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I don’t think most second-generation Chinese-Americans have any particular fondness for the CCP or any ideological reason to root for Chinese victory in Taiwan over the US and allies. They have a better life than their peers in China in practically every respect, life in China for professionals is just a worse version of life in the US. The only reason they’d do it is for money, and again, that works just as well on American intelligence personnel of other races. The discovered examples are pretty low level and seem mostly financially motivated.
Consider that the US and UK often seem to have pretty good intelligence inside China and Russia without needing to seed settler populations there.
I believe You're typical minding.
I'm not talking about 'professionals' I'm talking about people raised as illegal agents by carefully chosen ideologically committed parents. If you want to know what kind of calibre of person was being sent on such a mission, go look up Jack Barsky.
Secondly, you might not be aware of it, but US is really not looking too hot right now, and it's going to get even worse. When your choices are, defy your parents, be a part of the losing side of WW3 and return to a country that's going to unfairly blame you for losing, or be a hero and have a chance of being part of the winning side..
The US looks fine to me. Obviously not perfect, but then China is hardly building utopia either. I couldn't say who would win in a war.
As for Jack Barsky, it's not clear what, if anything, his case proves. This very ideologically committed spy did not manage a decade before he became a bigamist, and just ten years in America, he refused his order to return to the USSR. So I don't expect that second generation Chinese born and raised in the US will possess any loyalty to China. The spy's contradiction is that he must maintain total loyalty to a faraway entity while not also cultivating any loyalty to the people he actually lives with.
And as well, it's not obvious that it's that easy to just walk into the corridors of power. Barsky ended up as a programmer, not in the State Department.
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Do you honestly think there's going to be a huge war between China and the US in the near future?
There's a solid (~50%) chance of a war in the next ten years.
Especially likely if Trump wins and US recovers to a degree due to a rollback of DEI nonsense and AI.
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My understanding is that the CCP is more than happy to threaten the families of ethnic Chinese living abroad. The "C" part of MICE. I imagine the usefulness of that coercion gets less and less potent as the generations toll on and they get more distant from any family which is still within the territorial domain of the CCP, but second-generation is sort of in that "sweet spot", where they could conceivably qualify for high-level US clearances, but could also have significant ties to extended family back in China. I don't know how US counterintel is dealing with this problem. Presumably, they could choose to simply deny clearances to folks who have too much family that they are too close with back in China. Alternatively, they could still grant those clearances, yet try to flag those relationships as being of sufficient concern for some sort of extra monitoring. Or, of course, they could just be doing nothing besides trying really hard to impress upon the person applying for the clearance, "You know that if you do this, there's a decent chance that you'll be putting your family in danger. And you must must must must immediately report it if you receive any threats like this, no matter how scary it is or how much you care for them. Or else."
That sums it up yeah. It’s not a secret. You can google getting a clearance with foreign associations and learn the basics.
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Or just give every second-gen Chinamen who's granted a security clearance up to x# of greencards to get cousins and grandparents out of the CCP's reach. China's population pyramid being what it is we're not talking about giant extended clans here.
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