Atlanta shootings: stopping Asian hate requires getting to root of West’s Sinophobia

This current wave of anti-Asian hatred stems from Sinophobic sentiment which has long existed but increased sharply in recent years
Extra efforts need to be taken to prevent and combat the racist by-product of anti-Asian sentiments arising from international confrontation

Audrey Jiajia Li

Published: 11:00am, 10 Apr 2021

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The shootings in Atlanta that left eight people dead, including six women of Asian descent, have saddened many people. The Asian-American community has experienced heightened vulnerability during the past year, with nearly 3,800 incidents of anti-Asian bias reported. In 2020, reports of hate crimes against Asian-Americans in 16 US cities jumped by nearly 150 per cent from the previous year.

To phrase the nuanced sentiments as “Asian hate” can be misleading, though.

This current wave of anti-Asian hatred stems from Sinophobic sentiment which has long existed but increased sharply in recent years. As most Westerners are not skilled at distinguishing between people of different Asian ancestry, and some fail to draw a line between a country’s government and its people, the unfortunate consequence is that whenever China is the focus of criticism, people of Chinese origin – be they Chinese citizens or Chinese-Americans – or even anyone of East Asian heritage could experience hostility.

This primarily came thanks to former US president Donald Trump and his colleagues’ insistence on calling the coronavirus “China virus” or “kung flu”. During that time, the term “Chinese virus” jumped 650 per cent on Twitter in one day and there was a 800 per cent increase in the usage in conservative news articles, a study from the University of California, Berkeley found.

Behind this lies bipartisan political rhetoric about China. In the Trump era, targeting China was one of the few issues the majority in both political parties agreed upon. The new Biden administration has largely maintained Trump’s tough stance on China.

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Consequently, ordinary people of East Asian origin continue to experience collateral damage. While it is one thing to hold the Chinese government accountable for its domestic human rights abuses and its crackdowns on free expression, it is another to racially profile scholars and students of Chinese ancestry in the fight against espionage.

On the surface it might appear as a clash of ideologies, where liberal democracy is combating the evils of communism, but such confrontation could easily stir up echoes of the racial animosity of years past. America’s Sinophobia dates back to the 1850s, when “yellow peril” rhetoric prevailed. The government sanctioned numerous laws, including the notorious Chinese Exclusion Act, decades before the communists came to power in China.

Misinformation, racist slurs and hate speech led to the dehumanisation of certain groups of people and to an increased risk of violence. During World War II, 120,000 Japanese-Americans were forced into camps, an action that still haunts victims and their descendants. In the 1980s, many US political figures on both sides of the aisle cast Japan as some kind of an economic foe.

The xenophobic emotions that were stirred up unfairly targeted Japanese, Japanese-Americans and other people of East Asian descent. In 1982, two white men in Detroit – a Chrysler plant supervisor and his stepson – violently vented their anger over the success of the Japanese auto industry on a Chinese-American draftsman named Vincent Chin, whom they “mistook” as Japanese and beat to death.

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During WWII, as the US declared war on Germany, Italy and Japan, Americans of German and Italian backgrounds didn’t experience the kind of hatred Japanese-Americans did. Also, even when faced with the possibility of a nuclear annihilation at the hands of the Soviets during the Cold War or now as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime thwarts US interests everywhere, there has been little negative impact on the lives of Americans of Russian heritage.

However, whenever hostility towards Japan, China or other Asian countries arise, White America can’t resist the temptation to turn to a timeworn racial script. It questions the allegiance and belonging of 20 million Asian-Americans and treats permanent residents and visitors from East Asia as potential enemy aliens.

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Unsurprisingly, it’s China’s turn now – another Asian civilisation and economic power that is able to compete with the West. This reminds me of the remarks by Kiron Skinner, the State Department’s policy planning director of the Trump administration, that the US was “preparing for a clash of civilisations” with China. She also said the Cold War constituted “a fight within the Western family” while the coming conflict with China was “the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian”.

With East Asians being historically viewed as the “other” in the eyes of Westerners, extra efforts need to be taken to prevent and combat the racist by-product of anti-Asian sentiments arising from international confrontation. Only then can we truly “stop Asian hate”.

Audrey Jiajia Li is a Chinese journalist