The Anti-Anti-China Left

By Jimmy Quinn

Thursday, October 14, 2021

 

When House Republicans proposed sanctions legislation last summer targeting the Chinese Communist Party’s political-influence networks, Gregory Meeks, the New York Democrat who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, stonewalled the effort.

 

The GOP had proposed the sanctions as an amendment to the EAGLE Act, House Democrats’ China-focused legislative package. Meeks first stoked Democratic opposition to the measure during a meeting on the legislation. “This ‘malign’ descriptor is undefined,” he said, referring to the legislation’s focus on China’s malign influence networks, including those maintained by the United Front Work Department. “The broad generalities contained in this amendment leave such sanctions open to significant politicization and ambiguity.” The amendment was voted down.

 

While a spokesperson declined to give me an explanation for a subsequent move by Meeks to block a similar provision from this year’s defense-policy bill, Meeks’s public explanation for his opposition to the sanctions, as I reported for National Review Online at the time, is at the heart of a new progressive line on China. Left-wing Asian-American advocacy coalitions, spurred by pandemic-era hate crimes, have now teamed up with anti-war activist groups, many of which have made excuses for the Chinese government’s repression of ethnic minorities.

 

According to this new narrative, certain policies, such as pushing back against China’s malign influence operations, endanger Americans of Asian descent. “Anti-China framing . . . inevitably feeds racism, violence, xenophobia, and white nationalism,” a coalition of these activist groups and the Quincy Institute, a noninterventionist think tank, wrote in a statement opposing the Senate companion to the EAGLE Act. Leveraging fear of anti-Asian hate, as evidenced by the statement, is a way for pro-appeasement types to torpedo what they deem to be tough-on-China legislation (in reality, the Senate bill is quite anodyne, even anemic) and advance their preferred policies: “joint, non-military solutions with China and other countries” to address climate change, global public-health issues, and other challenges.

 

Earlier this year, opponents of Wash­ington’s apparent new consensus on China would not have had a prayer. Suffocating Hong Kong’s democracy, punishing Australian industry over Canberra’s support of an independent COVID-origins investigation, and sending jets through Taiwan’s air-defense identification zone — among many other recent outrageous acts — made Beijing a pariah, and these moves have only inspired new anti-authoritarian resolve in Washington and other Western capitals.

 

But by conflating anti-China policies with anti-Asian racism, progressive groups have successfully seeded their new narrative, even as the Biden administration has taken steps to build on the core strategy for competition put in place under Donald Trump. This is because, like many conspiracy theories, the unfounded assertion that the rhetoric and policy responses favored by China hawks have encouraged racist attackers is based on a faulty analysis of actual events.

 

Many Asian Americans have endured some level of social ostracization or, worse, racially motivated assaults, starting even before COVID-19 crashed down on America’s shores in March 2020 and continuing through the present. Whether anti-Asian acts during the COVID era constitute a statistically significant trend distinct from a broader crime wave is a separate question, but media reports on specific incidents over the past year and a half indicate that perpetrators of attacks on Asian Americans have consistently targeted their victims because of the virus’s origins in China.

 

In the absence of government reporting and rigorous academic research on the trend, many journalists and politicians initially turned to Stop AAPI Hate, a new Asian-American social-justice coalition, for explanations. The culture-war scuffles over the terms “Wuhan virus” and “China virus” throughout 2020, and the shootings at three Atlanta spas in March, in which six of the gunman’s eight victims were Asian women, sharpened interest in the group. Using its online form, people have submitted reports of almost 10,000 anti-Asian “hate incidents,” mostly consisting of verbal abuse and “shunning,” since the start of the pandemic, an effort that turned professional community organizers into some of the most widely cited authorities on these incidents. In September, Stop AAPI Hate’s co-founders were named to Time’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people.

 

But besides merely cataloguing anti-Asian acts, the group issued reports exclusively blaming such acts on white supremacy, Donald Trump’s “kung flu” rhetoric, and the supposed “yellow peril” framing used by many U.S. officials in crafting China policy. In one report issued in October 2020, for instance, Stop AAPI Hate named a Trump-era executive order banning the Chinese messaging app WeChat and a decision restricting the presence of Chinese state-media entities on U.S. soil, among other policies, as examples of “anti-Asian” measures.

 

But reasonable anti-China policies are obviously distinct from vile anti-Asian sentiments, and conflations of the two expose a fundamental misunderstanding of Chinese Communist Party efforts to corrode American democracy. The Chinese government, for instance, uses WeChat to monitor, censor, and spread disinformation among the Han diaspora, and Chinese state media in the United States routinely spread the party’s propaganda about everything from the origins of the coronavirus to the genocide of the Xinjiang region’s Uyghurs. In addition, through these and other channels, Beijing’s long arm reaches dissidents and human-rights advocates residing on American soil. After an NYPD officer of Tibetan descent was arrested last year on espionage charges for allegedly working to undermine the Tibetan independence movement in New York, it was later revealed that his handlers at the Chinese consulate included a United Front official.

 

Whatever the merits of specific policies, there should be widespread recognition of the need to combat such blatant interference efforts from a hostile authoritarian power. Stop AAPI Hate, other activist organizations, and the Quincy Institute, however, claim that doing so — and pointing out the broad, multifaceted threat from the Chinese party-state — ­irresponsibly inflates the threat from China.

 

In an essay for Foreign Affairs this year, Stop AAPI Hate’s Russell Jeung and Quincy’s Jessica Lee call on President Biden to bring in “person­nel with a diverse set of opinions on U.S.–Chinese relations, including those who do not believe that the only course forward is extreme competition.” They urge Congress to pass Meeks’s EAGLE Act instead of the bipartisan Senate-approved bill and ask public officials to avoid using terms such as “malign influence” and “existential threat.” This is deemed a corrective to “foreign-policy makers’ consistent overexaggeration of China’s threat.” Elsewhere, their fellow travelers have blamed congressional China hawks, including Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn, Rob Wittman, and others, for this sort of rhetoric.

 

The assumption here is often that perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes are following the foreign-policy debate in Washington, or at least that the climate created by specific national-security decisions has a bearing on the safety of Asian Americans. While they might have picked up on Trump’s characterizations of the virus in early 2020, most perpetrators’ actions are almost certainly shaped by factors distinct from the rhetoric used by U.S. officials.

 

The unfortunate truth is that many assailants implicated in anti-Asian assaults struggle with mental illness, drug addiction, homelessness, or some combination of the three. In fact, the NYPD revealed in May that about half of the people it arrested to that point in 2021 for anti-Asian hate crimes were mentally ill. This has largely escaped attention, with the notable exception of an April report on the trend from the New York Times metro desk. That report detailed one case in which an assailant had a record of 33 prior arrests. Another example is even more shocking: The perpetrator of a vicious assault on a 65-year-old woman of Filipino descent in Times Square was on lifetime parole for murdering his own mother in 2002.

 

For its part, Stop AAPI Hate has assiduously avoided saying anything about these contributing factors, and its leaders have objected to increased policing as one way to prevent these crimes. “The data just doesn’t show” that a larger police presence would make Asian Americans safer, according to Cynthia Choi, the co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, who spoke to Vox last March. Jeung said that, instead, “we are encouraging re­storative justice models.”

 

But even a short-lived initiative in New York City to deploy undercover officers disrupted a number of anti-Asian hate crimes. After these officers were themselves targeted, the program was quickly ended, suggesting that a “community ambassadors” volunteer program, an alternative favored by anti-police act­ivists, is an even less tenable solution. Ultimately, a lasting solution must in­clude stepped-up policing, in addition to treatment of marginalized individuals for ills that Stop AAPI Hate and its allies just don’t acknowledge as factors at play in many of these incidents.

 

The question now is whether the anti-anti-China Left will be as successful at shaping U.S. foreign policy as it has been at proffering a blinkered understanding of anti-Asian hate crimes. Already, there are signs that officials have accepted the faulty premises of social-justice activists, including the view that there’s something inherently wrong with enacting policies explicitly designed to counter the totalitarian Chinese party-state, even as it is swarming military aircraft in Taiwan’s skies.

 

In May, as Congress considered legislation to address the competition with China, Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) told Politico that it would be harmful to adopt a “Cold War mentality that uses China as a scapegoat for our own domestic problems and demonizes Chinese Americans.” The following month, Bernie Sanders published his own essay in Foreign Affairs warning about “Washington’s dangerous new consensus on China,” claiming that hate crimes have spiked amid “fearmongering about China.”

 

The strangest thing in all of this is that Sanders, in that very essay, condemned Chinese human-rights abuses and espionage, and Omar has, unlike Quincy-aligned groups, condemned Beijing’s atrocities in Xinjiang as genocide. As evidenced in their paradoxical stances, the progressive approach to China remains only partially developed, centered on the talking points furnished by activists, but it already has concrete policy implications, including Sanders’s vote against the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, which was opposed by the Quincy coalition in favor of Meeks’s gentler bill.

 

Coupled with Biden officials’ attempts to bring the White House’s focus on “systemic racism” into foreign policy, and their pledge to simultaneously seek cooperation with Beijing amid the broader competition, the progressive anti-anti-China narrative has even begun to enter the Democratic mainstream.

 

As anti-anti-China activists complain that policies advanced by Joe Biden inflate the Chinese threat, the administration is starting to concede their premises. The State Department hosted a panel discussion in October exploring “possible links between U.S. foreign policy and anti-Asian” sentiment. Although U.S. officials stopped short of endorsing the claim that hawkish China policy causes racism, Representative Judy Chu (D., Calif.) urged them “to refrain from rhetoric that singles out China alone as a threat,” and a panelist from the Southern Poverty Law Center endorsed the work of Stop AAPI Hate. In the coming weeks, the Department of Homeland Security will host a similar panel in conjunction with the Asian American Foundation, a new outfit co-founded by Joseph Tsai, the Alibaba executive who has defended Beijing’s squelching of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement.

 

Whether or not activists will prove successful at watering down provisions in the already weak China-focused packages under consideration by Congress, they’ve already shaped the cultural narrative. There will be time for policy victories later.