My Take | 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 persecution, now it is after ethnic business executives
Want to be a CEO in America? Try not to look too Chinese or have a name that sounds Chinese. 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.