In 1960 there were 237,293 Chinese Americans (combining immigrants and citizens) of which 40% lived in California and 16% in New York (and also 16% in Hawaii). Los Angeles' Chinese community had ballooned from 2,111 in 1900 to 8,000 in 1950 to 20,000 in 1960. Between 1962 and 1966, the USA authorized about 15,000 Chinese refugees who had fled from communist China to Hong Kong to enter the USA (the Hong Kong Parole Program).

Somehow the Chinese community started feeling proud of itself, even though the "white" elite still ignored their contributions. In 1963 five second-generation Chinese founded the Chinese Historical Society of America (Meiguo Huaren Lishi Xuehui). They were: Thomas Chinn, Chingwah Lee, Chan Hoon Kwock (born in Hawaii to a merchant couple of Zhongshan), Henry Kwock Wong (owner of several shops and a journalist for the Chinese Digest and Chinese World) and Thomas Wai Sun Wu (a dentist).

The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which repealed quotas, finally eased immigration into the USA from Asian countries. However, due to the closure of Mao's China, most Chinese immigrants of the 1960s and 1970s came from Hong Kong (still a British colony) and Taiwan (de facto independent and strongly allied with the USA, which still recognized its government as the legitimate government of all China), although about 70% of the 75,000 who entered the USA from Hong Kong during the 1960s were born in China. Because very few people were able to leave mainland China in the 1950s and 1960s, the 9,657 recorded Chinese immigrants of the 1950s and the 34,764 of the 1960s were mostly from Taiwan. Chinese-American demographics changed. And these were immigrants who often didn't identify with the old Chinatowns of California and were more likely to scatter in the suburbs.

In 1970 the population of the USA passed 203 million and the number of ethnic Chinese reached 436,000. There were actually more Japanese Americans (about 600,000) than Chinese Americans due to the fact that immigration from mainland China had died out after 1949. At the same time, millions of immigrants arrived from Indochina, following the "Vietnam War", especially after South Vietnam was conquered by communist North Vietnam in 1975. Many of the Vietnamese immigrants were ethnic Chinese. Within a decade from the end of the Vietnam War, half of all New Chinatown businesses in Los Angeles were owned by Vietnamese Chinese.

Between 1971 and 1973, Bruce Lee's movies launched Chinese martial arts (kung-fu) in the West. New Chinatown became popular for rock music: Madame Wong’s and the Hong Kong Cafe' became two of the main venues for the "new wave" of the late 1970s. The stereotype of Chinese Americans was changing rapidly.

Silicon Valley began in the 1950s with early semiconductor startups. At the time there were virtually no Chinese engineers: mainland China was ruled by Mao, whose Great Leap Forward destroyed Chinese classical education without creating a modern one, and Taiwan was just beginning to embrace electronic technology. China was no longer graduating world-class scientists, and Taiwan's science and technology was still in its infancy. In the 1960s there were still very few Chinese in Silicon Valley and discrimination was the norm to the extent that many realtors didn't want to sell homes even to those Chinese who held graduate degrees from US universities and worked for mainstream US companies. They were professionally isolated in a world dominated by white engineers, executives, investors and entrepreneurs. Just like in the 1860s the Chinese had been discriminated against, excluded from the most lucrative jobs, and had to start their own businesses like laundry services and restaurants, so in the 1960s the Chinese engineers, facing discrimination within the corporations for which they worked, decided to start their own companies. Lester Lee left Ampex in 1970 to start Recortec, David Lee left Xerox in 1973 to start Qume, and David Lam left Hewlett-Packard in 1979 to start Lam Research: they were all escaping unfair treatment by their bosses. When Lee sold Qume to ITT in 1978 for $165 million, it marked the first time that a Silicon Valley startup was sold for more than $100 million.

And so, after more than half a century during which Los Angeles had overtaken San Francisco and relegated the Bay Area to a marginal economic and cultural role, in the 1970s the Bay Area began a rebirth that shifted again the balance of economic power away from Los Angeles and towards San Francisco. Coincidence or not, this shift corresponded with the arrival, after more than half a century, of a new wave of Chinese immigrants into the Bay Area.