Senator Feinstein
surprised the civil rights organizers who threw her an informal wine-and-cheese
shmoozer a couple months ago with an impromptu speech warning of the gathering
speed of anti-China sentiment in Congress and the impending fallout for all
Americans of Asian descent. A new yellow peril is afoot, she warned, and civil
rights organizers better ready themselves.
A comprehensive poll
released in April confirmed the senator’s prophecy. In a Yankelovich study of
attitudes toward China and Chinese Americans–the first ever of its
kind–Americans revealed an abiding belief that Chinese Americans were
unassimilable, traitorous foreigners, poised to sell American secrets to a
dangerous China.
Two-thirds feared China as
the biggest threat to U.S. security, second only to international terrorism. A
third questioned Chinese Americans’ loyalty to the United States, and almost
half considered Chinese-American espionage on behalf of China a real problem.
Finally, respondents couldn’t really tell the difference between Chinese
Americans and other Asian Americans: when surveyors asked the same questions
about Asian Americans as they had about Chinese Americans, they received nearly
identical results. The study, conducted during the first two weeks of March,
involved over 1,200 phone interviews with a nationally representative sample of
Americans aged 18 and over. Its findings sent chills down the spines of Asian
American civil rights organizations.
"With the rise of China in
particular as U.S. enemy number one," says Asian Law Caucus’s Victor Huang, "we
expect an increase in anti-Asian violence in the next couple of years." Asian
Law Caucus is a San Francisco-based civil rights organization aimed at
low-income Asian Americans. They and other organizers who track hate crimes
against Asian Americans say the poll’s findings show nothing new. "Those of us
who work in the Asian American community are not surprised," says Aryami Ong of
National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium in Washington, DC. "Especially
after the campaign finance scandal which cast a net of suspicion across Asian
Americans who legally participate in the political process and the indictment of
[Taiwanese scientist] Wen Ho Lee, based on his race," Ong explains.
Asian American activists
trace the current wave of anti-Asian sentiment to a 1999 report on Chinese
espionage by a U.S. select committee led by Rep. Christopher Cox. The so-called
Cox report "basically alleged that the Chinese government charged every
scientist and student who came to the United States with an espionage
assignment," says Ong. The anti-Chinese hysteria that followed continues today
in vastly stepped up anti-Asian security measures. Last month, security guards
detained two-term Representative David Wu from entering the Department of Energy
building. Even after Wu showed them his congressional identification, he was
asked not once but twice whether he was an American. Ironically, Wu was
attempting to enter the building to deliver a speech in honor of Asian American
Heritage Month. The collision between a U.S. spy plan and a Chinese fighter jet
on April 1 provided a further rationale to let loose all manner of anti-Chinese
blather. Some radio talk-show hosts called for the internment of Chinese
Americans and for boycotts of Chinese restaurants. The satirical theater group,
the Capitol Steps, dressed a white actor in thick glasses and a black wig to
impersonate a Chinese official. His line: "ching, ching, chong, chong" The top
newspaper editors gathered to enjoy the skit "laughed heartily," according to a
Chinese American student photographer assigned to cover the skit.
Hints that the Bush
administration plans to capitalize on growing anti-Chinese feeling to
rationalize vastly increased military spending abound. "Discussions are under
way in Washington to retarget strategic missiles, redeploy Trident submarines,
remilitarize Japan, and ally with India," warns a May 28 Business Week
editorial. "No one is yet using the word ‘containment’ but a look at the map
shows that the U.S. is clearly organizing a pan-Asian effort that amounts to
just that." Certain business elites are understandably alarmed–U.S.
corporations have invested $25 billion in China in the last 20 years, according
to the May 14 In These Times. Other businesses, such as defense contractors,
stand ready for a windfall if the Pentagon’s much-anticipated "strategic review"
calls for outlandishly expensive new projects rationalized by a supposed threat
from China.
Defense secretary Donald
Rumsfield’s been so busy secretly compiling his grand plan to overhaul the
Pentagon, he’s even passed up the perquisite round of commencement speeches this
May. A prominent China hawk, Andrew Marshall, appears to be one of his most
important advisors. Marshall worried, in a 1999 paper, of a growing challenge to
U.S. hegemony from China, in the face of intensifying resistance to exploitative
U.S. military bases in Japan and Korea. But even June 2 Economist noted the
paranoid alarmism apparent in the defense department’s "new thinking." "With
more than $1 billion a day to spend," they wrote, "the Pentagon’s budget dwarfs
those of any of America’s allies or protagonists." China spends about a quarter
of what the U.S. does on its military, and supports twice as many ground troops.
Even scholars from the conservative Brookings Institute say that the Chinese
could not project their military beyond their immediate borders–even if they
wanted to–for at least two decades. As East Asian scholar Bruce Cumings noted
in a 1999 article, "China is a Rorschach inkblot onto which Americans project
their hopes and fears. ‘China’ tells us much more about ourselves than it does
about the real country by the same name."
If the China hawks in the
Bush administration have their way, intensified demonization of China will
surely follow, not only stepping up anti-Asian discrimination at home, but also
drastically impoverishing the government’s ability to fund education, health
care, and other social services. Unfortunately, Asian American civil rights
organizations sacrificed their ability to comment on U.S. policy toward China
(or indeed any other Asian country) when they made proving Asian Americans’
red-blooded Americanism their top priority. Any appearance of allegiance to Asia
"confuses the public," says Huang. The Organization of Chinese Americans,
according to Huang, routinely refuses to take positions on U.S. policy toward
Asia. "We don’t take positions on Chinese issues or Asian issues," explains
Huang. "It is not ideal, but we need to reinforce this message" that Asian
Americans are not foreigners. The May 25 release of the movie Pearl Harbor
unleashed a fresh wave of flag-waving patriotism from scared Asian Americans. A
Japanese-American veteran at a recent press conference, Haung says, offered
proof that he was truly an American, too: he would have killed Japanese people,
he repeated several times, because they were the enemy.
But "do we have to agree
with U.S. foreign policy to say that we belong in this country?" asks
Korean-American organizer Sun Hyung Lee. For some sectors of the Asian American
community, embattled by years of immigrant bashing, the answer is clearly ‘yes’.
But, "no matter how assimilated Asians become in this society, says Lee, "we are
never going to have equality if the countries we come from are being oppressed
by U.S. economic and military policy." This old argument, newly supported by the
Yankelovich survey, may become increasingly difficult for mainstream Asian
American organizations to ignore.
To connect racism against
Asian Americans with U.S. policy toward Asia, Lee helps coordinate an ambitious
new national initiative called the Asian Left Forum. The ALF was born in 1998 at
a UC Berkeley organizers’ conference, where an ad hoc meeting on Asian left
issues drew almost 100 participants. Two years later, their momentum hadn’t
abated: 80 organizers showed up for the 2000 national summit. The Bay Area local
of the ALF plans a public forum on China-bashing on July 6.
Their organizing efforts
have largely flown under the radar of other anti-globalization and
anti-militarism activists, however. While Lee says the ALF works with other
organizations founded around the same time, such as the Black Radical Caucus and
the New Raza Left, many radical Asian organizers consider the anti-globalization
movement, which shares many of their concerns, the "white left." But a looming
military buildup and potential Cold War 2 with China may bridge some of these
gaps. Clearly, it will take a multi-pronged effort to reveal the new yellow
peril what it is–a fakeout to rationalize scary big guns with peculiarly
ghastly repercussions for Americans of Asian descent.