It's not just the virus it's things like this. China is acting very authoritarian not just inside China but also towards other states and it's coming back to bite them.
I know language policing is never a full solution to anything but I wonder if it would be worthwhile to talk about the Chinese Communist Party's human rights violations, about the CCP's territorial ambitions, about Biden being tough on the CCP.
Also, I think you inappropriately dismiss "China's economy" as a driver of opinion. Opinion lags facts on the ground, especially when it comes to big inchoate fears like the Sword of Damocles.
The average Westerner doesn't care what China's doing in the SCS, and barely cares about the Uighurs and Hong Kong. Those plus COVID are mainly just triggers for an underlying antipathy born of China's economic rise at the expense of the Western working class.
And again, that antipathy lags facts on the ground. If you've been unemployed or underemployed for a decade-and-a-half now because your old well-paying factory job was "shipped to China", you're probably *still not happy about that*, and you probably *don't care that China's growth has slowed down*, because the damage has already been done.
I think there are a number of factors going on in the surge of Anti-Asian violence in the United States and elsewhere.
The first point is that many Westerners cannot/do not distinguish between Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. A classic example of recent memory is the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, who confused Japanese with Chinese. And he is a public figure of considerable standing! That there is especially insulting to these three nationalities is obvious: for most of the last century and a half they have been at loggerheads with each other, sometimes embroiled in active war against one another in the case of the Japan/China duo. To say Koreans are bitter about being colonized by the Japanese from the late 18th century to 1945 is an understatement, this despite the fact many older Koreans read and write Japanese. It is hard to deny that North American and Europeans harbor some racist thinking about people from Asia, particularly since Asia is the most rapidly growing region of the world in terms of per capita income.
In the United States anti-Asian legislation commenced with the Chinese Exclusion Act and intensified with Gentlemen Agreements with Japan negotiated in the early 20th century. There is no doubt that fear of Chinese and Japanese from undercutting white labor in terms of wages - a political movement particularly virulent in the West Coast of North America - was a factor, as was eugenics. In the early 1920s the United States Congress passed the National Origins Act that severely limited immigration from Asia. In many ways the notion that Japanese undercut wages of Americans was part parcel of the anti-Japanese demonstrations that took place during the 1970s in the United States. Groups of disgruntled workers smashed Japanese imported cars into pieces in protest. Now that Japanese wages are comparable to North American wages Japanese are no longer a problem for Americans per se, but Chinese are. As long as Chinese wages lag behind American wages by a big margin, fear of Chinese labor will continue. That China has been accused of manipulating its exchange rate to promote exports to the United States (depressing Chinese wages calculated in dollars) this problem will persist.
Added to the hostility of Americans to Japan first, now China, is the sense that they have cleverly learned through negotiation with American companies or through reverse engineering to quickly master Western "state of the art" technologies, even surpassing the Western countries in this area. Fear that Asia will become the powerhouse of innovation is a depressing thought for many Westerners, used to being the technological leaders of the world since the 16th century.
There is little doubt that suspicion of China's handling of the COVID virus - which is a corona virus like SARs which also emerged from China - has intensified distrust of China. Ironically some of this paranoia has been fed by the Epoch Times press which adheres to Falun Giong ideology, Epoch Times is Chinese owned and publishes a newspaper in Chinese that is widely read by Chinese living in North America. As well it has introduced an English language edition. Epoch Times invested heavily in Trump's campaigns including his court cases aimed at overturning the election won by Biden. It calls COVID-19 the "Chinese Communist virus" claiming it was unleashed on the Western world by a nefarious Chinese Communist plot in order to weaken the West. That a large number of Chinese dissidents are pro-Trump is consistent with this view.
In short I agree COVID-19 has intensified an anti-Asian backlash that draws upon a deep seeded racism akin to a fatal venom carried by a dangerous snake that is latent, breaking out periodically when economic tensions related to immigration or imports leap to the fore.
I am NOT a tankie or communist supporter, but I take exception to the #FreeHongKong type stuff. If Houston (or Texas) wanted to effectively secede from the Union (or at least declare that federal laws don't apply and that they're allowed to effectively be a devolved state), it would be met with overwhelming, likely near-unanimous opposition. I hate the idea of criticizing an idea that wouldn't be acceptable in a personal context.
It can be true that China's growth rate has slowed in the past 10-12 years, but (1) it remains impressively fast compared to most Western countries (2) people's intuitive fears aren't based on the growth rate, but on the absolute size, and probably on a few years' trailing average of that.
I happen to be someone who has little patience for our Cold Warring vs China, but anyway. More than 40 years ago, my then wife clerked for Thomas Tang of the 9th, and we became quite close to him. He talked about being the army in WW II and being taken for a Japanese while stationed at Benning (it's in GA, for those of you innocent of military service: watch the "Phenix City Story"). And called up for Korea, he was taken for a Chinese in the same place. You can imagine how all that worked out. It doesn't take much to get folks acting like idiots vs Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc.
China and Russia are both cynical powers. Russia is more cynical, but China's sheer population makes it more likely to challenge Western dominance.
This is why we need One Billion Americans. America may not have an outstanding track record, but at least we're not actively genociding anyone, and are still marginally "free" in terms of basic civil liberties.
It's interesting that negative opinions were rising even before Xi Jinping came to power. But since that time, it is hard to find many actions by the Chinese government that improved their reputation. Hypersensitivity to criticism worldwide, blocking the internet, military behavior in the S. China Sea, repression in Xinjiang, ignoring the Hong Kong agreement, continual threats to Taiwan, etc. Some investments and donations in Africa have been well-received, but others are obviously neocolonial. Under the steady stream of bad behavior, it is no wonder their reputation has worsened. Their continuing lack of transparency about COVID-19 is just one more instance of disappointing behavior
it seems like it's a thing but i think it's also worth noting that hate crime reporting and, IMO, even calling something a "hate crime" is "fraught" as the SJWs like to say.
I've never heard a compelling argument for designating things a "hate crime." It's like the old "why are the Nazis thought to be worse than japan or Mao, Khmer Rouge, Stalin?" They committed mass hate crimes, I guess?
It's not just the virus it's things like this. China is acting very authoritarian not just inside China but also towards other states and it's coming back to bite them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/01/21/chinas-ambassador-sweden-calls-journalists-critical-beijing-lightweight-boxers-facing-heavyweight/
I know language policing is never a full solution to anything but I wonder if it would be worthwhile to talk about the Chinese Communist Party's human rights violations, about the CCP's territorial ambitions, about Biden being tough on the CCP.
Also, I think you inappropriately dismiss "China's economy" as a driver of opinion. Opinion lags facts on the ground, especially when it comes to big inchoate fears like the Sword of Damocles.
The average Westerner doesn't care what China's doing in the SCS, and barely cares about the Uighurs and Hong Kong. Those plus COVID are mainly just triggers for an underlying antipathy born of China's economic rise at the expense of the Western working class.
And again, that antipathy lags facts on the ground. If you've been unemployed or underemployed for a decade-and-a-half now because your old well-paying factory job was "shipped to China", you're probably *still not happy about that*, and you probably *don't care that China's growth has slowed down*, because the damage has already been done.
I think there are a number of factors going on in the surge of Anti-Asian violence in the United States and elsewhere.
The first point is that many Westerners cannot/do not distinguish between Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. A classic example of recent memory is the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, who confused Japanese with Chinese. And he is a public figure of considerable standing! That there is especially insulting to these three nationalities is obvious: for most of the last century and a half they have been at loggerheads with each other, sometimes embroiled in active war against one another in the case of the Japan/China duo. To say Koreans are bitter about being colonized by the Japanese from the late 18th century to 1945 is an understatement, this despite the fact many older Koreans read and write Japanese. It is hard to deny that North American and Europeans harbor some racist thinking about people from Asia, particularly since Asia is the most rapidly growing region of the world in terms of per capita income.
In the United States anti-Asian legislation commenced with the Chinese Exclusion Act and intensified with Gentlemen Agreements with Japan negotiated in the early 20th century. There is no doubt that fear of Chinese and Japanese from undercutting white labor in terms of wages - a political movement particularly virulent in the West Coast of North America - was a factor, as was eugenics. In the early 1920s the United States Congress passed the National Origins Act that severely limited immigration from Asia. In many ways the notion that Japanese undercut wages of Americans was part parcel of the anti-Japanese demonstrations that took place during the 1970s in the United States. Groups of disgruntled workers smashed Japanese imported cars into pieces in protest. Now that Japanese wages are comparable to North American wages Japanese are no longer a problem for Americans per se, but Chinese are. As long as Chinese wages lag behind American wages by a big margin, fear of Chinese labor will continue. That China has been accused of manipulating its exchange rate to promote exports to the United States (depressing Chinese wages calculated in dollars) this problem will persist.
Added to the hostility of Americans to Japan first, now China, is the sense that they have cleverly learned through negotiation with American companies or through reverse engineering to quickly master Western "state of the art" technologies, even surpassing the Western countries in this area. Fear that Asia will become the powerhouse of innovation is a depressing thought for many Westerners, used to being the technological leaders of the world since the 16th century.
There is little doubt that suspicion of China's handling of the COVID virus - which is a corona virus like SARs which also emerged from China - has intensified distrust of China. Ironically some of this paranoia has been fed by the Epoch Times press which adheres to Falun Giong ideology, Epoch Times is Chinese owned and publishes a newspaper in Chinese that is widely read by Chinese living in North America. As well it has introduced an English language edition. Epoch Times invested heavily in Trump's campaigns including his court cases aimed at overturning the election won by Biden. It calls COVID-19 the "Chinese Communist virus" claiming it was unleashed on the Western world by a nefarious Chinese Communist plot in order to weaken the West. That a large number of Chinese dissidents are pro-Trump is consistent with this view.
In short I agree COVID-19 has intensified an anti-Asian backlash that draws upon a deep seeded racism akin to a fatal venom carried by a dangerous snake that is latent, breaking out periodically when economic tensions related to immigration or imports leap to the fore.
I am NOT a tankie or communist supporter, but I take exception to the #FreeHongKong type stuff. If Houston (or Texas) wanted to effectively secede from the Union (or at least declare that federal laws don't apply and that they're allowed to effectively be a devolved state), it would be met with overwhelming, likely near-unanimous opposition. I hate the idea of criticizing an idea that wouldn't be acceptable in a personal context.
It can be true that China's growth rate has slowed in the past 10-12 years, but (1) it remains impressively fast compared to most Western countries (2) people's intuitive fears aren't based on the growth rate, but on the absolute size, and probably on a few years' trailing average of that.
I happen to be someone who has little patience for our Cold Warring vs China, but anyway. More than 40 years ago, my then wife clerked for Thomas Tang of the 9th, and we became quite close to him. He talked about being the army in WW II and being taken for a Japanese while stationed at Benning (it's in GA, for those of you innocent of military service: watch the "Phenix City Story"). And called up for Korea, he was taken for a Chinese in the same place. You can imagine how all that worked out. It doesn't take much to get folks acting like idiots vs Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc.
China and Russia are both cynical powers. Russia is more cynical, but China's sheer population makes it more likely to challenge Western dominance.
This is why we need One Billion Americans. America may not have an outstanding track record, but at least we're not actively genociding anyone, and are still marginally "free" in terms of basic civil liberties.
It's interesting that negative opinions were rising even before Xi Jinping came to power. But since that time, it is hard to find many actions by the Chinese government that improved their reputation. Hypersensitivity to criticism worldwide, blocking the internet, military behavior in the S. China Sea, repression in Xinjiang, ignoring the Hong Kong agreement, continual threats to Taiwan, etc. Some investments and donations in Africa have been well-received, but others are obviously neocolonial. Under the steady stream of bad behavior, it is no wonder their reputation has worsened. Their continuing lack of transparency about COVID-19 is just one more instance of disappointing behavior
One thing:
- I appreciate you working through these issues via your blog, even if you don't have all the answers -- actually, maybe because of it.
it seems like it's a thing but i think it's also worth noting that hate crime reporting and, IMO, even calling something a "hate crime" is "fraught" as the SJWs like to say.
https://www.propublica.org/article/why-america-fails-at-gathering-hate-crime-statistics
I've never heard a compelling argument for designating things a "hate crime." It's like the old "why are the Nazis thought to be worse than japan or Mao, Khmer Rouge, Stalin?" They committed mass hate crimes, I guess?