San Francisco Chinese Chamber president resigns amid harassment scandal

Donald Luu resigned from the San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce after a legal dispute and harassment allegations shook one of Chinatown’s most influential institutions. Luu said the accusations were false, but the dispute has now pushed the chamber into a broader crisis over trust, leadership and who gets to speak for the city’s Chinese American business community.

The chamber is far more than a neighborhood association. It says its roots date to 1852, when it was known informally as Chinese Merchants’ Organizations, and that it was formally founded in 1917 to support San Francisco’s Chinese American community. From its headquarters at 730 Sacramento Street, the group helps run the Chinese New Year Festival & Parade, the Miss Chinatown U.S.A. Pageant, the flower market fair and other civic events that shape the public face of Chinatown.

That role makes the fallout especially sensitive. The chamber says it has formally run the Chinese New Year parade since 1958, even though San Francisco’s annual Lunar New Year celebrations date back to 1860. It also describes the parade as the largest nighttime parade of its kind in the world. The Miss Chinatown U.S.A. Pageant says it became a national contest in 1958 after starting as a local San Francisco competition in the 1950s. Together, those events draw major crowds, sponsorships and merchant activity, and any instability at the top can ripple through planning, participation and neighborhood confidence.

The dispute also exposed strain inside the chamber itself. Some leaders were pushing for Luu to be permanently removed from the board, a sign that the conflict had spread beyond one resignation and into a fight over governance and accountability. For an organization that serves as both a business association and a cultural steward, that kind of fracture can weaken relationships with member businesses and undercut its standing with residents, parade participants and civic partners.

Luu had once been presented as part of a generational shift in Chinatown leadership. A 2022-2023 swearing-in report identified him as the chamber’s 107th president, and the chamber’s continued partnership work, including a six-year broadcast commitment with ABC7 Bay Area struck in 2024, showed how central the organization remained to Lunar New Year celebrations. Now, the chamber faces the harder task of proving it can keep those traditions intact while repairing the trust that brought one of Chinatown’s cornerstone institutions to this point.