Editor’s note for Wednesday, March 17, 2021

Today this space is for my colleagues Jiayun Feng and Luz Ding:

Less than 24 hours after Robert Aaron Long shot up three Atlanta-area massage parlors — killing eight people, including six women of Asian descent — local authorities held a remarkable press briefing this afternoon, suggesting at points that the 21-year-old gunman was suffering from a “sex addiction” and the killings were not “racially motivated.”

According to the Atlanta police chief, it’s still too early to determine if the shooting was a hate crime. And most news outlets seemed reluctant to use the phrase, too. But given that Long deliberately targeted spas where Asian women worked, and in separate locations, it’s at least safe to say that when he went out of his way to commit mass shootings, he had a specific target in mind.

The murders felt like a culmination of many things. Many mass shooters are known for an immense hatred toward women. And these attacks come at a time when anti-Asian violence has been spiking, with most of the attacks directed at women.

As Asian women living in the U.S., the shootings were a reminder of a bleak reality that we know all too well, and have known even before the COVID-19 pandemic became an excuse for many Americans to lean in a new type of yellow peril, encouraged by a president who casually tossed around slurs like “Chinese virus” and “kung-flu” to describe the illness.

The hostility is also fueled by disproportionate and often sensational media reports emphasizing the alienness of Chinese American scientists and the inhumanness of Chinese people, and multiplied by the inflammatory rhetoric adopted by many American politicians when they frame China as a rival that needs to be countered on virtually every front.

At The China Project, we are aware of the problem and want to bring positive change to the situation. That’s why — day in and day out — we strive to explain the country’s complexity without imposing any preconceptions, provide context to events that would otherwise be misinterpreted, and tell as many stories a small newsroom like us can to create a fuller picture of the enormous country.

We hope you hold us accountable.

—Jiayun Feng and Luz Ding

Our word of the day is U.S.-China high-level strategic dialogue (中美高层战略对话
zhōngměi gāocéng zhànlüè duìhuà).