Anti-China sentiment in Washington can be linked to violence against Asia

Activists are commenting the rally on the wider political climate that has emerged from the start of the pandemic. Researchers directly linked former President Donald Trump’s tweets against the “Chinese virus” and “Kung flu” to an increase in hate against Asians online. And the Trump administration’s more general hostility toward Beijing can often turn into a dangerous territory. Bethany Allen noted that, “Trump’s frequent pre-pandemic rhetoric about China sometimes places the entire country and its 1.4 billion people as enemies, and rarely distinguishes between the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese nation, Chinese companies, or the Chinese people.” “. Brahimian and Shauna Chen of Axios: That stigma, as some lawmakers argued at a House hearing last week, put a target on the backs of ordinary Asian Americans. “I was shocked by the angry current in our nation,” said Representative Doris Matsui (Democrat from California), born during WWII in a Japanese-American concentration camp. “The heated rhetoric at the highest levels of our government cannot be viewed in isolation from the ensuing violence in our societies.” “When America explodes with China, the Chinese are attacked, and so will those who appear Chinese. American foreign policy in Asia is America’s domestic policy for Asians,” Russell Jeong, a history professor at San Francisco State University who also helped found the AAPI Hate Endowment Program, told my colleagues David Nakamura. “The Cold War between the United States and China – and especially the Republican strategy of scapegoating and attacking China against the virus – incited racism and hatred towards Asian Americans.” This is an allegation that might be difficult to prove. If Trump and his allies had different rhetoric, would there have been dozens of Alleged hate crimes and intolerant incidents with Asian American casualties over the past year? We know that Trump’s patriot policy has overshadowed other mass shootings – from a shopping mall in El Paso to a synagogue in Pittsburgh. We know that a year ago, Americans warned Asians from the dangers inherent in Trump’s messages. ”When Asian Americans objected to Trump and others’ use of the “Chinese virus,” it was because many of us feared that Leading these words, historian Geoff Chang wrote “Body Count.” “We were told we were exaggerating our reaction. But now has come a year of anti-Asian rage: children cut off in stores, old people burned or pushed to death, women attack twice as often as men, and they chase, beat, and spit, as if we are not human beings. But we are pollutants – infection, infection, stains of white. ”This“ anti-Asian rage ”precedes Trump, of course. The United States has a long history of stigmatizing and arresting immigrants from Asia as a scapegoat – from the “yellow danger” of Chinese arrivals to the arrest of Japanese Americans during World War II to the attacks on Sikhs and other South Asian Americans and Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11. Analysts argue that the current political context in Washington – where the anti-Beijing worldview is now a bipartisan consensus – adds a new level of threat. “In the 1980s, officials from both parties described Japan as the economic enemy; now it is China, one of the few issues that Democrats and Republicans agree on,” Veet Thanh Nguyen and Janelle Wong wrote to the Outlook section of the Washington Post, recalling the 1982 incident when it was exposed. A Chinese worker in Detroit is beaten to death by two white men. Who was thought to be Japanese. And yes, it is true that China is a very bad party when it comes to espionage and human rights. But decades of official US foreign policy and the rhetoric of the pundit class have had a unique impact on Asian Americans. ”The Biden administration has been vocal in its condemnation of violence against Asian Americans, while avoiding the language of” China virus “and advancing an unfounded conspiracy theory that the pandemic was legitimate. It was intentionally created in a Chinese lab. But Columbia University historian May Ngai said, “Biden has done little in terms of the actual policy to curb the anti-Asian hatred that Trump has generated,” saying that the White House, among other things, could end the era’s program. Trump says critics say he is making scholars of Chinese descent vulnerable to racial profiling. Even more controversial is that Ngai suggested that Biden “back off treating China as an adversary.” This is a move that has few following in Washington, where a number of politicians now routinely look To China as an existential threat and a historic challenge to the United States, but shouldn’t the United States confront China because of its perceived mistakes? On social media, commentators dismissed the idea that holding China accountable for its crushing of Hong Kong’s freedoms Weng or its hideous crackdown on Uyghurs in Xinjiang could somehow be linked to anti-Asian bigotry within the United States – a rhetorical move by a high-ranking Chinese diplomat. Yang Jiechi during his meeting with US officials last week. Foreign policy experts Caroline Chang, Anka Lee and Jonah Ohtake write that Washington politicians “must differentiate between real concerns with the Chinese government and racially motivated hatred against Asian Americans,” adding that the United States must “uphold the values ​​that China seeks to undermine.” , Including the strong legacy of its civil rights. Until then, millions of Americans have to grapple with a vulnerability that is not their fault. “The incendiary rhetoric of a racist ex-president coupled with the despair fueled by an unprecedented pandemic underscores the instability of the minority’s temporary existence in the United States,” wrote Jiayang Fan of The New Yorker. “Living during this period as an Asian American means feeling isolated against the virus as well as a virulent strain of scapegoat. It is the feeling of being trapped in an American tragedy while being denied the legitimacy of being an American.”