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ОглавлениеWELCOME TO THE TRANSPACIFIC EXPERIMENT
Nestled against the western shores of the San Francisco Bay, Angel Island is both a monument to the past and a window into the future of the world’s two most powerful countries. On the northeast corner of the island lies the Immigration Station, a relic of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. That act of Congress was the capstone to the first era of major face-to-face engagement between Chinese and American people. California was the stage on which these two groups made their first introductions and impressions. They didn’t exactly hit it off.
After the discovery of gold in 1849, tens of thousands of Chinese men made landfall in San Francisco—a city they called “Gold Mountain.” Fleeing famine at home and dreaming of rivers running with precious metals, these men left their villages in southern China and clambered onto wooden ships that would carry them across the Pacific. In California they dug for nuggets, cooked for cash, and earned a reputation as cheap but extremely valuable laborers. When Leland Stanford and his fellow robber barons set out to build the western segment of the transcontinental railroad, they enlisted Chinese workers for the most crucial and the most dangerous tasks.
But these men entered an America rife with economic anxiety and racial resentment. To Irish laborers in San Francisco—men like my great-great-grandfather—these Chinese arrivals were seen as a threat to their jobs and an affront to their identity. Newspapers and dime novels spread fears of a “yellow peril” descending on American shores. Demagogues thrived, blaming the new Chinese arrivals when banking crises dragged down the American economy. Thugs carried out lynchings at Chinese labor camps, and California’s own governor demanded that Congress “check this tide of Asiatic immigration.”
Those clamoring for a law excluding Chinese laborers sparred with men like Wong Chin Foo, a naturalized American citizen who became one of the most outspoken defenders of Chinese rights.
“As residents of the United States, we claim a common manhood with all other nationalities,” Wong wrote in 1893, “and believe we should have that manhood recognized according to the principles of common humanity and American freedom.”
But those principled appeals largely fell on deaf ears among white immigrants resentful of the new competition. My own great-great-grandfather arrived in San Francisco in the 1870s, working at the Pacific Rolling Mill and living in a tough part of town known as Irish Hill. Our family doesn’t have any record of him participating in anti-Chinese activity, but he certainly fit the demographic profile: a working-class Irish Catholic immigrant laborer, scratching to carve out his space in a new city and country.
His son and my great-grandfather, Tommy Sheehan, was born in San Francisco in 1879, three years before the Chinese Exclusion Act became law. Orphaned at a young age, Tommy grew up in Saint Vincent’s Home for Boys and went on to become a San Francisco longshoreman and union organizer. In that role, he befriended Peter C. Yorke, a priest and vocal advocate for Irish laborers. Tommy used to drive Yorke around the city on weekends, smoking cigarettes and talking shop. In our family, Yorke is remembered as a righteous defender of the working man. But he did not extend that empathy to Chinese laborers. Keynoting the 1901 California Chinese Exclusion Convention, Yorke railed against Chinese people who remained in the country during the exclusion era.
“We are face-to-face with an immigration which is emphatically not Christian,” Yorke told the crowd. “Their thoughts are not our thoughts; their blood is not our blood; their outlook is not our outlook.”1
Four years after that speech, construction began on the Angel Island Immigration Station, where thousands of Chinese people looking to make a home in California would be held. One of the few exceptions in the Chinese Exclusion Act allowed for children and spouses of Chinese people in America to follow their relatives over. The Immigration Station hosted interrogations designed to separate out true blood relatives from “paper sons”—people who would claim a false familial relation in order to enter the country.
Immigration officials would have new arrivals draw their family trees and maps of their home villages. Virtually all Chinese laborers in the U.S. were recruited from just a handful of counties in the south of China near Hong Kong, allowing immigration officials to cross-reference these diagrams with those drawn by earlier immigrants, attempting to weed out the “paper sons” in the process. Detentions could go on for weeks or even months. Some were finally granted entry to the country; others were sent back across the Pacific.
Thousands of miles from home but barred from San Francisco’s shores, the Chinese prisoners carved poems into the wooden walls of the Immigration Station, engravings that you can still see there today.
America has power, but not justice.
In prison, we were victimized as if we were guilty.
Given no opportunity to explain, it was really brutal.
I bow my head in reflection but there is
nothing I can do.2
THE TRANSPACIFIC PANORAMA
Today, Angel Island offers a panoramic view of a new transpacific reality, one being forged by the new era of large-scale face-to-face engagement between Chinese and American people. The surrounding landscape is where the world’s two superpowers are getting reacquainted with one another at ground level in the twenty-first century. For a window into that process at work, we just need to take a short walk south from the Immigration Station.
Exiting through the front door of the building, hang a right, and head south along the island’s paths for about a mile. Reaching the shore, scramble out to Point Blunt, at the southeast corner of the island. These boulders offer up a sweeping view of the Bay Area: Berkeley and Oakland to the east, Treasure Island in the middle of the Bay, and San Francisco to the west. If the fog hasn’t rolled in, you can just barely catch glimpses of Silicon Valley in the distance to the south.
Starting in the east, you see the Campanile, a gothic clock tower at the center of University of California, Berkeley. Over the last decade, the number of Chinese undergrads at UC Berkeley has multiplied by a factor of ten, a microcosm of a nationwide boom in Chinese enrollment on U.S. campuses.3 In the aftermath of the financial crisis, public universities that saw their funding slashed at home turned to China, hoping that an influx of international undergrads paying higher tuition could fill the gaping holes in university budgets. Many Americans saw an additional benefit to the new arrivals: a chance to “show the light” to China’s next generation, exposing them to free speech and planting the seeds of China’s own democratic reforms.
But things haven’t exactly gone as planned. When confronted by the political evangelism of their American peers, many Chinese students feel increasingly confident in—or defensive about—their home country. It’s a group that isn’t necessarily buying into American political values. And the sheer number of new arrivals has stirred anxiety among some California students and parents, who fear that admission to America’s top public universities is being auctioned to the highest bidder. That backlash is now going national, with members of the Trump administration accusing these undergrads of spying for their home country and proposing a total ban on Chinese students.
Panning east to west across the Bay Bridge, you catch sight of the two largest housing developments in the region, both of which needed funding from Chinese investors to get off the ground. Past the cranes of the Oakland shipyards lies Brooklyn Basin, a 2,300-unit development going up just past Jack London Square. And across the water in San Francisco’s Bayview–Hunter’s Point neighborhood, Chinese immigrant investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the San Francisco Shipyard, the city’s largest housing and retail development in decades.4 That development rubs up against San Francisco’s only remaining predominantly black neighborhood—the last island of affordability in a city that has seen a massive exodus of African Americans amid tech-fueled gentrification. As Chinese money comes in and the buildings go up, longtime residents look on with hope for new jobs and fear of displacement.
Gazing south toward Silicon Valley, you can see the home of America’s most influential industry, a thriving technology ecosystem that some fear will be “disrupted” by competition from across the Pacific. Chinese billionaires, coders, and internet juggernauts have arrived in Silicon Valley seeking out “unicorn” start-ups, top U.S. researchers, and the next big idea. Local start-ups have learned to pitch to Chinese investors, while in my hometown of Palo Alto, Mark Zuckerberg has devoted himself to studying Chinese.
But when the giants of Silicon Valley return the visit in Beijing, they receive a much cooler reception. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and many more pillars of the global internet are outright blocked by China’s “Great Firewall.” Still, entranced by the potential of a billion new customers, these companies are bending over backward to curry favor with the Chinese Communist Party leadership and its censors. Facebook has worked on software tools that would seal off Chinese users from political content abroad, and Google has offered to build a fully censored search app for China to regain access to its market. A decade ago, techno-utopians gleefully predicted that a free internet would be the midwife to democracy in China. Today the question isn’t how Silicon Valley will change China. It’s how China is changing Silicon Valley, and the very structure of the global internet.
Four hundred and fifty miles farther south, the same dynamics are playing out in the other great bastion of American cultural dominance: Hollywood. For years, Hollywood films dominated Chinese screens and the people’s popular imagination. But today a booming Chinese box office, strict government controls, and the rise of Chinese-made blockbusters are eating away at Hollywood’s hegemony. Like their peers in Silicon Valley, Hollywood studios are now rewriting plotlines to please government censors, all in a bid for greater market access. And as China’s film industry comes into its own, American films are increasingly forced to compete with Chinese movies that marry Hollywood techniques to local sensibilities, creating China’s own equivalents of nationalistic blockbusters like Rambo II and Captain America.
Finally, complete the panorama from Angel Island by scanning the horizon on all sides—from the brightly painted hilltops of San Francisco to the mansions of Silicon Valley and the Spanish-style homes lining the East Bay. These housing markets have already seen dizzying price hikes from an influx of Silicon Valley tech money, and in the last five years, wealthy Chinese home buyers have pushed prices up even higher. Political and economic turbulence in China has led many of the country’s wealthiest citizens to seek financial security in international real estate, turning multimillion-dollar U.S. homes into “the new Swiss bank account.” The phenomenon of wealthy Chinese home buyers touches not just on real estate prices, but also on social values. California today prides itself on embracing immigrants from all over the world, but that embrace has become more complicated when the new arrivals are wealthier than the longtime residents. It’s challenging many Californians to ask themselves, Do we welcome all immigrants, or just those of the “poor, tired, huddled masses” variety?
As this new generation of Chinese immigrants sets down roots, they’re now shaking up long-standing political coalitions. Earlier generations of working-class Chinese immigrants had become staunch Democrats, often building pan-ethnic coalitions and struggling alongside black and Latino activists in campaigns for civil rights and racial justice. But the new immigrants are leaving China and entering America under far different circumstances. Instead of earning minimum wage at jobs in Chinatown, they often have high-paying tech and investing jobs in wealthy suburbs. For this cohort, affirmative action has become a lightning-rod issue, catalyzing a new generation of Chinese American activists that coalesced around an unlikely champion: Donald Trump. Now they are fanning out across city councils and serving as foot soldiers in a new wave of conservative Chinese American politics.
The phenomena glimpsed in this panorama are playing out to different degrees in cities and towns all across America. They are bringing the U.S.–China relationship down from the realm of geopolitics and directly into the lives of ordinary Americans. In doing so, they’re shifting key dimensions of the relationship from the White House to the state house, and from the politburo to the PTA meeting. To see where the world’s two most powerful countries are meeting, cooperating, and competing today, we need to get outside of Washington, D.C., and Beijing.
Welcome to the Transpacific Experiment.
WHAT IS THE TRANSPACIFIC EXPERIMENT?
The Transpacific Experiment is the living laboratory for a new breed of grassroots superpower diplomacy. It is the fluid ecosystem of students, entrepreneurs, investors, immigrants, and ideas bouncing back and forth between the Golden State and the Middle Kingdom. It’s the Chinese undergrads expanding their horizons on California campuses, and the Silicon Valley start-ups scratching for a toehold in China; the California mayors courting Chinese factory investment, and the Chinese governors studying California carbon markets.
As the top destination for Chinese investors, students, tourists, technologists, filmmakers, and home buyers, California is ground zero for this experiment in deep and multifaceted engagement between China and the United States. The results of this experiment—the personal ties, economic frictions, and technological innovations—are already reshaping China and the United States and filtering out into the international system that orbits around them.
All of these interactions bring new opportunities—for investment, jobs, tuition dollars, and fascinating cultural fusion—but also new anxieties.
When international diplomacy enters our everyday lives, it is transformed. Greater contact can humanize the other side, turning a faceless “other” into a neighbor, classmate, or even friend. But that close-up contact can also drag things in the other direction, sharpening awareness of our differences and making geopolitical problems feel personal. In the Transpacific Experiment, we see both of these forces at work: a magnetic pull toward greater integration and synergy, as well as an intense backlash when one side feels manipulated or taken advantage of.
Here we catch a glimpse of the tension that animates this experiment in grassroots diplomacy. This new breed of deep U.S.–China engagement has the potential to bring tremendous benefit to people in both countries, but in that process, it creates entirely new problems that hit closer to home.
Heightening the drama is the grand geopolitical backdrop to these interactions. In the century and a half since Chinese and American people first came face-to-face in California, the relative positions of the two countries have changed dramatically. During that first wave of engagement in the 1800s, China was a once-great dynastic empire slowly being torn apart by colonial aggression and internal strife. The United States was instead an up-and-coming nation of immigrants, an unproven democratic experiment mixing lofty ideals, messy realities, and mounting military strength.
Today, the people of these countries are getting reacquainted on different footing: as citizens of the world’s two superpowers. Now, the United States plays the role of the incumbent juggernaut. It is home to powerful global industries and proud national traditions but also an increasingly fraught economic, social, and political order. And China is now the up-and-comer, a nation that has emerged from decades of domestic turmoil to challenge the United States for global leadership. To complicate matters further, China has not risen to this position by walking the path prescribed for it by Western theorists: free markets, free speech, and democratic politics. Instead, it has relied on its own unique alchemy of Leninist politics, state-guided development, and strict controls on speech and culture.
That geopolitical role reversal infuses every aspect of the Transpacific Experiment. New ties may be forged at the grassroots, but they are often colored by our sense of relative standing on the world stage. How Americans feel about their new Chinese neighbors is intimately wrapped up in our feelings about China as a rising power, as well as insecurities about the trajectory of our own national experiment in democracy. Chinese people’s perceptions of these interactions are similarly bound up in questions of national pride and insecurity. On a good day, the United States and its top companies might be looked at with admiration, as a source of inspiration for artists, entrepreneurs, and educators. On a bad day, that same country is seen as mired in steep and unsalvageable decline, an aging nation that will expend its last ounce of energy attempting to hold China down.
As Chinese investors, immigrants, and ideas make their presence felt on U.S. soil, they pose a question that challenges something deep within the American psyche: Are Americans ready for a world in which they engage with Chinese people, companies, and ideas on equal footing? Or a world in which the Chinese side has the upper hand?
Today, California is the space in which these tensions, frictions, and possible futures are taking shape. In many ways, China and California make for an odd couple. America’s most liberal state, and one of the world’s most sophisticated authoritarian regimes. A bastion of environmental protectionism, and an industrial behemoth that leads the world in carbon emissions. The free-spirited home of everything from the hippies to the Kardashians, and an ancient Confucian culture built on ritual and personal restraint.
And yet, those apparent contradictions are often what have drawn these two states into their dialectical dance. Chinese leaders see a vision for their own country’s future in California: blue skies, top universities, innovative technology, and global blockbusters. They know that if China is going to make the leap from a middle- to a high-income country, it needs to move up the global value chain, fostering technological and cultural industries. In that light, California offers both inspiration and a tremendous wealth of resources to be accessed or acquired.
For Chinese families, the stakes are less grandiose but no less important: they want clean air for their lungs, a good education for their kids, and a place to stash their life savings that is safe from the vagaries of the Chinese political system. They often don’t think of themselves as volunteer diplomats in the most pivotal international relationship of the twenty-first century, and yet circumstance and happenstance have made it so.
On the U.S. side of the equation, these same phenomena have a tendency to challenge dearly held values and pose uncomfortable questions about our own nation.
At the neighborhood level, the new Chinese arrivals are turning many American ideas about immigration on their head, confronting Californians with complicated questions about acceptance, assimilation, and citizenship. Residents of suburbs like my hometown often feel comfortable—even self-righteous—in their open-armed embrace of immigrants and refugees targeted by President Trump. They abhor “build the wall” chants and proudly decorate their lawns with signs declaring NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL. Looking back on the Chinese Exclusion era, they condemn the racist white workers who resented Chinese laborers for “stealing” their jobs.
But tweak a few of the variables and bring these issues to their own doorstep, and you might get far different reactions from these same people. What if the immigrant isn’t a poor laborer, but a rich family escaping the Beijing smog? What if the resource being competed for isn’t a working-class job, but a house in your hometown? What if, like many of the early immigrant laborers, the new arrivals have no intention to remain in the country long-term? Suddenly that comfortable moral clarity is harder to come by, forcing a closer examination of exactly what principles to hold on to and which to amend.
For California’s trademark industries—technology and culture—the rise of competitive Chinese ecosystems also challenges long-standing orthodoxy about the sources of innovation and creativity. For over half a century, California has been a global haven for personal freedoms and alternative lifestyles. During that same period, it has also dominated the world of technology and culture. That correlation—between personal freedoms, technological innovation, and cultural production—led many to believe these phenomena were inextricably woven together. A country without political freedoms could not truly innovate, and people without freedom of expression couldn’t create a thriving cultural industry. It’s a mantra woven deep into our American psyche, and one that seemed to be confirmed by the country’s successive triumphs over rivals such as the Soviet Union.
But the rise of China’s technology and movie industries is steadily peeling apart that once-solid correlation. In the process, it is challenging certain core beliefs about what makes innovation and creativity possible. Instead of putting stock in abstract personal freedoms, China is instead betting that you can build these industries up brick by brick. Throw together a critical mass of computer programmers, free-flowing capital, film sets, movie screens, and disposable income, and hope that innovation and commercial culture emerge from it. The game is far from over in these industries, but China has consistently outperformed expectations, and that surprising run of success is changing the conversation about technology and culture on both sides of the Pacific.
Looked at from a 40,000-foot perspective, these issues can appear abstract or distant from everyday life. But all of these open questions and thorny problems are playing out in real time. They are affecting lives and livelihoods today, driven forward by real people with big ambitions, fears, and hopes for what the Transpacific Experiment will mean to them.
Over the past six years, I’ve used my own work as a journalist, analyst, consultant, and general hanger-on in California and China to follow these people’s stories and fit together the pieces of this puzzle as best I can. The book you’re now reading is the result of that piecing together. It’s an imperfect, incomplete, and subjective snapshot of these phenomena. In the process of writing, the people, places, and questions dissected here became a part of my life. Much of the writing here reflects that closeness, with both the insight and the bias that closeness brings.
Bridging two distinct countries and cultures is a delicate and often fraught process. If done right, it can open entirely new vistas for the people and the places involved. If done wrong, it can turn minor frictions into a major backlash, fueling mutual suspicion and outright resentment along national, cultural, and personal lines. This book tells the stories of people who have tried, and sometimes failed, to build those bridges between China and California.
But before telling you their stories, I’ll briefly share my own. Over the last five years, the Transpacific Experiment has exerted a similar pull on me: part personal, part professional, and whole lot of dumb luck. That run of luck began with a broken ankle and a visa problem.
ANKLES AND OPPORTUNITIES
I grew up in the Bay Area, but before 2008 had virtually no interest in China. My high school didn’t offer Mandarin courses, and even if it had, I would have stuck with Spanish. In our survey courses on “world history,” we blew through a dozen Chinese dynasties in a couple of weeks. By the time I got to college, I could sum up my knowledge of modern China in three phrases: Mao Zedong, Tiananmen Square, and Factory of the World.
But in the summer after my sophomore year in college, I stumbled into a job as a counselor at an academic summer camp in Beijing. It was June 2008, and the city was ramping up to host the summer Olympics, furiously repaving roads and launching campaigns to discourage spitting in public. Despite those efforts, Beijing was still a city with an untamed heart. I found myself fascinated by the high-functioning chaos that reigned all around me: the lawless fluidity on the roads, the bruising bartering in the markets, and the no-holds-barred competition for every seat on the subway.
Underneath that gruff exterior, there was also real warmth and openness toward Americans. Many working-class Chinese people had never interacted with an American before, and a big smile combined with some creative sign language went a long way in the cause of grassroots diplomacy. I made friends with the security guards at our dormitories, gifting them my Frisbee on my last day there, and receiving one of their Beijing Public Security uniforms in return. Sitting in the airport lounge waiting for my flight to San Francisco, I knew I had to come back to China.
So, after graduating college in 2010, I found a job teaching English in the central Chinese city of Xi’an. As I slowly gained Chinese language skills, that city and the whole country became even more captivating than on my first trip. After a year in Xi’an, I headed back to Beijing to study language full-time at a university. Graduating from that program, I began a job at a local TV station that broadcast English-language pseudopropaganda about China in countries like Iran.
By the spring of 2013, I knew that I wanted to work as a proper journalist. Reading American media coverage of the country, I felt that it wasn’t capturing what I saw in the daily life of my Chinese friends. I wanted to fill that gap with their stories. I gave myself six months and $5,000 in savings to try to string freelance writing gigs into a job as a China correspondent.
I hitchhiked across central China looking for stories, writing about a fight I witnessed at an airport and about the personal evolution of Chinese students who returned from studying in the U.S. When I eventually ran out of time and money, I had collected a handful of publications but no job offers. Resigned to reality, I began interviewing for more mundane careers: selling real estate in central China or working for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the country’s northeast.
And then, a miracle happened: I badly mangled my ankle during a game of Ultimate Frisbee in Beijing. By the time I dragged myself into the lobby of a local hospital, my ankle was the size of a cantaloupe, but the doctor who glanced at my X-rays declared it to be “no problem”—if I stayed off it for a week or two, all would be back to normal. A few days later, I flew home to California for a long-scheduled visit of a couple weeks. There, my family doctor saw things differently: the ankle was severely broken in two places, and with an injury like that I absolutely should not fly for at least two months.
I was stranded back in the Bay Area with one working foot and no job. The prospect of two months sitting at home left me worried that I would lose the pulse of what was happening in China. I’d spent the last six months obsessively following—and trying to contribute to—news coverage of the country. Right before coming home, I had completed an intensive Mandarin program in which I vowed to speak no English for three months, a pledge that I broke at the exact same moment as my ankle. Now I was trapped in the leafy suburbs of the Bay Area, 6,000 miles from the action in Beijing.
But then, the action started coming to me. At the time, prospective Chinese home buyers were arriving in my hometown of Palo Alto in droves. They were boarding luxury buses for mobile real estate tours of the city, purchasing million-dollar homes the way my parents might snap up a nice piece of furniture. I called up the real estate agency hosting the tours and talked my way into joining one of them, eventually writing an article about it for the website of The Atlantic.
The home-buying tours were a truly transpacific phenomenon: the rush to move money out of China reflected jitters about that country’s economy, and the sudden influx of rich Chinese buyers was ruffling feathers in California suburbs. It was one of the first signs I saw that the economic, social, and human narratives that I’d been tracing within China were now making their way onto American soil.
When my ankle healed up, I headed back to China and resumed my job search. Soon after arriving back in Beijing, a well-timed introduction and a lucky break landed me my dream job: as the first China correspondent for The WorldPost, a new media collaboration between The Huffington Post and the Berggruen Institute, a think tank. Before I could begin that work, I had to apply for a journalist visa.
That application process is never easy, but my timing was particularly bad. A year earlier, The New York Times and Bloomberg had dropped bombshell investigations into the family wealth of China’s top leadership, reports that led to a freeze on visas for those publications. Chinese leadership had no beef with The WorldPost, but we faced a different hurdle: China had never before granted full journalist credentials to an all-online media platform. The print–online distinction was functionally meaningless but bureaucratically momentous. Tensions with The New York Times hung heavy over the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and no one there was eager to hand out credentials to a new American outlet. I flew back to San Francisco in December of 2013, unsure if the powers that be would see fit to grant me the visa.
But this time around, I was ready to track down some more transpacific narratives. When state labor inspectors raided the Southern California factory of a Chinese electric car company, I interviewed the eccentric mayor who had courted the company and covered the fallout from the investigation. I began visiting and interviewing people in the Hunters Point neighborhood being transformed by a Chinese-funded mega-development. I hung out with Chinese entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and met the Airbnb team planning the company’s China strategy. I even helped organize a delegation of small-town Bay Area mayors making a trip to China to pitch their cities as ideal destinations for investment.
All these stories provided small windows into massive changes within China itself. When I first set foot in Beijing just six years earlier, China was still squarely a developing country. Awe-inspiring Olympic ceremony aside, it was a majority-rural country whose economy ran on low-wage labor. China was considered a technological backwater and an afterthought for the U.S. entertainment industry. Cheap Chinese goods stocked the shelves of our nation’s Walmarts, but that was about as close as Chinese people got to the everyday lives of most Americans.
Now, as I followed these stories up and down the state of California, I saw early glimpses of a country transformed. Chinese technology companies had become some of the largest in the world, and they were making their presence felt in Silicon Valley. The Chinese movie industry was growing at breakneck speed and casting a spell over executives in Hollywood. Chinese students, tourists, investors, and home buyers abroad were carving out a new reputation for their countrymen: rich, sometimes cultured, sometimes crass, and very ready to spend.
Watching as Chinese tourists lugging enormous cameras poured into Stanford’s Quad, I couldn’t help but ask myself: Is this how Italians in 1950s Rome felt when all the Americans began crowding into the Colosseum?
This new wave of arrivals didn’t quite reflect the life of the average Chinese person back home: the country was still middle-income, with large swaths of the population scraping out a living in factories or on farms. And many Chinese immigrants arriving on U.S. soil did so in a low-key, thoughtful, and genuinely curious way: more in the tradition of James Baldwin in Paris than obnoxious Americans in Thailand. But China’s growing footprint in California does offer clues into the country’s future: the industries it wants to promote, the lifestyles it hopes to adopt, and the kind of wealth it hopes to cultivate.
THE BAY AREA, BEIJING, AND BACK AGAIN
After seven months in visa limbo, I was abruptly informed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that I would indeed receive a journalist visa. I tied up some loose ends with my reporting, packed my things, and in the late summer of 2014 headed back to Beijing.
But sitting in the airport departures lounge, I once again knew that I would be coming back—this time to California. China still felt like the center of the action, but the Transpacific Experiment felt like the next frontier.
Back in China with my newly minted journalist credentials, I pinballed around the country, covering everything from democracy protests in Hong Kong to down-and-out coal towns in Shaanxi Province. I also traced the transpacific stories back to their source, meeting the Chinese students who were heading to California and those who had returned, the artificial intelligence (AI) researchers who left Google to found their start-up back in China, and the wealthy “birth tourists” who gave birth to American citizens on U.S. soil before heading home to Beijing.
In 2016 I moved to Oakland, California, and since then I’ve continued weaving in more layers and more characters as these stories evolved. Tracing these trends from source to destination and back again continues to drive home the interconnectedness of these two places. In this world of deep China–U.S. entanglement, an anticorruption crackdown in Guangzhou can drive up housing prices in Pasadena, and an ideological campaign in Beijing can reshape the movie slate of Hollywood studios. We don’t know what long-term consequences these ties will yield, but it’s clear that they are already molding the industries, technologies, universities, and communities that affect the entire world.
Each of the following chapters charts these trends in one of six key arenas: education, technology, film, green investment, real estate, and American politics. Each chapter seeks to explore that arena through the eyes of the people who are living out these phenomena in real time: students, film producers, mayors, entrepreneurs, and community activists. Woven into those stories are my own intersections with them, the chances I’ve had to both observe and sometimes affect the Transpacific Experiment in action. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about both countries from watching this strange new world take shape, and I hope you will as well.
Let’s dive in.
