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Let
me tell you a little bit about myself:
I was born in Shanghai. I came to the US
for High School. My father was a [pause] capitalist. He owned one
of the biggest theaters in Shanghai showing American Hollywood films. We
had a good run, but when the revolution happened, We had to leave.
Given this background, people often ask me, why are you so pro-China?
I am pro China because I Love my adopted country--America. Or rather the
promise of what it could be. On the surface, America has been very good
to me. It gave me the opportunity to be the first AA female judge in No.
CA. I am the poster child for the model minority myth.
Unfortunately,
for every Judge Lillian Sing, there are 100 Chinese Americans who have lived in the shadows, done only menial, manual work, who never reached their potential, and lived out their lives in suffering and “eating bitter”.
To many, Mei Guo, Beautiful America is not the land it promises to
be-especially today.
[pause]
***********
When the corona virus broke,
and President Trump blamed the corona virus on China, and people like Senator
John Cornyn said things like
The corona virus outbreak was due
to a culture where people ate bats, snakes, dogs, and things like that”.
He made it sound like China was a backwards state living in the dark ages and the
Chinese were an uncivilized people. I and many
CA became outraged with these racist statements. Conspiracy theory blames China for the
Corona virus, deaths, joblessness, the economy, high gas prices, and
--everything bad, everything wrong, everything unjust, in the US. But why?
The more anti-China the US became, the more I felt compelled to speak up about the danger of US-China
conflicts and the importance of promoting US-China friendship. In order for me to publicly speak up on
these issues, I had to retire from the judiciary completely which is what I did
last week. This is why today I am a
retired judge and am on this panel to speak about the dangers of US and China
as enemies.
I personally
know what it was like for CA living in America when American and China were
considered enemies.
Before I became a judge, I specialized in Immigration law and represented some
CA who were victims of the McCarthy Era.
During the McCarthy Era thousands of CA were targeted as potential spies simply
because they had relatives and other ties to China. Many were
arrested and jailed without due process, some were targeted for
deportation without the right of representation and a hearing.
Many committed suicide. Mei Guo, the beautiful country, became a
land of torture and hell.
I don’t want the same thing to happen
in the US again.
UNFORTUNATELY, this is
exactly what’s happening in the US today.
US
instituted a China Initiative Policy
under the Trump administration and continued in the Biden administration, The initiative
targeted Chinese Americans in the scientific and academic communities as being
potential spies because of their ties to China and led to false
accusations. In the scientific
and academic communities, it is known as the Crime of “researching while Chinese”. Like the McCarthy era, it is based on racial profiling and guilt by association.
One
significant case involved Professor Anming Hu, a a renowned expert in
nanotechnology was a researcher professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville,
Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering.
Professor Hu was the first “China Initiative” case that DOJ took to
trial. He was indicted with 6 felony charges. However, during the
trial, it was revealed the FBI had
knowingly built a case based on false evidence, obtained Hu’s university
documents without warrants, spied on Hu and his family, and had even attempted
to coerce Hu to spy on China for the US. The trial ended in a hung jury
and the judge declared a mistrial. One of the jurors was so outraged by
the facts that she went public and declared: “it was the most ridiculous case,
and if this is who is protecting America, we’ve got problems.” She asked
the DOJ to issue an apology to Professor HU.
But
not only did the lead prosecutor, Mr.
Casey Arrowood not apologize, he wanted to retry Professor Hu.
The case was so weak and meritless that the Judge, Thomas Varlan, ruled that the government’s evidence, even if given in
the light most favorable to the government, would be clearly insufficient for a
rational jury to convict Professor Hu of the crimes alleged and acquitted
Professor Hu of all charges. As a judge, I know how rare it is for a judge to grant a Motion to Acquit.
But this was simply a bad case, a wrongful
and vindictive prosecution.
But guess what, this same prosecutor, Mr. Casey Arrowood is now being
considered as the next US Attorney of the Eastern District of Tennessee.
This is an affront to our communities. Some of us met with Senator
Dianne Feinstein’s office last week. It
turned out the Senator’s office was not aware of the nomination nor the concerns
we raised because the nomination
was made in early August and the Senate was in August recess. But now that they are aware of our concerns,
they have been in touch with Chair Durbin’s staff and asked for a delay in
considering Arrowood’s nomination. Our latest understanding is there is not currently a plan
for an imminent Committee vote on Arrowood’s nomination.
Another recent development involved Franklin
Tao, a tenured professor of chemistry at the University of Kansas. In August 2019, Professor Tao was indicted
with 7 serious felony charges. He was
tried by a jury and the jury convicted him of 3 of the 7 charges and dismissed
the remaining 4 charges. The significant
development is the judge in this case, Judge Julie Robinson, on 9-19-2022, last
week granted defense’s motion for Acquittal notwithstanding the verdict. This is truly an extremely
rare case as no judge wants to meddle with the jury’s verdict unless there is
simply no evidence legally or factually that could support the jury’s
verdict.
Indeed, Judge Robinson overturned the 2 wire-fraud
convictions for exactly those reasons.
This reversal follows a string of failures by
the DoJ to bring strong convictions under the umbrella of the China Initiative.
Peter Zeidenberg, one of Tao’s lawyers said “This will
hopefully drive a final stake through the heart of these China Initiative cases”. Let’s hope he is right.
The
prosecution of scientists, like Professors Franklin Tao and An Ming Hu has
contributed to worsening of US China tensions., and Contemporaneous with these prosecutions, we saw a 71% increase in
incidents of violence against AA from 2019 to 2020. Let me be clear
here: You cannot exercise a policy of wholesale hatemongering and threat inflation against Chinese, encourage and reward officials for
those acts, without some
of that hatred trickling down into random attacks against AA.
Proof
of this is seen in CALIFORNIA AG, Rob Bonta’s recently released Hate
Crime Report; overall hate crime events increased 32.6% but anti-Asian
bias increased 177.5% IN 2020 TO 2021.
Anti-Asian
hate crimes are on the rise. It is an epidemic of hatred, fed and
reinforced from the top. The United States is not a safe place for
Chinese Americans.
pause
In this context, PELOSI’S TRIP TO TAIWAN ADDED FUEL TO FIRE AND BROUGHT US
MORE ANTI Asian VIOLENCE
In SF, 3 ugly attacks occurred in the week of Pelosi’s visit. I know all
of the victims personally.
I have also known Pelosi personally for over 30 years. I am truly
disappointed with her, and many CA feel betrayed and will no longer support
her.
Pelosi’s Taiwan trip is not just about Taiwan. IT HAS GEO-POLITICAL
EFFECTS.
Pelosi is wrong. Most people in Taiwan
want the status quo. Life is good in
Taiwan right now. Its people, culture
and economy are deeply intertwined with China’s. In 2021, 2-way trade
between China and Taiwan was valued at 328.34
billion US Dollars. Chinese customs data showed that Taiwan
exported 188.91 billion US Dollar
worth of goods and services to China and HK in 2021, whereas US-Taiwan trade
was only 65.7 billion US Dollars.
China, and not the US, is Taiwan’s biggest trade partner. Five times
bigger.
The Chinese are very practical people. It is all about doing business
for mutual benefit. It is about putting food in your mouth, not politics
HER
TRIP TO TAIWAN was also BAD for the American people. It COST AMERICANS JOBS. Contemporary Amperex Technology
(CATL), China's world-leading manufacturer of automobile batteries, was
planning to build battery plants in So. Carolina and Kentucky. That plant
was going to supply batteries for Ford and BMW and provide lots of jobs for
good old Americans. But after Pelosi’s trip, CATL declared the plan to
build the plants “has been deferred.” We lost jobs because of her trip to
Taiwan.
There
are families that may be hungry or homeless because they lost this
opportunity. Multiply that a
million times, and you start to get a sense of how terrible this escalation
with China has been, not just to CA, but to all Americans.
But Worst of all, Pelosi’s Taiwan trip has brought us closer to a real war
between US and China.
On
September 14, 2022, just last week, the US
Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the Taiwan Policy Act of
2022. This Act, if passed, will make
the US the only major country in the world that recognizes Taiwan as a nation
independent of the People’s Republic of China.
China will never accept that.
For the past half-century the US policy towards China has been the
One China Policy whereby the US recognizes the People’s Republic of China (PRC)
as the only legitimate government of China, and that Taiwan is part of China.
If this Taiwan Policy Act were enacted, it would mark a radical
shift away from the US One China policy. It will also upset the post WWII order
set up by the Cairo and Potsdam Declarations that returned Taiwan to China,
irrespective of the form of China’s government.
.To
China, separation from Taiwan is the result of an unfinished civil war that
China intends to finish by reuniting with the island peacefully but if pushed, at
any cost. By enacting the Act, US will surely be on a collision course with
China.
Do we want a war with China over an
island across the ocean that most Americans cannot even find on a map?
No
we don’t.
We cannot and don’t want a war with China.
Some of us are circulating a petition urging our representatives in
Washington not to support this Act.
Unfortunately,
we have hawks like Anthony Blinken, US Secretary of State, even declaring that nuclear
weapons are not off the table. Are we going crazy?
A nuclear
war between China and the US could result in the end of the world. We
cannot afford that.
The
entire world is seriously in danger. We
need to do everything to prevent a war. This is why I am now a peace activist, and I urge everyone to do everything to promote
a better relationship between my China and the US so we will have a better,
safer world for all mankind.
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