It’s Not Bigotry to Tell the Truth About China The Communist Party and its U.S. apologists try to hide behind victims of anti-Asian violence. Sadanand Dhume
Does criticism of China imperil Asian-Americans? A rash of recent commentary in the wake of last month’s shootings in Atlanta that killed eight people, six of them Asian women, makes that claim. But its factual basis is doubtful.
Columbia University historian Mae Ngai wants the U.S. to “pull back from treating China as an adversary.” In the Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen and Asian-American studies professor Janelle Wong argue: “When officials express fears over China or other Asian countries, Americans immediately turn to a timeworn racial script that questions the loyalty, allegiance and belonging of 20 million Asian Americans.” Journalist Peter Beinart warns that “if America’s leaders are serious about combating anti-Asian violence” at home, “they must stop exaggerating the danger that the Chinese government poses.”
Such arguments are deeply misguided. There is no contradiction between abhorring violence against Asian-Americans and criticizing a repressive regime that squelches human rights at home and undermines liberal democracy abroad. Most Americans are capable of making this elementary distinction. They make it every day.
How we approach this issue matters. China’s authoritarian system of government, economic heft and technological prowess make it the foremost challenger to the U.S.-led international order that has underwritten global peace and prosperity for more than seven decades. At the same time, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders—some 19.3 million strong according to the Census Bureau—are America’s fastest-growing demographic group. Those who call on the U.S. to drop its criticism of China for the supposed well-being of Asian-Americans are asking Washington to enter a geopolitical boxing ring with one arm tied behind its back.
This plays into China’s hands. Like the Soviets in the Cold War, China’s Communists seek to exploit domestic divisions to weaken the U.S. In Alaska last month, China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, accused America of having “slaughtered” blacks, a transparent attempt to deflect attention from China’s horrific treatment of ethnic minorities, including Uighur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists. With its usual subtlety, the Communist Party-linked media outlet Global Times used the Atlanta killings to charge “brazen Western politicians, scholars, media and other China-haters who take advantage of the pandemic” with stoking “hate crime incidents” against Asian-Americans.
The argument that we must tread softly around China for the sake of Asian-Americans mistakenly conflates the 19.3 million Asian-Americans with 4.4 million Chinese-Americans. Additionally, most ethnic Chinese came to America fleeing political persecution or seeking economic opportunity. Like most other Asian groups, they have thrived because the U.S. has rewarded education, hard work and entrepreneurial drive. There is no evidence that Chinese-Americans have greater affinity for the Chinese Communist Party than any other group of Americans do. Given their circumstances, the opposite is often true.
This isn’t to dismiss all criticism of U.S. political rhetoric about China. You could argue that in a racially charged environment it makes more sense to refer to the Covid-19 pathogen as the Wuhan virus rather than the Chinese virus; the former refers to a place and is difficult to confuse with a race. Besides, at this point, virtually every sentient being outside China knows that the pandemic originated in that country.
America’s mainstream discourse around Asian-Americans largely ignores inconvenient facts. Attacks on Asian-Americans have indeed risen in recent years. According to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, anti-Asian hate crimes reported to the police in major cities in 2020 rose to 145% of the number of reports in 2019. But this refers to only 120 incidents in a nation of 330 million. This jump also runs up against longer-term trends. Between 1996 and 2019 the number of hate crimes against Asian-American and Pacific Islanders declined nearly 50%, from 355 to 179, according to FBI figures. At the same time, the AAPI population more than doubled.
Moreover, the professional activists who most loudly decry a largely imaginary “white supremacist” assault on Asian-Americans are often the same people whose ideas threaten the community’s hard-earned success. They are the ones pushing to end race-blind admissions to some of the most selective public schools across the country. They are the ones who want an emphasis on equality of opportunity to give way to equality of outcome, an approach that already penalizes Asian-American applicants to leading U.S. universities like Harvard and Yale.
In the end, America has no choice but to grapple with the threat of an authoritarian and increasingly belligerent China. But the best way to strengthen the country domestically is to reject both white supremacy and “wokeism” by striving toward a society that is race-blind, not race-obsessed.
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