State Del. Chao Wu knows politicians sometimes say the wrong thing, but he believes a worse mistake would be not participating in democracy at all.
Still, Wu, who represents parts of Howard and Montgomery counties, didn’t expect to be catapulted into Maryland’s political spotlight this week. Other lawmakers rushed to the native Chinese lawmaker’s defense after two Republican colleagues, Del. Mark Fisher and Del. Brian Chisholm, mocked his accent and suggested that he is a communist spy in a racist video — and then refused to apologize.
Anti-Chinese sentiment has flared in the United States in recent years amid China’s growing geopolitical and economic strength and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Americans hold a negative view of China and Chinese-Americans, and those perceptions are fanned by political rhetoric, often from the right, including from President Donald Trump, who’s visiting China right now in hopes of improving economic relations and cutting deals.
For Wu, the Republicans’ remarks rattled his family and troubled the soft-spoken Democrat.
“But I never regret,” he said Wednesday. “I participate in this great process and try to make change based on my experience and my knowledge.”
Up until now, the 48-year-old Wu has maintained a relatively low profile in the General Assembly, where colleagues describe him as a hard-working moderate who is willing to take on the unglamorous labor required to get bills passed.
“He works so hard that you may not hear about it,” said Sen. Clarence Lam, another member of Howard’s state delegation. “He’s not out there beating a drum all the time.”
Lam said it’s unfortunate that Wu is getting attention for a negative incident and not his good work.
Fisher and Chisholm criticized Wu’s 2025 bill that would have required certain disclosures about the data used to train generative artificial intelligence systems. About half a dozen lawmakers cosponsored the bill with Wu, who is a data scientist, but it did not pass.
Wu said he tries to act professionally, listen to everyone and seek compromise. But it can be challenging. What’s the point, he said, of talking to delegates who think of him in that way?
Born in Yingshan County, Hubei, China, Wu moved to the U.S. in 2003 after completing his master’s degree in Singapore. He earned a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Maryland before taking a tech job in Crofton. For a time, he thought he might return to China, where he still has family, but eventually settled in Columbia and became a U.S. citizen in 2016.
Howard County has the highest percentage of Asian residents in Maryland, and the second-highest total Asian population in the state, behind Montgomery County. Yet first-generation immigrants are still underrepresented in some local offices.
Perhaps that’s because immigrants aren’t always comfortable sharing their opinions, Wu said. He decided to set that aside in hopes of being a model for his daughter and son.
He wanted to show them “your daddy really cares about the neighborhood, cares about what happens around him.”
Wu volunteered to serve on Columbia’s River Hill village board and later went on to serve on the Columbia Association’s Board of Directors, which manages the massive homeowners association’s annual budget. When the language barrier between him and other board members proved challenging, he repeated comments at a slower pace.
“I don’t feel ashamed,” he said of his accent.
Wu joined Howard’s grassroots Chinese American Parent Association, which he said taught him the power of coalition-building. The advocates successfully partnered with other immigrant groups to add holidays commonly celebrated in Asia to the school system’s calendar.
In 2018, Wu won a seat on Howard’s Board of Education and served four years through the contentious COVID-19 pandemic era, when parents delivered furious testimonies in favor of and against masking and vaccine policies as well as returning to school buildings. He recalled police handing out their cellphone numbers to board members to report any safety concerns.
“That’s a moment I realized politics can be a dangerous job,” Wu said.
Still, the experience didn’t deter him, and he was elected to represent District 9A in the House of Delegates in 2022. Back in Howard County, some candidates of Asian descent view Wu as a trailblazer and mentor to those following in his footsteps.
“His success rate is very high, so he must be doing something right,” said Lingfeng Chen, who sought Wu’s advice ahead of his own run for Howard’s Board of Education in 2022.
Maryland is generally welcoming to Asians like himself, Chen said, but “in the forest, there are all kinds of birds.”
“If someone is nasty, that means you are strong,” Chen said.
Emergency room doctor Kevin Chin was mulling a run for the Howard County Council’s District 1 seat around 2024 when he spotted the delegate wearing his “A vote for Wu is a vote for you” shirt at a Labor Day cookout for local Democrats.
The two soon met at the Bagel Bin in Columbia, and Wu gave him tips he’d learned during his own campaigns. Canvass neighborhoods by scooter instead of on foot. Leave door hangers instead of flyers because they don’t blow away.
“He said, ‘If you win, you win. And if you lose, you win also because then you don’t have to do the hard work that goes into being an elected official,’” Chin recalled.
Even after Wu’s colleagues doubled down on their comments Tuesday, the delegate said he viewed them as outliers. He called for civility — an oft-cited value back home in Howard County, where residents put “Choose Civility” bumper stickers on their vehicles.
There’s always a middle ground to be found, Wu said. Everything else is noise.
“It really depends on our will and our personality and our character.”
Baltimore Banner reporter Pamela Wood contributed to this story.
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