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 Chronicle of Higher Education reported on how the ill-considered, badly executed Trump administration “crackdown on scholars with ties to China has triggered a reverse brain drain.” Specifically, they focus on one researcher, Tán Wèihóng 谭蔚泓, who was hounded out of the U.S. last year, and became the leader of a successful project in China to develop a fast, easy test for COVID-19.
"From 2000 through 2009, clearance applicants with connections to China—such as family or financial relationships—were denied Pentagon clearances at the same rate as applicants with links to all other countries: 44%. But from 2010 through Oct. 31 this year, the China-related denial rate jumped to 61%, and the rate for all other countries fell to 34%," reported Bloomberg.
"The N.I.H. and the F.B.I. have begun a vast effort to root out scientists who they say are stealing biomedical research for other countries from institutions across the United States. Almost all of the incidents they uncovered and that are under investigation involve scientists of Chinese descent, including naturalized American citizens, allegedly stealing for China," reports the New York Times.
The FBI is “intimidating or harassing” at least three Chinese faculty members at the University of Cincinnati, according to Eric Palmer, the executive director of the local American Association of University Professors chapter.
Bloomberg tells the story of a nanotechnology startup at College of William & Mary that left for China “after federal agents hounded its founder, [Xin Zhao], for two years.” One lawyer told Bloomberg that “Chinese scientists and engineers are often detained and searched at U.S. airports these days while traveling to and from China, as family members watch in panic.”
"Influential in academic circles, Li worked at Emory for more than two decades and was leading the university’s research on gene-editing technology. The sudden termination of the lab, which was one of the oldest and most productive at the School of Medicine, left over 500 cages of research mice uncared-for and 6 NIH grants frozen, which, as Li notes, was a 'massive loss' for the university, financially and academically," The China Project reported.
NPR reports that the FBI is “encouraging American research universities to develop protocols for monitoring students and visiting scholars from Chinese state-affiliated research institutions, as U.S. suspicion toward China spreads to academia.”
An aggressive effort by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to enforce rules requiring its grantees to report foreign ties is still gathering steam. But it has already had a major impact on the U.S. biomedical research community, Science Magazine reported.
University World News describes how the addition of dozens of Chinese universities to “entity lists” at the U.S. Commerce Department and other government arms in Washington has threatened to stifle cross-border research collaborations.
