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This 1999 high profile case did not only call attention to the greater number of racial profiling cases against Chinese American scientists in the period that preceded Lee’s arrest and that had remained largely invisible until then. It also helped crystallize in the popular imagination the racial trope of the Chinese “scientist-as-spy”—quite resonant of the “evil criminal genius” of the fictional character Dr. Fu Manchu—and made visible the targeted criminalization of this highly educated class of ethnic Chinese scientists and engineers. This trope and its consequential effects on racial profiling make explicit that educational-scientific achievement does not automatically translate into national acceptance or belonging. It exposes the falsehood of meritocracy that undergirds the American dream. Race and ethnicity—in this case, being ethnic Chinese/racially Asian—renders people suspect in all aspects of national security. As Andrew Kim, an attorney in Houston, asserts, “In the same way racial profiling African American as criminals may create the crime of ‘driving while black,’ profiling of Asian Americans as spies . . . may be creating a new crime: ‘researching while Asian.’ Emerging from the context of the U.S.-China trade war, the 2019 targeted crackdown of Chinese American scientists certainly can be perceived as part and parcel of the Trump administration’s comprehensive plan to cripple China’s global economic advance. These specific attacks against individual scientists aim to stamp out China’s alleged practices in acquiring/extracting intellectual property—both scientific and technological—of U.S.-based researchers, the kind of intellectual property that could be commoditized and entered into the calculus of economic trade. Indeed, the fear of scientific espionage is fueled by the fear of loss of economic competition. In a global market driven by scientific-technological innovation, it is the potential loss of the commoditization of science and technology in the race for control of global market shares that drives this “witch hunt” for possible intellectual property theft and Chinese scientific espionage.