Sino Americans are presently being held to an arduously unrealistic standard by Chinese society when it comes to language fluency, as a result of which, they have been unfairly excluded from the Chinese, and more broadly, the East Asian job market.

Unfortunately there has been a pervasive trend within China and Hong Kong (extending to all of East Asia, in fact) where second-generation Sino Americans, those seeking to reside and be employed within their ethnic homeland, are being systematically shut out of the job market despite possessing superior qualifications and work experience.

It is already a well-known discrepancy that many so-called "English teaching" positions seek after applicants who are white while closing their doors to Sino Americans, even though the latter are 100% fluent in English, but that is not the subject of the present article. Rather, we are addressing that phenomenon which began around eight years ago (that is, around 2010) where Sino Americans are being shut out of lucrative jobs within the Mainland of China, Hong Kong, and Singapore, with respect to the broader fields of finance, consulting, technology, and law, simply because they are held to an impossible standard concerning their fluency in the Chinese language, with no credit being given for their English skills.

The job market at present is plagued by a double-standard, according to which Chinese citizens with business-level proficiency in English are considered "fluent in English" and hired for meaningful roles, while Sino Americans who are in the opposite situation having perfect English, and business-level proficiency in Chinese are being excluded from a wide range of roles within most Chinese industries.

We find it worthwhile to bring this situation to the attention of the members of our demographic because such a state of affairs has obstructed many talented, hardworking, and qualified Sino Americans who have felt an allegiance to their Homeland, but who have fallen through the cracks, having been spurned by the masters of China's private industries.

The author himself had worked in the hedge fund and banking industry in Hong Kong from 2012 to 2014, around which time he began to see a pervasive and adverse trend of highly qualified Sino Americans being passed over or replaced, either by Chinese citizens or white people. This trend deserves to be publicly declaimed because there are numerous highly talented and deserving Sino Americans, especially males, who have not been given employment and career opportunities which are commensurate with their qualifications, skills, and passions, simply because they are Sino Americans. They are derided by the public as being trapped between two cultures, yet bearing membership in neither, and being endowed with the social networking capacities of neither. As of late, Chinese employers, especially large law firms, asset management companies, investment funds, technology companies, consulting organizations, and VC firms have been rather obviously filtering candidates based on their "perceived" fluency in Chinese, and this has effectively eliminated Sino Americans from consideration, regardless of their diligent efforts to acquire the Chinese language on their own.

It is not hard to perform a quick search on LinkedIn (or any other job portal) for finance or consulting jobs in Hong Kong or Singapore, and to realize that nearly all of them require fluency in Chinese.

At the same time, white-dominated corporations in the Anglosphere offer few, if any, career promotion opportunities for Sino American males. This is well-known and has been extensively discussed. This is the reason why many Sino Americans, especially males, have come back to their home country, upon discovering the Anglosphere's evident hostility toward East Asian male descendants. American corporations have long used a variety of subtle tactics to spurn qualified East Asian male descendants from being promoted to senior positions allowing for strategic planning.

However, we are seeing before us the rise of a second trend, that of American corporations eagerly hiring Chinese citizens, while maintaining their exclusion of Sino Americans, the former being perceived as more "native" even in light of the existence of numerous Sino Americans who have spent years studying Chinese in order to reach the level of business-fluency.

We have observed that when job openings in almost any industry say they desire "fluent English and Chinese," what the employer is really looking for is someone with 100% native-level Chinese, along with business-level English. This dynamic favors the citizens of China if their English is merely passable. However, Sino Americans, having grown up in America, would not be considered for these same positions, even if they spent significant amounts of time studying Chinese and achieved business-level proficiency. This dynamic establishes a "double-standard" in the realm of language requirements which effectively shuts out Sino Americans from most Chinese jobs, even jobs where their Chinese is more than sufficient. However, the Chinese citizens speaking "passable English" are allowed employment and advancement opportunities with no pressure for their English to improve.

Moreover, for any job which requires 100% fluent English, Chinese companies on the whole prefer to hire white people, as they are seen as being the "true Americans" who can help Chinese companies access business opportunities in Anglosphere and European countries, whereas Sino Americans once again are unfairly passed over, even though they could have been as productive as the white candidates.

The author has witnessed countless incidents of Chinese corporations or enterprises hiring only Chinese citizens to do the "China-facing" portion of the job, and only whites to do the "foreign-facing" jobs. There is no room for Sino Americans, even those who graduated from such schools as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, to get their foot in the door, seeing that the combination of "perfect English plus business level Chinese" is viewed with contempt, and filtered out during interviews. The author has been in interviews with numerous large corporations which were easily scheduled because of his Ivy League credentials only to be asked, numerous times, as the first question, "At what age did you go to America?" If the age given was too low, then the candidate was rejected.

Most crucially, it is nearly impossible for Sino Americans who grew up in the Anglosphere or Europe to overcome this bias by sheer diligence and willpower. What Chinese employers consider to be native-level fluency in Chinese is almost universally based on subjective assessments of demeanor and mannerisms, which are nearly impossible for someone who was not reared in China to emulate, regardless of how much vocabulary he has memorized, or how many books he has read. Thus, Sino Americans who arrived in the USA at the age of ten, who even continued taking weekend Chinese courses while in the USA, and who pursued Chinese studies in high school or college, would not be considered for the positions discussed, and their advanced mastery of English confers no merit in the eyes of the interviewer. All experience has shown that most employers in China judge a candidate based solely on the age at which he or she entered the USA, and have no confidence in Sino Americans who have studied Chinese in their own time and defied the odds, no matter how well they have scored in written Chinese proficiency exams. The threshold of age, after which one may leave China and develop in another country, and still be considered as possessing Chinese mannerisms and the capacity of dealing on equal terms with Chinese peers, is roughly fifteen. Thus, leaving China early, or revealing to others that one had left China early, has become a kiss-of-death for finding decent jobs in Greater China.

The standards of the Chinese toward fluency are so uncharacteristically harsh. Imagine if Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, or Arnold Schwarzenegger's English proficiencies were constantly called into question, on account of their foreign accents and subtly differing mannerisms. That is the impossible standard to which Sino Americans are presently held. Whereas white migrants from other countries are seen as "fully American" despite their less-than-perfect English, Sino Americans are not even given a chance to prove their formal and written proficiency of Chinese because of the strong emphasis on colloquialisms and mannerisms.

Let us review the basic facts again: Sino Americans were brought to the USA (or Anglosphere, Europe) at a young age. They did not consciously choose to discard their ties to the homeland in favor of blind worship of whites. This decision was made by their parents, many of whom prevented their children from learning about their heritage, and applied all manner of physical and mental abuse these children to force them to "assimilate" into a white-dominated, yellow-despising culture which labelled them as being "perpetual foreigners." But once these children grow up and realize the adversity of their situation, and seek to make a living in their ethnic homeland, China, such as to live as the ordinary Chinese people they were meant to be, they find themselves rejected by unjust stereotypes which Chinese citizens hold against second-generation Sino Americans. The end result is that Sino Americans cannot easily return to China because of the perverse "background discrimination" of the job market, one which welcomes both Chinese citizens and, to a lesser extent, first-generation Sino Americans, and even white Americans (in limited sales and English-teaching roles). The second-generation Sino American has been entirely left in the cold.