Connections between Feinstein, China, San Francisco/Shanghai sister city and Silicon Valley started in 1985 –

Cultivator for US-China relations

By Qidong Zhang in San Francisco | China Daily USA | Updated: 2014-04-11 10:46

One day in 1985, a Red Flag limousine pulled up in front of a US delegation that had just arrived at Hongqiao International Airport in Shanghai. The driver got out, and put up a large name board for "Mr Thomas Klitgaard", one of the delegation members. They soon found out the car had been sent by the mayor of Shanghai, Wang Daohan, especially to pick up Klitgaard.

At the time, Klitgaard, then an attorney and partner at Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro, was one of the first Americans who went to Shanghai with US Senator (then Mayor) Dianne Feinstein in 1980 to establish a sister-city relationship between Shanghai and San Francisco, only a few months after the US and China normalized diplomatic relations.

"Dianne Feinstein thought that the development of a special relationship with Shanghai would be a tremendous benefit to San Francisco and that normalization presented opportunities for San Francisco and the United States that were going to happen only once in a life time, so she initiated the trip of about 20 people to go to China with her to open a new page in history," Klitgaard said.

Under an MOU signed by Jiang and Feinstein, Chinese managers would be sent to San Francisco to study economics and business management, and the US side would send professors and business professionals to Shanghai to provide instruction on those and other subjects at universities in Shanghai. This was to include hands-on internship programs for the Chinese managers at businesses in California and elsewhere in the US at the end of the formal instruction.

The program trained almost 100 Chinese managers selected by the Shanghai Municipal Government and later by China's State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, Pudong Branch. Many of the graduates have become high ranking officers in the Chinese government and state corporations. They were pioneers in developing a mutual appreciation and understanding of the underlying business cultures of San Francisco and Shanghai and ,in a broader sense, of the US and China. They interned at businesses of all sizes and were exposed to the American entrepreneurial spirit in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201404/11/WS5a2e14dba310eefe3e9a2763.html

>>3415132

Important dates in the relationship between China and San Francisco

Since before the Gold Rush and the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, San Francisco and China have had a special relationship.

1840s San Francisco’s Chinatown founded

1863-1869 Chinese laborers construct large portions of Transcontinental Railroad

1882 Chinese Exclusion Act passed — first U.S. immigration law to target one ethnic group

1906 Original Chinatown destroyed in earthquake

1924 Immigration Restriction Act bars further Chinese immigration

1943 Magnuson Act repeals Chinese Exclusion Act

1960s Large numbers of immigrants from Hong Kong begin to arrive

1972 President Nixon visits China

1977 People’s Republic of China changes restrictions on emigration

1979 San Francisco and Shanghai become sister cities

1992 Chinese Student Protection Act grants permanent residency status to immigrants from mainland China

2008 Olympic torch relay

http://www.sfexaminer.com/relationship-between-san-francisco-china-has-changed-in-last-decade/

Chinese spying in Silicon Valley

Excerpts -

But foreign spies have been showing up uninvited to San Francisco and Silicon Valley for a very long time. According to former U.S. intelligence officials, that’s true today more than ever. In fact, they warn—especially because of increasing Russian and Chinese aggressiveness, and the local concentration of world-leading science and technology firms—there’s a full-on epidemic of espionage on the West Coast right now. And even more worrisome, many of its targets are unprepared to deal with the growing threat.

Unlike on the East Coast, foreign intel operations here aren’t as focused on the hunt for diplomatic secrets, political intelligence or war plans. The open, experimental, cosmopolitan work and business culture of Silicon Valley in particular has encouraged a newer, “softer,” “nontraditional” type of espionage, said former intelligence officials—efforts that mostly target trade secrets and technology.

As one former senior intelligence official put it: “San Francisco is a trailblazer—you see the changes there in foreign counterintelligence first. Trends emerge there.” If we want to understand a world where Russia and China are ramping up their spy games against the United States, then we need to pay attention to what’s happening in San Francisco.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/27/silicon-valley-spies-china-russia-219071