Tracking paranoid rhetoric, visa restrictions, and the targeted policing of China-connected research, which combine to create a hostile atmosphere for Chinese people in the U.S.
“Faculty members, post-docs, research staff and students tell me that, in their dealings with government agencies, they now feel unfairly scrutinized, stigmatized and on edge – because of their Chinese ethnicity alone.”
—MIT President L. Rafael Reif, June 25, 2019.
Since early 2018, the American immigration and justice system has appeared to target Chinese students, and ethnically Chinese researchers, with paranoid rhetoric, visa restrictions, and targeted policing and politicization of China-connected research. Together, these three trends comprise the primary — but not only — components of the current atmosphere of suspicion and distrust in America of not just Beijing, but Chinese people as a whole.
This tool tracks rising Sinophobia in the U.S. Click on the filters to view different categories of Sinophobia-related developments, including Responses to Sinophobia, like the letter by the MIT President cited above.
Read about why The China Project launched this Sinophobia Tracker, in the words of our Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Goldkorn.
"The 'China Initiative' launched in late 2018 aimed to prevent U.S. technology theft by China but has since 'deviated significantly from its claimed mission,' according to the Sept. 8 letter, which was signed by 177 Stanford faculty members and made public by them on Monday [September 13]."
Launched by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2018, the China Initiative is a government program gone rogue. Will it be shut down after the suspensions of half a dozen investigations ended without prosecution or any evidence of wrongdoing?
"As the National Institutes of Health begins implementing Trump-era guidelines, researchers voice concerns over transparency and racial profiling."
Maggie Lewis, a Professor of Law at Seton Hall University, responds to the indictment of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Gang Chen, arguing that the case "underscores two major concerns with the [Department of Justice's] China Initiative: an over-emphasis on national security and an under-emphasis on bias."
Tianyu M. Fang reports for The China Project that Yáng Jiànlì 杨建利, a prominent Chinese human rights activist, has been denied U.S. citizenship because he used to be a Communist Party member in the 1980s until he joined in the 1989 Tiananmen protests. Fang concludes, "The lesson here, perhaps, is to recognize the layered complexities and deep contradictions in the politics of Chinese individuals rather than inciting lazy Sinophobia and loyalty tests."
The China Project interviews lawyers, academics, and scientists affected by the U.S. Justice Department's China Initiative for their perspective.
"The Justice Department’s effort to prosecute some Chinese researchers in the U.S. accused of hiding their ties to the Chinese government is facing increasing pushback from some academics and Chinese-American groups."
NPR interviews a student whose visa was mistakenly revoked and then reinstated, and who now plans to work in the European Union instead of the U.S. A Chinese researcher also tells NPR that during a border screening, it felt that "throughout the entire process, the agents have assumed that you are a spy." Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the Paulson Institute, tells NPR: "I think our policymakers have kind of been lulled into believing that the way that we treat immigrants and the way that we treat incoming researchers doesn't matter because they'll come here no matter what. But...people are no longer forced to study in the U.S. if they want to stay at the forefront" of scientific research.
On August 31, 2020, Ling-Chi Wang, Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, wrote a letter to UNT to express "shock and profound concern" over the sudden expulsion of students from the university and the U.S. "In the absence of any legitimate explanation, the expulsion appears to be national origin-based and possibly racially and politically motivated, an action explicitly prohibited by Title VI of the Civil Right Act of 1964," Professor Wang wrote in the letter.
