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.
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 SupChina 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."
SupChina interviews lawyers, academics, and scientists affected by the U.S. Justice Department's China Initiative for their perspective.
"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."
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.
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.
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."
"Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sued the Trump administration in federal court on Wednesday, seeking to block a directive that would strip foreign college students of their visas if the courses they take this fall are entirely online," reported the New York Times. The lawsuit was successful, and the ICE policy was revoked.
Catherine X. Pan-Giordano, a partner at the international law firm Dorsey & Whitney LLP, tells SupChina that the Department of Justice has "created fear and distraction among the scientific community," and that the government has often penalized individual scientists and faculty members for failing to understand “complicated and sometimes confusing” disclosure rules.
