China Gains Respect From Its Emigrants

When Yong Chen came to California 30 years ago, he left behind a hometown in central China’s Hubei province so mired in poverty that he worried his neighbors wouldn’t have enough to eat. There was little auto traffic because most people rode bicycles. Brown brick government housing units, some without running water, dotted the landscape. Most of his friends and relatives dreamed about owning a television.

Today, Chen’s hometown, Wuhan, is booming: Modern private homes are replacing government apartments. A developer from Hong Kong plans to build a modern theme park. Traffic is snarled for miles because of the explosion of car ownership.

And Chen, now a history professor at UC Irvine, experiences a feeling that many Chinese Americans are coming to know, often to their own surprise: a sense of hope and satisfaction about their native land.

China’s economic rise has generated anxiety among many Americans, an unease heightened recently when CNOOC Ltd., the Chinese oil company, offered $18 billion to buy Unocal. For many Chinese Americans, however, China’s rise has a different, and very personal, meaning.

“For the last couple of centuries, when overseas Chinese thought of China, what came to mind was a profound sadness,” Chen said. “There was suffering from war, famine and epidemics. But now China has become a source of pride. A place of opportunities. A country that can contribute to the rest of the world.”

In Southern California, it was only 16 years ago that crowds gathered at the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles to protest the Communist government’s crackdown at Tiananmen Square.

Now the talk at the restaurants and boardrooms of the San Gabriel Valley, center of the nation’s largest Chinese American community, is about opportunities in China. Some Chinese Americans, dubbed “sea turtles,” are returning to China in hopes of making their fortunes.

Chinese immigrants began arriving in Los Angeles two centuries ago, eventually settling along the narrow alleys of the historic Chinatown district just north of downtown. The community remained relatively small until the 1970s, when tensions between China and its neighbors and uncertainty over the future of Hong Kong brought new immigrants, mainly from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

These new immigrants transformed suburbs in the San Gabriel Valley into bustling, predominantly Asian cities where Chinese markets, restaurants and retail stores dominate many thoroughfares, including Atlantic Boulevard in Monterey Park and Valley Boulevard through Rosemead, San Gabriel and Alhambra.

In more recent years, successful mainlanders, who arrived in the U.S. years ago as students or to work in restaurants, make up a newly rich community in suburbs that include Diamond Bar, Walnut, Chino Hills and Rowland Heights.

There are now more than 330,000 Chinese Americans living in Los Angeles and Orange counties. There are no official statistics of how many are from mainland China, but immigration trends indicate that they are a growing force. Federal immigration records show that about 60,000 mainlanders have been immigrating to the U.S. annually for the last few years, compared with 15,000 from Hong Kong and Taiwan combined.

Not all Chinese Americans have dropped their skepticism about their native country’s prospects. Some are quick to point out that the Communist government still stifles many freedoms and that large parts of the country remain in poverty.

Sean Song’s family still lives in a rural farming village in the northern Hebei province. Though he saw the rise in living standards in China when he attended a university in Beijing, a visit home is a reminder that wealth and opportunity are far greater in China’s major cities.

“Life in my village hasn’t changed for decades,” said Song, 31, a reporter at a Chinese newspaper based in Alhambra. “I see more of the negative side. There’s still one or two families without electricity.”

His home region remains so out of touch with modern China that many of the villagers he knows still admire Mao Tse-tung for his socialist policies and despise his successor, Deng Xiaoping, for introducing capitalism.

“They haven’t benefited so much from the so-called reform,” Song said.

Others, however, believe conditions in China are dramatically improving. A public opinion survey conducted earlier this year by the Committee of 100, a nonpartisan group of prominent Chinese Americans, attempted to measure Chinese American attitudes about China. Seventy-five percent of 354 randomly polled Chinese Americans viewed China favorably.

Kesheng Wu, a medical doctor who works in Whittier, left his hometown of Shanghai in 1990 to study biology. His decision to move was sealed after the 1989 protests and bloodshed at Tiananmen Square.

“I wasn’t comfortable in China after the Tiananmen scare,” said Wu, 43.

When Wu thinks about life in China 30 years ago, he remembers the scarcity of food and items such as toilet paper. His family had to wait years to receive a government-issued bicycle, the only form of transportation available to regular citizens at the time.

Now when he returns to Shanghai, he stands in awe of the expanding skyline, luxury cars and the legions of young people carrying the latest cellphones.

“It’s amazing,” he said. “You don’t need a special ticket to buy anything anymore. You can find food from all over the world. The overall situation is better. I’m very proud.”

Wu says he has been bullish on China’s economy ever since 1980, when Deng, then premier, introduced capitalism. But he was skeptical about the country’s strides toward social and political stability, especially after Tiananmen Square. Today, he is far more optimistic.

“It will happen slowly,” he said.

China’s success has buoyed the image of immigrants from the mainland as well. When Wu arrived in the U.S., mainland Chinese immigrants often felt inferior to those from Hong Kong and Taiwanese, whom they perceived as more sophisticated and wealthier, he said.

“That belief has dissolved now” because of China’s economy, Wu said.

Indeed, immigrants from the mainland are at the forefront of many Southern California companies that do business in China.

Charlie Woo, owner of Megatoys, a toy manufacturer in Los Angeles, came from Hong Kong to study at UCLA in 1968. For much of his time in the U.S., he watched with sadness the political upheaval caused by China’s Cultural Revolution and the killings at Tiananmen Square.

To see China’s economic rise celebrated -- even envied and feared -- marks a stark but welcomed change, he said.

“China has been humiliated in the international scene for over 100 years, at least since the Qing Dynasty,” said Woo referring to the last period of imperial rule, which ended in 1911. “Now there’s a sense of relief. China can shed the image of being weak, incompetent and not being able to compete in the global arena.”

Woo has been doing business in China for 20 years. His company contracts with several large factories in South China. He supported CNOOC’s bid to take over Unocal Corp., noting that the factories suffer weekly blackouts because of energy shortages.

The debate in Washington sparked by the CNOOC bid worries him. “I feel a sense of anxiety over this,” Woo said.

“When China and the U.S. compete for economic interests and economic dominance, particularly in this country, the spin of national security will get involved,” Woo said. “That puts Chinese Americans, at best, in an awkward position. People will suspect which side we are on.”

Woo has also noticed what he considers another troubling byproduct of China’s success.

During a recent visit to China, Woo was astonished to see rabid fans at an international soccer match. And he was shocked by mass protests against Japan, which many Chinese view as ignoring atrocities committed during World War II.

Nationalism “is a bad motivation,” Woo said. “They should be proud of improving the standard of living for their people, not because they can compete against the world in a soccer match.”

Chen, the UCI professor, is more optimistic about China’s future. He also hopes the tensions between the U.S. and China over economic policies will eventually fade.

China’s surge should not be viewed as a threat, Chen said, because a stable China benefits the long-term interests of the United States.

“Do you want a country with over a billion people in poverty, or do you want them well-fed?” Chen said. “China wants stability and security just like the U.S.”