Accusations that China has stolen nuclear secrets from the United States, and the firing of one Chinese American employee at Los Alamos have produced a spate of editorials on relations with China, nuclear danger, and the like. But for the Chinese-language media, the story is smaller and hits very close to home. PNS correspondent A. A. Quong is a freelance journalist.

Charges that Chinese government spies stole U.S. nuclear secrets have provoked an avalanche of analysis in the U.S. news media -- on issues ranging from U.S.-China relations to the state of post Cold War espionage. In the U.S.-based Chinese language media, by contrast, the overriding concern lies with the scandal's impact on the lives of Chinese Americans.

The political differences between the two largest circulation Chinese language dailies on the west coast -- one headquartered in Taiwan, the other in Hong Kong -- are many. Yet both condemn the way the scandal has cast suspicion on all foreign-born, or foreign-looking, Chinese Americans.

The World Journal, a Taipei-based daily newspaper with a global circulation in the millions, publishes a West Coast edition from its offices in Millbrae, just north of Silicon Valley. Its coverage of the dismissal of Wen-Ho Lee from Los Alamos Laboratory has struck a special chord with its California readers many of whom, like Lee, are Taiwan-born engineers who have made successful careers in the U.S.

"We've been covering this since day one, very heavily," says deputy editor Kai-Ping Liu.

Unlike the mainstream press, which tends to go to "high-placed experts," reporters for the World Journal have sought to interview Chinese American engineers and scientists as well as Mr. Lee's family members, colleagues, and friends. The paper ran an exclusive interview with Lee's brother, Wen-Tu Lee, who lives in Los Angeles, and said his brother is "very scared" of the mainstream media.

Another interview, from a wire service, quoted former University of California chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, who said he was relieved that he had not accepted the job as head of the Department of Energy, as he would now be subject to suspicion.

Editorials in the World Journal -- one exclusively in local editions, another published nationally -- voiced worries that Americans will now be suspicious of scientists from Taiwan and refuse to employ them. The editorials called forcefully for a complete government investigation -- but deplored scapegoating for political purposes and Americans' inability to regard Asian Americans as their fellow citizens, according to editor-in-chief Yu-Ru Chen.

"Anything related to Mr. Lee, we will report on it, wherever that may be, in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, San Francisco," remarked Mr. Chen. New York Times stories on the matter were translated and featured in the World Journal.

The Hong Kong-based Sing Tao Daily, the world's oldest international Chinese language newspaper, warned in an editorial against guilt by association, according to Wellington Cheng, editor-in-chief of the paper's northern California bureau.

The paper acknowledged there may well be Chinese spies in the United States but deplored the unfairness of grouping together Chinese Americans as suspect based on ethnicity.

Sing Tao and World Journal reporters have been scrambling for any fragment of information about Mr. Lee or his predicament. Los Angeles-based Sing Tao reporter Vincent Ruan interviewed several Chinese American scientists at Los Alamos by telephone. "They feel like they're third class citizens even though they're U.S. citizens," he says. "Many eyes are looking at us."

These themes are echoed on San Francisco's Chinese language broadcast media. "It seems the New York Times already accused him," commented one radio host, and a television reporter confided, "He's definitely being targeted first and foremost because he is Chinese," adding, "There's this inability (in mainstream America) to trust someone who's from somewhere else."

David Pang, who hosts a daily news talk show in San Francisco, points out that a Chinese born and raised in Taiwan would be a most unlikely spy for Taiwan's rival. "There's no reason for him to work for China."

Many Americans do not get this distinction, says Mei-Ling Sze, who anchors a Bay Area evening news program in Cantonese. "In the minds of most Americans," she notes, "China and Taiwan are the same."

She thinks the loud response can be attributed to critics of the White House policy of engagement with China who want to revive the notion that China is still an enemy. "There's an internalized fear against the Chinese because they are Communists."

Many view China-bashing as a predictable marker of American politics. Yu-Ru Chen deems Mr. Lee's case "a major story for all Chinese Americans in the U.S. and Canada, but," he says, "it's not the most important one." In Taiwan, where the World Journal's parent firm circulates 1.5 million copies daily, "it's not a headline story because it's not very unusual to see overseas Chinese being treated unequally."