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 SupChina 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.
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.
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.
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."
"China's spying and attempts to steal U.S. technology are 'the greatest long-term threat' to America's economic vitality, Wray said."
On May 28, 2020, Senators Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn and Representative David Kustoff, also of Tennessee, introduced legislation that would bar Chinese nationals from all STEM graduate-level programs in the U.S., Inside Higher Ed reports.
On April 26, 2020, Senator Tom Cotton said, “I have little doubt that the Chinese intelligence services are actively trying to steal America’s intellectual property as it relates to the virus that they unleashed on the world,” and suggested that Chinese students should not be allowed to study science in the U.S. as a result, per the New York Post.
On August 27, 2019, Senator Lindsey Graham made an incendiary — and hugely popular — statement on Twitter accusing “the Chinese” of cheating, citing no evidence and making no distinction between Chinese people and the Chinese government.
On July 30, 2019, Marie Royce, a senior U.S. State Department official, made remarks titled “The United States Welcomes Chinese Students.” But as Elizabeth Redden at Inside Higher Ed reported, some parts of the remarks were received more as a warning that perpetuated stereotypes of Chinese students.
