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