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.
Responding to the ICE policy, L. Rafael Reif, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes, "The international scholars the administration was threatening to send home are vital to American innovation and competitiveness."
"Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sued the Trump administration in federal court on Wednesday, seeking to block a directive that would strip foreign college students of their visas if the courses they take this fall are entirely online," reported the New York Times. The lawsuit was successful, and the ICE policy was revoked.
Catherine X. Pan-Giordano, a partner at the international law firm Dorsey & Whitney LLP, tells The China Project that the Department of Justice has "created fear and distraction among the scientific community," and that the government has often penalized individual scientists and faculty members for failing to understand “complicated and sometimes confusing” disclosure rules.
Maggie Lewis, a law professor at Seton Hall University School of Law who focuses on criminal justice law in China and Taiwan, argues in a June 2020 draft paper that the U.S. Department of Justice’s ‘China Initiative’ risks undermining the department’s commitment to impartial justice.
"On behalf of OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates, and the 162 undersigned organizations, we urge the President to rescind his divisive and discriminatory Presidential Proclamation on the Suspension of Entry as Nonimmigrants of Certain Students and Researchers from the People’s Republic of China, following the release of the SECURE CAMPUS Act."
"While some government leaders have expressed concerns about the potential theft of intellectual property and prepublication results by foreign governments that threaten our national security, we must never resort to suspicion based on a person’s national origin. To do so is nothing short of discrimination, which is antithetical to our values as an institution. Racial profiling, in any context, is corrosive to our community."
Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, writes that the U.S. government's "policing attempts thrust economic and political concerns into fierce conflict with First Amendment freedoms."
The South China Morning Post reports on the new “Red Scare” targeting Chinese-American scientists and scholars, and the organizations, such as Asian Americans Advancing Justice, that are fighting back.
"We, the undersigned, are leaders in U.S. academic and industrial biomedical research and drug development. We are concerned that recent actions by government agencies and universities with respect to Chinese scientists in the U.S. could threaten U.S. leadership in biomedical science."
