Beyond Hate and Panic

Yesterday, a mass murder dominated the headlines. Robert Long, a young white man, is accused of killing eight people, six of them Asian. In the US, mainstream news media have turned the spotlight on a rising trend of violence and discrimination against Asian and Asian-American people and others.

In the background has been the persistent xenophobic rhetoric on the political right, which has increased in volume and vitriol in the years of the novel-coronavirus pandemic. Those of us who are alarmed at violence against the vulnerable that often accompanies such rhetoric should keep confronting the lies and hatred that take recognizable chauvinistic forms. However, we also need to think about the ways that the broader China-panic in the media have contributed to a climate of prejudice and suspicion.

To begin with, respectable outlets, from the New York Times, to the Financial Times, to The Economist, to Foreign Policy, have written headlines and made cartoons to sensationalize “the rise of China.” However, though such stories presumably take up the attention of the intelligentsia, it is not clear what exactly should concern the vast majority of people.

In economic terms, one country’s success in fighting poverty is simply a human achievement, which does not in and of itself harm anyone else.

However, the media imply economic anxiety through political fear. “The China model” may inspire authoritarians in places such as Africa, but it is the height of denialist ignorance to believe that American influence has guided the world’s poor to freedom and human rights. The opposite is so often true. Moreover, democracy is so evidently frail at home, that American liberal elites scarcely deserve the fantasy that our country is in much shape to serve as example of civil-social liberty.

Moreover, it has never been clearer that America’s military and economic dominance is not improving the lives of most people, not even within the United States. The zenith of US power abroad has also been the time of significant distress shown in many indications of social wellbeing at home.

News coverage of what life is like in China is often seriously flawed. In general, it is not so much that the liberal press say things that are untrue or distorted, but that they highlight the particularity of what they present in ways that inhibit comparison and narrow perspective.

Take the panic of the past 12 months, the ostensible origins of COVID-19 within China, of which the rightwing media have made so much. By comparison, the liberal press might have been less sensational about “wet markets” and obfuscation by the Chinese state. However, there has really not been a discussion of how global consumer capitalism, in which China is responsible for producing the world’s goods so cheaply, has combined with the concentration of public-health knowledge and resources in the Global North to make such pandemics like this one such a structural risk.

The mainstream press have similar problems covering authoritarianism in China. The Chinese state really is undertaking a massive persecution of people in the majority-Muslim region of Xinjiang that is unprecedented in East Asian history.

Under the presidency of Xi Jinping, ordinary people are more surveilled and dissidents more repressed than they have been in some time. However, the mainstream press have paid comparatively little attention to the phenomenon of “democratic backsliding” (not my favorite expression) in many parts of the world.

China’s history and its political structure are its own, but economic and environmental insecurity have prompted a great many leaders to use the conceptual, administrative, and security resources of the nation state to target minority groups and to consolidate their own power. Even if we assume China’s cagey elite act solely on their own, people who want to question and challenge its abuses need committedly-reflective solidarity that is little aided by work that sees China as an exceptional pariah.

To reflect in this way, we need to think critically about how information, even true information, is deployed and presented. No one questions Soviet abuses of power, yet anti-communism in the United States involved considerable paranoia and contributed to opposition to the civil rights movement by the state and much of the media. Similarly, it is impossible to dispute the crimes of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, but the US-led war on terror has meant more danger and less freedom for millions of people around the world, including Muslims in the United States.

Though most everyone can distinguish between the Chinese state and people from China or with roots in China or Asia, the China panic is less discriminating. Fears of foreign penetration and compromise echo the Cold War, while worries about contamination build on long-established anti-Asian tropes. Cities’ Chinatowns, shaped by and as a refuge from racism, have again become sites of serious concern about violence. Academics and college students are having their loyalty scrutinized. Older people, immigrants, sex workers, or people who are assumed to be sex workers, are particularly vulnerable.

I am not saying we can overcome the China panic by ignoring or canceling the liberal (or conservative) media. Rather, we can do significant corrective work by listening to people who speak from experience about confronting the effects of the China panic and navigating its ambiguities as much as those who have faced political repression in China, the US, or elsewhere.

However, our response will be incomplete if we do not address the conditions that have made the China panic and intensified fear of the other so potent. It is true that, for example, manufacturing in the US declined in the period that it developed in China. But this does not mean that poor workers in one country gained because less poor workers in another lost. It is rather that a global economic system has expanded its ambit to enrich those at its center while rendering life on its peripheries increasingly precarious. In this process, we share more with the vast majority of every country than with the interests of capital and the national elites who respond to economic dislocation with brutality and demonization.

We can work against the forces of dispossession and alienation in our own countries and contexts, but we must not imagine this work is limited to those countries and contexts.