By Xiaobei Chen, Special to OnePacificNews

*This article is an adaption of a chapter with the same title in Reading Sociology (4^th ed.), edited by Johanne Jean-Pierre, Vanessa Watts, Carl James, Patrizia Albanese, Xiaobei Chen, and Michael Graydon, Oxford University Press (Forthcoming in fall 2022).

Introduction
By February 2020, many Chinese Canadians were confronted with two impossible choices: to wear a face mask in public spaces and thus risk racist abuse, or to not wear a face mask and risk the transmission of corona virus. Those who immigrated from Mainland China were acutely aware of how infectious and deadly the virus was from their families and friends in China, and how important preventive measures are in controlling the spread of the virus (Burki 2020). They tried to persuade their neighbours and colleagues to use masks, to no avail; when they wore masks in public, many were harassed. Some harassers misunderstood wearing face masks as being sick and felt the wearers should not have left home; some equated the practice to ignorance, to being culturally un-Canadian, and to a Chinese Communist conspiracy, in many ways resembling xenophobic stigmatizing of Muslim women wearing hijabs.

Contrary to common understanding, these abuses are not the beginning, but the culmination of growing hostility in the last decade against the Chinese diaspora in Canada, who have been scapegoated for complex social issues such as housing (Ng 2019; Wu 2019). Many scholars (e.g. Hoffman & Modi 2012; Denike 2015) have documented that immigrants in the US and Canada have long shouldered the blame for any kind of threat. The current trend of blaming the Chinese diaspora is part of the tradition of race-based anti-immigrant scapegoating (Allport 1948/1959; Girard 1972/2021), particularly in the wake of social and political crises (Li 2009; McClain 2021).

The term anti-Asian racism has become commonly used only recently. It is important to briefly note a few points about it.

First, racist classifications and ideas targeting Asians are part of the European-originated ideology of “scientific racism” that justified European expansion and white domination over Indigenous peoples in settler colonies, Blacks, Asians, Jews, Arabs, and other peoples classified as non-white. Second, white-supremacist, racialized construction and discrimination of people of Asian ancestry have a long and pervasive history in western countries and are systemic in nature (Yu 2021). Third, historically, discussions about racism against Asians often bear specific references to ethnicity or country of origin, for example, the Chinese Exclusion from immigration, or the Japanese Internment. This speaks to a characteristic of racism targeting Asians, that is, it is intertwined with anti-immigrant sentiments and geopolitics. As a result, the content of racist ideas and actions against Asians tend to vary depending on the situation that provoked the particular wave of heightened hostility against a specific group; other Asians are affected because they are mis-identified as, say, Japanese, during the anti-Japanese agitations. Fourth, since the 1960s some activists had tried to cultivate a pan-Asian consciousness and anti-racist organizing. The widespread #StopAsianHate protests sparked by the Atlanta shootings in March 2021 indicate a clear interest in pan-Asian organizing against racism.  It is important to see both the specificities of anti-Asian racism at a given conjuncture and responses that may be partly based on broader, strategic Asian identification and solidarity.

Following the late Jamaican-born British social theorist Stuart Hall (1996/2021), I recognize race as “the floating signifier”. For our purposes here, this means anti-Asian racism needs to be understood as a white settler colonial cultural tradition that acquires new contents often in times of crises. Furthermore, it is important to be explicit that one specificity of the current anti-Asian racism is anti-Chinese sentiment. We are seeing a politics of fear driven by Sinophobia about the rise of China as an economic and political rival, exacerbated by anxiety associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. This is causing disproportionate profiling and targeting of people of Chinese origin, especially for those who have connections to China and who are not ideologically anti-China or share the new Cold War mentality; it also results in stranger hostility against anyone who looks Chinese.

This article is based on my research, personal experiences, and community engagement around anti-Asian racism since 2020. Anti-Asian racism affects me and many others personally. I fear for my family’s, my students’, and my own safety.

Furthermore, speaking up about anti-Asian racism as an immigrant from China has become grounds for suspecting Chinese Canadians’ disloyalty to Canada. For example, in May 2020, on behalf of a Chinese-Canadian professors’ group I launched an online petition to protest Global News journalist Sam Cooper’s irresponsible report portraying a sensational but erroneous picture of “millions of Chinese Canadians” working for the Chinese Communist government to buy up PPE, jeopardizing Canada’s fight against the pandemic. Without evidence, Cooper recently stated that the petition had “the hand of Beijing behind it,” basically accusing me of being an agent for the Chinese Communist government, when I was only doing my work as a public scholar and sociologist of racism and the Chinese diaspora. Similar attacks are routinely hurled at Mainland Chinese individuals and groups who speak up (research interviews).

In this sociological account of anti-Asian racism, I will:  first, outline the historical and contemporary structural conditions that have produced the current anti-Asian racism; second, discuss two forms of anti-Asian racism: anti-Asian hate crimes and systemic anti-Asian racism; and thirdly, problematize the tendency of only paying attention to direct, personal attacks against Asians.

Structural Conditions of Anti-Asian Racism
Sociologists analyse historical and contemporary social structure that have shaped life experiences. I highlight three such structural conditions below.

Western Imperialism and Colonialism in Asia
European and American imperialism and colonialism in Asia are central to understanding the history of discrimination of people of Asian ancestry in western countries. White racial superiority and aims of domination gave rise to widespread and enduring racist representations of Asia and Asians. For example, characterizations of Chinese culture and people as “uncivilized” and degenerate became influential through actions of British politicians, merchants, and Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century, when British imperial power used military force to press the Qing Empire of China to trade in terms favourable to Britain.

When American imperialism dominated in the twentieth century, its aggressions in Asia were characterized by racializing processes deeming entire populations “the enemy” and exterminist tactic echoing the genocide of North American Indigenous peoples (Shibusawa 2006; Man 2020). For stance, during the Philippine-American War, terms such as “Indian country” and “n-word” were used to describe Asian places and peoples (Man 2020, p.27).

As Lee-An and I pointed out (Lee-An and Chen 2021), the Atlanta shootings in March 2020 revealed the impact of Western imperial and colonial history of racializing and sexualizing Asian women. Asian women have been variously portrayed as objects to be saved from their cultures, exotic and easily available for pleasure and fun, or targets of sexual violence. Such ideas stem from, for example, sexualized travelogues that were popularized among American soldiers occupying Japan and Korea, where military duty in East Asia was treated as “first and foremost a sexual adventure (Kindig 2016, p.151).”

At present, whether on the street, in Twitter space, and in more formal print media, calling Chinese immigrants, especially those from Mainland China, as communist spies, has become a common strategy to shut them down and to stigmatize (Paltiel et al. 2021). The culturally accepted practice of combining anti-communism with anti-Asian racism, i.e. racially profiling East Asians as communist agents at home, is a long-standing pattern of the connection between contemporary anti-Asian racism and American imperialist wars in Asia. In the 1980s, Texas fisherman working with the Ku Klux Klan attempted to drive out Vietnamese refugees who had settled there, portraying them as being infiltrated by communists. In disturbing ways, white power activists, Klansman, and even major newspapers understood the conflict as an extension of the Vietnamese War (Belew 2018).

Settler Colonial Racial Order
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Asians – Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinx and South Asians – migrated to North America because of the devastating impact of the west’s expansion on native economies and societies (Man 2020). When they arrived, ideas about them as an inferior race and ignorant heathens were already established. In western settler colonial societies (US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), they were barely tolerated but for the hard, exploited labour needed by capitalist economies and the expansion of the colonial, white nation project; they were shunned and oppressed for perceived moral, health, and economic threats to the white nation (e.g. Li 2009).

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the “maximisation of [Asians’] labour, and not their lives” was ensured by law (Man 2020). The dehumanization of Asians was evident in the rejection of their existence when their labour was no longer needed. Head taxes and then Chinese Exclusion laws banning the immigration of Chinese and East Asians were passed in the US (1875 and 1882), New Zealand (1881), Canada (1885 and 1923), and Australia (1901).

Canadian immigration policies since the 1960s have shifted their priority from hard labour to skilled labour, and later to investment. Despite policy changes, Asians’ subordinated incorporation (Brown 2008) into the settler colonial racial order was conditional on what Canada needs from them. While racist laws are not applicable today, the dehumanizing approach of valuing what is wanted from Asian peoples over their lives is still with us. For example, universities rely on Asian international students’ tuition fees to mitigate cuts to public funding, while doing little to acknowledge and support them during the surge of anti-Asian racism.  

Geopolitical Shift, Fear, and the New Sinophobic discourse
Li (2009) shows that while the place of the Chinese in Canada improved substantially since WWII, in the decades ensued up to the early 2000s they continue to be vulnerable to racist stereotypes. The current surge in anti-Asian racism is tied to a major shift in geopolitics, whereby China and Russia are seen as “the threats of 2021 and tomorrow”, as American President Biden stated in his speech on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan (Biden 2021). In the opinion of scholars such as Bui (2019), China’s threats are often exaggerated and fanned by demagogues and conspiracy-theory propaganda outlets for their own political and economic interests. The rising fear about China and animosity, unfortunately but not surprisingly, has produced new hate towards Canadians of Chinese origin. Similar to the situation leading to the internment of Japanese in the US and Canada, Chinese immigrants and their native-born children are seen, through the prism of racist logic, as potential enemies as much as those in China, and targets of hostility and marginalization (Luo 2021).

Anti-Asian Hate Crimes during the Pandemic
Hateful attacks on Chinese and other Asian Canadians skyrocketed in 2020. There are many reports of people being refused service, coughed at, spat at, pushed, and beaten. A survey estimated that 50% of Chinese Canadians routinely experience verbal assaults and 60% of Chinese Canadians change their routines to avoid attacks (Angus Reid Institute 2020, 2021). Vancouver, known as the most Asian city outside Asia and supposedly “the bastion of progressive multiculturalism”, registered more anti-Asian hate crimes than in the top 10 most populous US cities combined. It experienced a 717% increase in anti-Asian crimes, despite underreporting, and was thus dubbed the world’s capital of anti-Asian hate crimes (Pearson 2021; Baylon and Cecco 2021).

In Ottawa, where I live, Justin Tang while entering a downtown mall was told by a stranger that wearing a mask made him want to “kill Asians” (Cotnam 2020). Chinese Canadians fear that these are not empty threats. Indeed, they are not. On March 16, 2021, a man drove to three different Asian-operated spas in Atlanta to kill–six of the eight murdered victims were Asian women. These killings are widely seen as the culmination of growing hate and hostility against the Chinese and Asians for the past year. This tragedy led to many protests across North America, united by the hashtag slogan #StopAsianHate. Hate and how the government should respond to it emerged as central concerns to many individuals and advocacy groups. But is a narrow focus on hate crime enough?

Systemic Anti-Asian Racism 
There are problems with a narrow preoccupation with hate crime. First, the legal tools against hate are extremely limited. Second, the preoccupation with anti-Asian hate crime follows a long-standing pattern of only noticing individual racism, where overt and dramatic racist acts are blamed on the pathology of a few individuals. This misses the structural and systemic nature of racism. The 2020 protests against anti-Black racism in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by police has made mainstream the concept of systemic racism (James 2022). Ironically, little media coverage about anti-Asian racism has included the mention of this important concept, which understands racism as a systemic condition that is pervasive, deeply rooted in the culture of a society, and imbricated with the system of power and privilege.

The notion of systemic racism has several layers of meanings and anti-racist critics using this term may refer to one or a combination of these: racial prejudice and discrimination are not limited to a few prejudiced or ignorant individuals, rather these ideas and practices are enduring parts of a society’s or an organization’s culture; racial hierarchy is structurally related to material, political, and cultural inequality between groups; social and political institutions (e.g. the media, schools, governments, policing, the labour market, and the popular culture) interact to produce outcomes that have widespread impact on racialized groups. Covert and subtle forms of racism, racial prejudice, racial harassment have become more prevalent. Instead of seeing racism only in its direct and explicit forms and as a result of individuals’ prejudice or ignorance, it is important to recognize systemic racism that is resistant to change.

Systemic and widespread Sinophobia remains unacknowledged and unchallenged. Sinophobia is similar to Islamophobic hysteria (Denike 2015; Kassam-Remtulla 2020). Here, collective anxiety about the threat of China leads to “guilt-by-association” and a desire to punish the surrogate victim in order to restore perceived control (Rothschild et al. 2012, p.1149; Girard 1972/2021). The surrogate victim is identified through group/racial profiling: how they look, where they migrated from, and what they say or not say about China and the Chinese government. Immigrants from Mainland China and their Canadian-born children are faced with anti-communist prejudice and classified into two groups: victims of the Chinese Community Party (CCP), or accomplices of the CCP (Chen 2008). Those who categorically denounce the Chinese government as the enemy are embraced as victims; those who have more nuanced views about the tension between China and the US-led west or who are apolitical are suspected to be Communist agents or puppets.

At the policy level, under the Trump Administration, the Department of Justice in the US launched the China Initiative in 2018 to counter national security threats from China. Since then the Federal Bureau of Investigation had launched over two thousand investigations under the Initiative. While there have been thefts of trade secrets and other crimes, legal scholar Margaret Lewis argues that it is problematic to frame efforts to counter criminal activities by using the framing of “China”, as it attaches “a criminal taint” to “China-ness” and that the prosecution and punishment “rests in part on a connection with ‘China” (Lewis 2021, p.145).

In Canada in 2020, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service warned universities that “China is allegedly using students, academic exchange programs, and partnerships to obtain access to science and technology for economic advantage” (Canadian Association of University Teachers 2021).  In 2021, the federal government imposed mandatory national-security risk assessments of funding requests from university researchers (Fife and Chase 2021). Canadian Association of University Teachers, two associations of Chinese Canadian professors, and others have expressed concerns about the guidelines.

How the guidelines may be implemented and applied to more areas of research remain to be seen, but there is a real possibility of institutionalizing racial profiling in academia, whereby individual researchers are targeted and affected solely on the basis of their country of origin. When such issues of systemic anti-Asian racism are brought up, they are mostly met with silence or claims that those who questions such policies are Communist spies. For example, my interview with Globe and Mail (Chase 2021) alone has provoked many personal attacks. The scale and predictability of such hysterical attacks in themselves demonstrate the worsening problem of Sinophobia.

Conclusion
Systemic racism has multiple layers of meanings. In the context of anti-Asian racism, this concept directs our attention beyond the exclusive preoccupation with policing anti-Asian hate attacks by individuals against individuals.

Calling for hate crime laws and more policing are not effective solutions, and moreover it may damage solidarity and a collective struggle against racism (Talusan 2021; 18millionrising.org). Social and political institutions including the media, popular culture, schools, and government policies, interact to (re)produce anti-Asian racism. To address anti-Asian racism, we must understand the roots of anti-Asian racism in North America as well as colonial and imperialist aggressions in Asia. We need a geopolitical analysis of racism to better understand how wars and war-mongering hysteria reignite prejudices and justify dehumanization of the targeted group.  

Xiaobei Chen is Professor of Sociology and Associate Chair in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. She was President of the Canadian Sociological Association (2020-2021)


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