The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [129]
The Korean War was the salvation of the Nationalist regime in Taiwan. Before the Korean conflict, the CIA had predicted that the Communists would invade Taiwan before the end of 1950, and the State Department was prepared to recognize the People’s Republic of China as the official government of China. But as American soldiers died in the Communist Chinese onslaught, the United States decided to protect Taiwan and cultivate the island as a Pacific base from which to combat communism in Asia.
For Americans of Chinese descent, the Korean War meant something else entirely. As the American public heard reports of white soldiers being slaughtered, imprisoned, and tortured in POW camps, they were baffled that their government did not drop nuclear bombs on China, as General MacArthur had suggested before Truman relieved him of his command. Chinese Americans, meanwhile, endured an atmosphere of hostility reminiscent of what Japanese Americans had experienced during World War II. A white mob tore apart a Chinatown restaurant in San Francisco to avenge American deaths in Korea. Reports began to appear of ethnic Chinese being physically attacked, their property vandalized.
As the shadow of the cold war fell over their communities, Americans of Chinese heritage found their finances scrutinized. The Korean War led to a U.S. trade embargo of the PRC, which not only prohibited Chinese imports but also prevented American money from entering China. On December 17, 1950, the United States Treasury Department used the Foreign Assets Control Regulation to ban all remittances to mainland China, shutting down the flow of capital from the Chinese American community to relatives across the Pacific. Even Hong Kong, then a British colony, fell under this regulation, preventing Chinese Americans from using the city to funnel money to their families in China. The regulation had teeth. Violators could be fined up to $10,000, and imprisoned for up to a decade. In counties such as Toishan, this created tremendous hardship for those who depended on American money for their very existence.
The regulation did more than choke off the pipeline of funds between the United States and China. On at least one occasion, it helped silence pro-Communist voices in Chinatown. In 1951, in a crackdown that ruined careers, the Treasury Department subpoenaed several staff members of the China Daily News, the largest Chinese American newspaper sympathetic to recognizing the PRC as the government of China. The following year, the Justice Department charged that Eugene Moy, the managing editor, and four others had violated the Foreign Assets Control Regulation, the only time anyone had been prosecuted under this law since its passage in 1917. Sentenced to two years in prison, Moy died shortly after his release.
To undermine leftist newspapers, the U.S. government launched a campaign to intimidate subscribers. Throughout the country, FBI agents visited Chinese Americans, warning them to drop their subscriptions to the China Daily News. In New York, the FBI interrogated Tan Yumin, the English-language secretary of the left-wing Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, asking him the same question over and over: why did he read the China Daily News? The distraught Tan later jumped off—or was pushed from—the Brooklyn Bridge, his body buried under river mud for days before it finally surfaced.
As they found their mail opened, their phone lines tapped, their movements shadowed