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.
Peter Mattis and Matt Schrader write, "America’s problematic history with enforcement actions directed at Asian-Americans means that we cannot simply give the benefit of the doubt to either the U.S. government or the universities and research institutes that investigate and administratively punish their accused researchers."
“UC campuses from San Diego to Berkeley are reporting that Chinese students and scholars are encountering visa delays, federal scrutiny over their research activities, and new restrictions on collaboration with China and Chinese companies.”
The New York Times reports on the increasing influence of the racist and xenophobic views of people like Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, and organizations like the Committee on the Present Danger, a Cold War relic whose revival Bannon has spearheaded.
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.”
On July 16, 2019, Donald Trump repeated, without evidence, an inflammatory insinuation from billionaire investor Peter Thiel about Google committing “treason” by “working with the Chinese government.”
"We write today to reaffirm our enduring commitment to our international students, researchers, and patients. The success of a research university like ours is predicated on the open, robust exchange of ideas; enhanced by our ability to welcome people with different academic and practical training, experiences, cultural backgrounds, and viewpoints; and improved by our capacity to nurture talent from around the world."
"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.
