SCMP: Want to be a CEO in America? Try not to look too Chinese or have a name that sounds Chinese. 香港南華早報: 想在美國當企業主管, 盡量不要長得太像中國人，名字也別太像中國人. by Alex Lo in Toronto Canada Aug 10 2025

Going after Lip-Bu Tan, Malaysian-American CEO of Intel, is just the beginning. The United States has long been targeting ethnic Chinese scientists for prosecution, now it is after ethnic Chinese business executives 南華早報：追殺英特爾馬來西亞裔美籍執行長陳立武只是一個開始。美國長期以來一直將華裔科學家作為起訴目標，現在又將矛頭指向華裔企業高層.

There is absolutely no future for Chinese Scientists and Business Executives in the US 中國科學家和企業主管在美國絕對沒有未來

Lip-Bu Tan, the new chief executive of chipmaking giant Intel, finds to his dismay that out of nowhere, top United States politicians up to President Donald Trump have declared him a threat to national security.

Trump tweeted last week on his Truth Social platform: “The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem.”

Immediately? Why the urgency? The president didn’t say. What evidence is there that Tan was such a threat to America? Trump didn’t present any. It appears that he was paraphrasing Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who earlier wrote to Intel’s board chair expressing “concern about the security and integrity of Intel’s operations” and Tan’s ties to China.

Tan is Malaysian, studied in Singapore and received his degrees from MIT. He has long been a US citizen. Cotton accused him of having extensive investments in China. Well, name me a Wall Street or Silicon Valley titan in the past quarter of a century who didn’t have investment or business in China. Elon Musk? Apple? BlackRock?

You may remember Cotton’s infamous grilling of TikTok’s CEO Chew Shou Zi during a Senate hearing in February last year. Many people described his antics as racist.

“Senator, I’m Singaporean,” Chew pleaded, but Cotton kept asking whether he was a Chinese national, and a member of the Chinese Communist Party, and then demanded to examine his passport for proof of citizenship.

With Tan, though, the more serious charge Cotton has levelled is that Cadence Design Systems – a San Jose-based firm that Tan headed between 2009 and 2021 – last month agreed to pay US$140 million to resolve charges that it violated export controls by selling chip design products to China’s National University of Defence Technology with ties to, as the name suggests, the Chinese military.

According to numerous news reports, it appears Cadence staff in China hid the dodgy sales from the company’s compliance officers and bosses at the US headquarters.

The Cadence fine was not unusual. Seagate Technology was slapped with a staggering US$300 million penalty in 2023 for shipping millions of hard drives to Huawei Technologies.

California-based chip equipment maker Applied Materials is being investigated over shipments to Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC), China’s leading foundry operator.

Intel itself makes a good punching bag. Under the previous CEO, it secured US$8 billion in subsidies, the largest outlay under the 2022 Chips Act signed into law by Joe Biden. And yet, foundry construction has been delayed, and there have been mass lay-offs. The Chips Act was supposed to create jobs, not lose them. So the attack on Intel is also an attack on Trump’s predecessor, Biden, whom he likes to blame for everything, even though the industrial policies of both administrations and their tech war against China are similar.

The US government has been going after ethnic Chinese scientists and engineers for almost a decade, but ethnic corporate executives, it seems, are now fair game, too. This is McCarthyism 2.0, and goes well with Trump 2.0. Let’s not forget that Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man, Roy Cohn, was once a personal lawyer and mentor of the young Trump.

While we are talking about “conflicted”, it would be hard to name another US president with more conflicts of interest than Trump.

For just a snippet, as The New York Times reported in late May, “the Trump family and its business partners have collected US$320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging US$500,000 apiece to join”.

Intel’s late great CEO Andy Grove famously declared, “Only the paranoid survive”. Ironically, the firm, now a shadow of its former glory under Grove, has become a victim of Washington’s China paranoia.