Benjamin C. Zulueta, “Brains at a Bargain‘: Refugee Chinese Intellectuals, American Science, and the ’Cold War of the Classrooms” (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2004).
Entry by Amy Sparrow
In 1956, an American woman named Geraldine Fitch who had recently returned from decades of missionary work with her husband in China passionately addressed a group in Minnesota: In the Cold War years when American manpower lacked the same numbers and enthusiasm of the Soviet Cold War efforts, she explained, the United States needed to look for opportunities to gain more trained scientists. China, which had just become a Communist county in 1949 when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established, offered a host of these trained individuals.[1] Many of them had even completed graduate studies in the United States. Fitch and her colleagues emphasized that the Chinese brains could be purchased “at a bargain.”[2] Mrs. Fitch was an initial supporter of Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals, Inc. (ARCI), an interest group set up by Minnesota Congressman Walter H. Judd to encourage and assist immigration from China. For 12 years (1952 – 1960), the ARCI arranged immigration of 2,300 individuals from China to the United States—over 9% of the total Chinese immigration during that time. Eager to leave the increasingly oppressive Chinese state on the verge of the Cultural Revolution that punished highly educated and elite members of Chinese society, the ARCI argued, Chinese scientists and physicists could be the perfect solution to meet the growing demand in the United States for physicists and engineers to assist with Cold War projects like the hydrogen bomb and the space race.
Nearly fifty years later, in 2004, PhD student Benjamin C. Zulueta examined the development of the ARCI, Chinese immigration, and Cold War policies in his dissertation submitted to the University of California Santa Barbara. Zulueta’s dissertation spans a wide breadth of topics generally focused around the Chinese-American experience in the two decades following World War II. While all of the information presented in the 250-page dissertation is relevant to materials in our course, I have chosen to focus specifically on a small subsection of Zulueta’s research: the “stranded students” who were forced to stay in the United States after China became a Communist nation in 1949.
Zulueta explains that during the 1940s, visiting Chinese students in the United States faced the possibility of being stranded outside of their country as the civil war and political turmoil left them incommunicado from their homes. Since they were admitted to the US on student visas, they could only stay in the country as long as they continued to study. Plus, they could not accept full-time employment. Most importantly, they could not return home since the changing political climate spelled doom for any capitalist supporters and many highly educated elite who were unwilling to submit to the full-blown communism of the PRC.
Most of the Chinese students had come to the United States to study scientific fields in world-class laboratories and originally planned to return to China.[3] Many of the fields of study were “of broad national security import” in the United States, and had to do with rocket engineering, nuclear physics, and chemistry.[4] The onset of the Cold War and the establishment of the PRC produced a fundamental change in their plans: suddenly they were no longer welcome to freely return home to pursue science in their fields on their own terms. The United States was fearful of falling behind arms and space races with the Soviet Union. Zulueta even cites a Joint Committee on Atomic Energy report from 1956 that emphasizes this fear: “
Overall, this dissertation offers insight into the full story of Chinese immigration to the United States during the Cold War era. While United States immigration laws during the this time were stringent–the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (also known as the McCarran-Walter Act) placed an annual ceiling of two thousand visas on immigration from Asia—there were also exceptions to the law.[6] Overall, highly educated scientists from China who had nowhere to go when the nation became communist in 1949 were welcome in the United States. Over 5,000 Chinese immigrants ultimately served the Cold War effort in the United States. Those who did return to China or stayed in China were also welcomed heartily and were forced to work on Communist projects. Some historians have explained that these scientists who were largely trained in the United States and fully accepted China’s communist rule went on to allow China to develop their first nuclear weapons.
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[1] Madeline Y. Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2015).
[2] Benjamin C. Zulueta, “Brains at a Bargain‘: Refugee Chinese Intellectuals, American Science, and the ’Cold War of the Classrooms” (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2004), http://search.proquest.com/docview/305197800.
[3] Ibid., 3.
[4] Zulueta, “Brains at a Bargain.”
[5] Ibid., 19.
[6] Zulueta, “Brains at a Bargain.”
[7] Ibid.
Science in the Cold War 