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 Trump administration said that it had cancelled over 1,000 student visas for "certain Chinese graduate students and researchers with ties to China’s military fusion strategy." However, the visa cancellations do not appear to have been limited to graduate students.
"As the Trump administration continues to scrutinize all aspects of America’s relations with China, the University of North Texas has expelled 15 Chinese researchers who were funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council, a government organization."
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.
"Many are hurt by Trump’s overtures — however symbolic — about Chinese talent having no place in his vision of America. Together with the mass cancellation of Chinese work visas last month, the Trump administration has effectively pushed many future talents back into the arms of the CCP."
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gives a speech framing America and China as locked in a black-and-white battle of "freedom and tyranny." While overlooking the contributions of Chinese people to American society and academia, he says that China has "sent propagandists into our press conferences, our research centers, our high-schools, our colleges, and even into our PTA meetings," and he only discusses Chinese students in the context of "too many" of them only being "here to steal our intellectual property."
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."
"Scientists in China have told Nature that they are reluctant to travel to the United States for conferences or other research activities even when pandemic travel restrictions lift."
"A new rule from ICE that prohibits international students from remaining in the U.S. if their universities offer classes only online is just the latest setback for Chinese students in the time of COVID-19."
A July 8 SCMP article follows the plight of Lǐ Xiǎojiāng 李晓江, a tenured professor at Emory who was fired unceremoniously after Emory launched an investigation into his work with a research lab in China. In the article, Lǐ details how Emory’s failure to provide complete documentation to the FBI led to his being swept up in the DOJ’s ‘China Initiative.’
