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.
Senator Tom Cotton argues that because it is "often impossible to distinguish honest students from spies," there is an "inherent problem in allowing hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals to study advanced STEM in America." His solution is to presume all Chinese STEM students to be potential spies and totally ban them from graduate studies in the U.S.
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.
Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor for the New York Post, insinuates that Facebook's content moderation cannot be trusted because six Chinese nationals work on one of their algorithm engineering teams. Senators Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley are quoted in the piece, agreeing with Ahmari's claim that this is a legitimate reason to investigate Facebook.
"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."
Two Chinese students who were arrested in January for taking unauthorized photographs of a navy air base in Florida are in a federal penitentiary awaiting deportation, despite no evidence being publicly presented that indicates they were anything but lost tourists. They will be unable to finish their studies at the University of Michigan as a result.
"Hu Haizhou, who was studying underwater robotics, had permission to access code he allegedly stole… The development is a black eye for the Justice Department in its recent series of cases against Chinese military-linked researchers studying in the U.S."
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.
