Center for Global Work and Employment Events

U.S.-China rivalry has increasingly jeopardized the rights and interests of transnational actors whose lives span the two countries. Few are more exposed than the Chinese diaspora in the United States, which has faced heightened discrimination, regulatory scrutiny, and other government actions justified on national security grounds. How do members of the diaspora mobilize law to defend themselves, why have Chinese immigrant lawyers emerged as the principal organizers, and how does their litigation shape the implementation of policies targeting China and people of Chinese origin? Drawing on interviews, digital ethnography, two original surveys, and judicial archives, this article traces diaspora legal mobilization from the successful 2020 challenge to the executive order banning WeChat to its institutionalization in the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance, which has since contested the China Initiative, state alien land laws, and the termination of Chinese students’ visa status. Litigation, the article argues, transformed dispersed grievances into sustained collective action and generated the organizational capacity, legal consciousness, and institutional infrastructure for successive rounds of mobilization, making the courtroom an overlooked arena of contemporary U.S.-China relations.