PALO ALTO -- Standing in front of a rapt audience, Sherry Chen began to describe the October morning she was arrested at her U.S. government job and accused of spying for communist China.

"Suddenly, there were six FBI agents," Chen, a 60-year-old hydrologist, said. "One showed me an arrest warrant. Another one put me into handcuffs."

But then she broke down at the podium and wept, as her voice vanished into silence.

The appearance at a recent Palo Alto forum was the first time the shy, Beijing-born Chen had spoken publicly about her case, which has become a cause célÃ¨bre in a movement protesting what activists call the growing and unfair targeting of Chinese immigrants for espionage. Although decidedly upscale, the civil rights movement -- made up of Chinese-American scientists, techies, attorneys and academics -- features classic protest language of a disadvantaged class -- "racism," "discrimination," "racial profiling."

"This is an issue that affects my kids and grandkids and yours, especially those of you still working," George Koo, a retired international business consultant who lives in Mountain View, told the forum's nearly 100 attendees, most of them of Chinese heritage.

Produced by the Committee of 100, a revered Chinese-American organization, and the influential Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs group, the meeting was a call to arms, especially aimed at Asian-Amerians in science and technology.

"We are considered a model minority, except when we're not," said Koo, who started his career as a chemical engineer. "Then we are believed to be enemy agents for China."


Chen, who was cleared of the charges a week before her trial was set to start, was arrested on Oct. 20, 2014, at her job at the National Weather Service in Wilmington, Ohio. She was accused of downloading data on U.S. dams and passing it on to a Chinese government official. The four espionage counts could have cost her $1 million in fines and 25 years in prison.

In an interview, Chen said one of the worst parts of the ordeal was when agents marched her -- shackled -- past her co-workers. "I felt so ashamed," she said. "That was something I only saw on TV, when criminals are taken away."

Because China is infamous for stealing the trade secrets and intellectual property of thousands of U.S. companies, the nation attracts enormous federal scrutiny.

At the Palo Alto forum, several speakers cited a January "60 Minutes" segment -- "The Great Brain Robbery" -- in which U.S. government officials identified economic espionage by China as "a national security emergency" costing the nation "hundreds of billions in losses and more than 2 million jobs."

Chinese-American activists say those figures are greatly inflated and that they are more concerned that federal investigators are increasingly aggressive about arresting and charging Chinese immigrants, using the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 as the legal impetus.

"Everybody is doing nefarious, bad things," said Los Angeles attorney Brian Sun, a leader of the fight-back movement,

"but that does not mean it has to be only Chinese people."

A mere charge that a Chinese immigrant is a spy, activists say, is always a crushing blow. Friends and family immediately scatter as fear, anger, confusion and distrust run rampant. Loss of employment and mountains of legal fees cause financial devastation, even when cases are dropped.

Sun and other activists say there is a dangerous notion among many security experts that Chinese immigrants remain loyal to the nation of their ancestors. Specifically, Koo said, security experts fear that Chinese, especially those in science, tech and international business, are secretly gathering and passing on bits of information.

"I don't think it's just pure animus at the Chinese or at Chinese nationals, although there is a lot of suspicion that charges may be tainted in part by prejudice," said Shubha Ghosh, director of the Technology Commercialization Law Program at Syracuse University. But, he added, "there are so many genuine concerns around competitiveness, international trade and diplomacy, the government may not be thinking about the human dimensions."

Chen's troubles began on her annual trip to Beijing to visit her parents in 2012, when she was still working at the Army Corps of Engineers. She told investigators a family matter resulted in her meeting with a former hydrology classmate, now a government official. Looking for ways to pay for dam projects in China, Chen said, he casually asked her how such U.S. projects were financed. Upon returning to the U.S., she told a management co-worker about her conversation in China and later e-mailed the Chinese official some website addresses.

In September 2014, Chen went to work at the National Weather Service, not knowing that her co-worker had already reported her to security staff at the Department of Commerce. Several weeks later, she was arrested. But after five months, the charges were dismissed.

"We are not trying to say there is not trade-secret theft out there, because there is and everybody does it," said Sun, who defended Wen Ho Lee in a case that planted the seeds for today's more aggressive backlash against the espionage accusations.

Lee, a Taiwanese-American nuclear physicist for the University of California at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory, was accused in 1999 of funneling nuclear secrets to China. It took seven grueling years for the case to fall apart and for him to be awarded $1.6 million in a civil judgment. The judge in the case publicly apologized to Lee and blistered federal authorities for their conduct.

Last year, 42 Democratic members of Congress and more than a half-dozen influential Asian-American organizations sent letters to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking whether "race, ethnicity or national origin played a part in recent cases in which Asian-Americans have been wrongfully arrested and indicted for alleged espionage only to have those charges later dropped."

The letters were mostly in reference to Chen and Xiaoxing Xi, a physics professor at Temple University. He was arrested by gun-wielding FBI agents last May at his home in front of his wife and children. Four months later, the espionage charges against him were dismissed, with prosecutors saying only that "additional information came to the attention of the government." Similarly, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office said only that the case against Chen was dropped because of "prosecutorial discretion."

After she was arrested, Chen, who became a citizen in 1997, immediately lost her job. Now, almost a year after the case folded, she is still on paid leave despite desperately wanting to return to work. The government is still contemplating firing her over minor conduct issues -- not involved with spying.

"It's about time we stood up and spoke out," said Frank Wu, former dean of UC's Hastings College of Law. "For so long, Asian-Americans have been thought of as submissive or passive."

Chen agreed. "It's all really sad," she said. "This is not what I believe this country stands for.

"We are part of the community," she said forcefully. "We make the country better and stronger. We are not spies."

Contact David E. Early at 408-920-5836. Follow him at Twitter.com/DavidEarlySr.