled around emphasizing the danger of the PRC and PRC influence in the US. I did not disagree on the merits of the argument, but I worried that my interlocutors were failing to consider their strategies’ great potential for harming innocent people of Chinese heritage in the US. And so, I interrupted the discussion with a rather graphic story about my grandmother, who had been spat on, cursed at, and threatened with an acid attack during the COVID-19 pandemic by someone who sought to blame the “Chinese virus” on one elderly Shanghainese woman. I remember my voice shaking as I asked for empathy: for the room to consider what it is like to have American geopolitical interests blowback on their families. The room fell silent. One person said he was sorry that happened to her. I didn’t want apologies. I wanted the room to center the human impacts of their proposals. I wanted to not have to leverage my grandmother’s trauma—and perhaps also my own—to make a point. 

It helps to remember how my experience is far from unique. A 2024 New York Times report found that thousands of “American federal employees with ties to Asia…say they are being unfairly scrutinized by U.S. counterintelligence and security officers and blocked from jobs… those parts of their background that give them a familiarity with China unfairly mark them in the eyes of officials as possible spies.” Nor is this restricted, really, to being Chinese. Many collectivities of people who have ties to a state that is under national security scrutiny have lived intimately with this feeling, from Japanese Americans in World War Two to Muslim Americans during the War on Terror. It is now, as Chinese Americans, our turn. 

I started working in this field because I want to contribute to making a more productive US-China relationship for my aunties and cousins on both sides of the Pacific. If this withstanding this occupational hazard is what I must endure in service of that bigger goal, I’ll do it. But I can’t help but wish that American foreign policy discourse was grounded less in premature suspicion and harmful stereotypes, and more in the ideals that attracted my family to this nation in the first place. 

About the author

Frances Zhu Hisgen (朱潇逸) is the senior research program manager for the Program on the US, China, and the World at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. She holds an AB from Harvard College and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, where she was the Paul Williams Scholar at Emmanuel College. Her current research is on contemporary China and US-China relations, with a particular focus on gender and feminism and human rights.

Photo: Frances Zhu Hisgen. Credit: Ying Zhu