Wise up to the anti-China campaign

Clearly the greatest national security threat we face. Gentlemen, DEFCON 2.

Chinese-Americans think of themselves as American, not as Chinese. That’s a problem. That’s why they support Trump. They think they’ll get the same treatment as white people. But [white] Americans don’t see Chinese-Americans as American. The Muslims—the Arabs—they all voted Republican before 11 September, didn’t they? And now where are they? And why do you think that is?

Pretty much verbatim, this is what my wife said to me yesterday, in what started out as a conversation about Crazy Rich Asians. She’s more than a bit concerned about the recent news coming out of the Beltway’s wherever, so to speak. The trade war’s not ending anytime soon. Trump’s latest anti-Chinese comments to a group of CEOs in New Jersey, for example. Or the crackdown – apparently a long time in the making – on immigrants who come here legally, but suffer financial difficulties. Or Joe Wilson’s (yes, that guy’s) initiative to defund public universities which host Confucius Institutes. Or the recent wave of crocodile tears over mainland Chinese Uighurs, which appears to be based on State Department priorities – but since when does the State Department, under whatever administration, care about Muslim civil rights anywhere?

I’m troubled by all these recent political manoeuvres against China, Chinese nationals and Chinese-Americans. As I’ve already shown, I stand to be directly and intimately affected. My immediate family are either CRBA citizens or recent legal immigrants, and we certainly aren’t rich or well-connected, to say the least. (But yeah, my five-year-old daughter is definitely a Chinese spy. Have you seen just how cute she is, gentle readers? Only spies could possibly be that cute. And she does traditional Chinese dance now as a hobby, which is clearly just an insidious plot to undermine the American cultural bedrock.)

In my experience, Confucius Institutes in academia mostly do innocuous, humanities-related things like – well, support my daughter’s dance troupe and other events associated with Chinese culture. The Confucius Institutes do propagate teaching materials from the government of mainland China, but honestly this sort of thing is to be expected. And if American universities are doing their jobs properly, then honestly the best defence against such materials is not to shut down cultural events and groups, but instead to train students to be able to spot propaganda when they hear it or read it.

The animus against mainland Chinese students, moreover, is not quite entirely scare-mongering, but it’s damn close. Having taught, advised, fought with, motivated and congratulated hundreds of aspiring Chinese college-goers for several years both here and in China proper, I feel I’m in a good position to attest to this personally. The reasons Chinese students come over here to study are manifold. Many do so simply to get a degree with prestige enough to get them a better-paying job back home, and that utility is diminishing. Others come here with more idealistic expectations of Western education which don’t always live up to the reality. There might be a handful of Simon Shady types – but in the main, the reality is much more mundane. They’re not here to spy for their government. They’re not here to steal industrial secrets. They’re here so they can go home and get good jobs.

But the emanations of anti-Chinese sentiment from both the executive and legislative branches of the government—cannot be incidental. They are being officially encouraged. My suspicion is that the recent encouragement through the organs of the national security apparatus and through the corporate media of racist orientalist sentiment against Russians was something of a test case. Unfortunately, American liberals have just proven themselves most of all susceptible to this toxic mixture of race-baiting and Cold War nostalgia. However, despite a handful of reports of low-key ‘street-level’ discrimination, Russian-Americans are simply not ‘visible’ enough as a minority to be useful in a classic jingo campaign: only about three million people are reported as ‘Russian-American’, and even this is an over-estimate given that it used to be an umbrella term for all immigrants from former Soviet countries. When push comes to shove, it’s simply the case that despite this immense top-down propaganda campaign that we’ve seen, not many people actually care about l’affaire russe de deux mille seize. May God bless them.

China, though? That’s way juicier for politicians and pundits. Collective defamation and anti-China sentiment aimed at immigrants is nothing at all new for the United States. Chinese-Americans are both more numerous (at five million) and far more visible a target than Russian-Americans. And there are ready-made constituencies for an anti-China campaign both among élite liberals and among the more blue-collar working-class vote. Sadly, it is remarkably simple to misdirect white working-class anger at China; American politicians and union leaders have been doing that for three decades now. And we already know what a test case for inculcating anti-China sentiment among liberals would look like, thanks to Australia’s Clive Hamilton, a ‘green’ activist who by his own self-description is absolutely, definitely, completely not a racist – but who still bullies Asian students who criticise him and accuses them of being fifth-columnists. Little wonder the executive branch here can say the same thing now and mostly gets away with it. At this point, I’m realistic (or cynical) enough to believe we can expect more Hamiltons on the left, and more Caffertys and Carlsons on the right, to begin appearing and craftily nudging American public opinion toward a jingo campaign against the Chinese mainland in the near future, with Chinese-Americans as the proximate target.

On the larger scale of international relations, I do understand that realist concerns apply in spades. China is safeguarding and securing its national interests, and the United States does need to do the same in response. Cybersecurity, intellectual property security and maritime security in the Pacific are all relevant and necessary concerns for the American government. However, American policy-makers are notoriously bad at distinguishing between vital national interests, and ideological or special-interest based hobby-horses. Attacking the Confucius Institutes and Chinese students is easy and popular domestically: being visible and easily-connected to the Chinese government, they’re a handy target for a jingo campaign. But, to put it bluntly, academia isn’t the vector of Chinese espionage and cyber-warfare campaigns. And the Chinese government doesn’t suffer except marginally through these symbolic measures aimed at academia; Chinese-Americans, however, will suffer much more.

I stand with Asian-Americans here because I am their brother: almost (but not quite) their nüxu. As to Chinese-Americans themselves: my suggestion to them, as I believe my wife’s would be, is to wise up. Before the advent of the term or the concept of ‘Asian-American’, the tendency of Asian immigrant advocacy was to disaggregate into cliques. That was politically counter-productive at the time – Japanese-American assimilationism and disaggregation from their fellow Asian-Americans didn’t save them from the camps. And the same disaggregation is happening again today, though now the ‘wedge’ issue seems to be affirmative action. Disaggregation is happening; it’s being driven from the top, and it’s being encouraged by the executive branch of the federal government. There’s strength in solidarity.