The Chinese in America (47 page)

Even the state schools were turning away qualified Chinese American applicants. Traditionally, the best students in California had viewed Berkeley and other UC schools as safety nets in case they were rejected by more prestigious universities such as Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, and the Ivy League schools. For years, the only requirement for admission to Berkeley or UCLA was graduation within the top 12.5 percent of one’s high school class. Given the high concentration of Chinese and other Asian Americans on the West Coast, their numbers soared within the University of California system. Between 1966 and 1980, for example, the percentage of Asian American undergraduates at Berkeley had quadrupled from about 5 percent to 20 percent of the students. According to the
New York Times
in 1981, Berkeley officials fully expected 40 percent of the entering freshman class to be Asian American by 1990. But suddenly, in the mid-1980s, the pattern reversed and the numbers abruptly dropped.

In 1984, Ling-chi Wang, an ethnic studies professor at Berkeley and veteran activist, noticed that the number of Asian American enrollments fell 21 percent within a single year. Something, he believed, was terribly wrong. “As soon as the percentages of Asian students began reaching double digits at some universities, suddenly a red light went on,” he told the
Los Angeles Times.
“I don’t want to say there’s a conspiracy but university officials see the prevalence of Asians as a problem, and they have begun to look for ways to slow down the Asian American admissions. Are they scared of Berkeley’s becoming an Asian university? They’re shaking in their socks.”

A volunteer task force in the San Francisco Bay Area—including activists, judges, and professors of Chinese descent—quickly formed in 1984 to investigate the situation. They were shocked to discover that Berkeley had turned away students with perfect GPAs while admitting others who had not even submitted their grades or test scores. Reporting on the Berkeley controversy, the media began to draw parallels between the declining admission rates for Asian Americans and the stringent racial quotas that Jewish students had faced at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale between the 1920s and 1940s.

The media started to interview Chinese Americans who believed they had been unfairly treated by Berkeley. In 1987, Berkeley rejected Yat-Pang Au, the son of Hong Kong émigrés and a star student at Gunderson High School in San Jose, California. A straight-A student, Au had been the valedictorian of his class, won prizes for ten extracurricular activities, earned letters in cross-country and track, served as a justice on the school’s Supreme Court, and even operated a Junior Achievement company. When Au received the rejection letter in the mail, he read it over and over, “because I thought maybe I had misunderstood or that it wasn’t addressed to me,” he told the
Los Angeles Times.
“I had my mind and heart set on Berkeley. I’d thought about Berkeley for years; I’d worked hard in high school to get into Berkeley. I couldn’t believe I’d been turned down.”

Stunned to learn that ten other students with lower grades and test scores had been admitted, Au went to the press and publicly complained about the situation. When the Bay Area media reported the story, the Au family’s house was vandalized, and Au’s terrified mother ended up buying a gun and taking shooting lessons. For two years, Au attended De Anza, a local community college, before finally enrolling at Berkeley.

In 1989,
NBC Nightly News
interviewed Hong Kim, an A student of Taiwanese heritage. He had been rejected by Berkeley, while two of his black friends with lower grades were accepted. “I don’t hold it against them, they’re my friends,” he told NBC. “I want to tell them I still love them, but ... I think I’m more qualified.”

The public furor in the Chinese American community triggered federal investigations and policy changes. In the wake of the controversy, the Justice and Education departments began to probe allegations that Chinese and other Asian American applicants were victims of racism. Federal officials eventually exonerated Harvard and Berkeley but found UCLA guilty of bias.
⁵¹

The discrimination even extended to the high school level. In 1983, prestigious Lowell High School in San Francisco adopted different admissions standards for different ethnic groups, with the harshest ones reserved for Chinese Americans. To settle a lawsuit filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the San Francisco school district agreed to increase the number of black and Hispanic students in the city’s top public schools. The settlement mandated that at least four ethnic groups had to be represented at each school and that no more than 40 to 45 percent of the enrollment could be dominated by one single ethnicity. To enforce this racial cap, Lowell required Chinese American applicants to outperform Caucasians and all other ethnic groups in order to be accepted. The minimum test score for admission to Lowell was 62 (originally 66) for ethnic Chinese applicants, 59 for Caucasians, 58 for other Asian Americans, and 56 for Hispanics and African Americans.
⁵²

Some activists depicted the fight over racial quota systems as a struggle for limited slots between Asian Americans and other minority groups, such as blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans. But in reality, asserted Henry Der, head of Chinese for Affirmative Action, “Asian applicants are competing with white applicants.” The “legacy” programs for children of Ivy League alumni, the “old-boy networks” that maintained places in elite universities for the children of the East Coast establishment, Der said, were a form of affirmative action for Caucasians. Noting that two-thirds of all Asian Americans opposed the system of affirmative action, Der told A magazine, “Most Asian immigrant families would ask for meritocratic standards. These families don’t understand that selection has never been based on meritocratic standards.”

A
s the 1980s drew to a close, the leadership of the People’s Republic of China faced the greatest threat to its power since its defeat of Chiang’s Nationalists. Their public embrace of a new openness during the Reagan-Deng years had encouraged long-suppressed but deep-seated dissatisfaction with the Communist Party to bubble to the surface. Now they would have to deal with it.

The trouble began small. In 1986, Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist and vice president at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei and a Party member, emboldened others by openly criticizing the government. Soon afterward, a student movement protested PRC corruption, charging that elections to the people’s congresses had been fixed. When demonstrations spread to other cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, Fang Lizhi was fired from his position and dismissed from the Communist Party. But serious damage had already been done. The secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Yaobang, an outspoken advocate of both democracy and immediate government reform, was made a scapegoat for the protests and forced to resign.

In April 1989, Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack, provoking another mass gathering in Beijing. His death coincided with a year of anniversaries within China—the tenth anniversary of U.S. recognition of the People’s Republic of China, the fortieth anniversary of the birth of the PRC, and the seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth movement, an early intellectual and literary revolution based on Western concepts of freedom. To bolster their demands for political change, Beijing students held street parades in homage to May Fourth and staged a broad-based hunger strike in Tiananmen Square. The state visit of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that month added fuel to the fire, for under his leadership the Soviet Union was instituting serious reforms, such as
perestroika
(restructuring), which edged his people in the direction of capitalism, and
glasnost
(openness), a policy offering greater access to information on government policies and a new freedom to comment on them.

By late May 1989, the Beijing students had erected in Tiananmen Square a Chinese “Goddess of Democracy” statue, inspired by the American Statue of Liberty. More than a million people came out to support the students, and outside the capital similar rallies erupted. It was the largest pro-democracy movement in the history of China, and possibly, considering the number of participants, the largest anywhere in the world. It seemed to many in both China and the United States that China might be on the threshold of its first democratic society. According to high-level documents leaked out of China, later published anonymously as
The Tiananmen Papers,
such optimism was not entirely unrealistic. Many top officials initially wanted to negotiate with the student activists and reach some sort of compromise with them. But eventually they deferred to an elite group of party elders, including Deng Xiaoping, who decided that the best course was to declare martial law and crush the movement.

In the pre-dawn hours of June 3 and 4, 1989, fully armed Chinese troops, accompanied by tanks, stormed into Tiananmen Square and opened fire, killing hundreds of people and wounding many more. While some of the most visible pro-democracy leaders were rounded up and arrested, others fled the country and sought asylum in the United States. Fang Lizhi and his wife fled for their lives to the U.S. embassy, which, to the great indignation of the PRC leadership, secured their safe passage out of China.

The massacre, widely reported by the international media, left a lasting scar on Sino-American relations. Footage of the bloody corpses was smuggled out of the country and shown on Western television, creating enormous sympathy for the Chinese students. Over the next few days, Chinese television ran pictures of some of the better-known protestors who had been captured, all appearing much the worse for their few days in custody. Overnight, the warm Western stereotype of China—a country of lotus flowers, pavilions, and pandas—was replaced by violent images of a brutal Soviet-like totalitarian regime.

On June 5, 1989, President George H. W. Bush signed an executive order allowing all Chinese nationals to remain in the United States. On April 11, 1990, he issued another order giving Chinese immigrants who could prove they were in the country before that date the right to stay. Bush also combined domestic with international politics when he made clear that “individuals from any country who express fear of persecution ... related to their country’s policy of forced abortion or coerced sterilization” would be welcome to stay in the United States.

Many students felt little interest in returning to China. One law student from Beijing told an interviewer that it would be “political suicide” to go back: “It is a waste of life.” A Berkeley engineering student said the PRC would “make Chinese intellectuals as scapegoats, just like what they have always been doing in every political movement in the last forty years.” A few expressed interest in returning only after the ruling-class elite had passed away. Observed a Stanford doctoral candidate, “China will definitely change because it just cannot get worse. Political changes might come faster after the death of some old guys.” In 1992, in response to the plight of these pro-democracy student activists, the U.S. government passed the Chinese Student Protection Act, permitting more than fifty thousand students and scholars to gain permanent residence status in the United States.

The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 had other consequences as well. It provoked fears of political instability across Asia, encouraging ethnic Chinese capitalists to establish second homes in North America. Perhaps no group was more concerned about its future than the people of Hong Kong, which by treaty the British were obligated to return to the People’s Republic of China on July 1, 1997. Could the freewheeling capitalist culture of Hong Kong survive under the Communist old guard? No one knew. To allay fears, the mainland Chinese government promised not to change the city’s social conditions for the next fifty years, but many Hong Kong residents did not fully trust them. “No sane person should have faith in the promises,” announced one Hong Kong skeptic. “Mao made the same pledge to Shanghai in 1949, but it lasted for just three months. My parents escaped to Hong Kong, giving up everything.” He pointed to the tragedy of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. “Shouldn’t we leave before it is too late?”

Many felt they could not afford to wait to find out. Not surprisingly, those who most wanted to leave were the ones with the most to lose under Communist rule—the capitalist and professional elite of Hong Kong. Late-1980s surveys found that 70 percent of Hong Kong’s government doctors, 60 percent of its lawyers, and 40 percent of its civil engineers intended to move out before 1997. According to a review of visa applications, between 1987 and 1991 some 15 to 19 percent of Hong Kong émigrés held college degrees, compared to only 4 percent of the general population. A 1989 telephone poll of 605 Hong Kong residents found that the wealthier the household, the stronger the desire to leave. Many emigres were, in fact, millionaires. In the 1990s, the typical household of a Hong Kong émigré investor in Canada was worth an estimated 1.5 million Canadian dollars, equivalent to about $1.2 million U.S.

Like the 1949 refugees from Hong Kong, most of those trying to leave in the 1990s found the logical destination—England—closed to them. Although Great Britain traditionally issued British passports to all those born on its territory, it refused to do so with the Chinese born on Hong Kong while it had been British. These passports would have ensured entry to England for those who chose that path. Many Hong Kong residents felt profoundly betrayed, convinced that Great Britain had shirked its responsibilities to avoid ruffling the feathers of the PRC. Even though the British had enjoyed a century of colonial rule in Hong Kong, benefiting from the wealth created by the colony, it appeared they were unconcerned about the fate of their former subjects.

Fortunately, other countries had friendlier policies. Canada, for instance, had lenient immigration laws, especially for political refugees. Thus Canada became the most popular destination for the Hong Kong émigrés, followed by Australia and the United States. No doubt many former residents of Hong Kong were attracted to these countries not only because of their liberal admissions policies, but also because English was their primary language. As people left in droves for those regions, the annual rate of migration from the city of Hong Kong soared from twenty thousand in the early 1980s to over sixty thousand after 1990.