The amygdala is a pair of neural clusters near the base of the brain that assesses danger and can help prompt a fight-or-flight response. A prolonged stress response may contribute to anxiety, which can cause people to perceive danger where there is none and obsess about worst-case scenarios.
America’s collective national body is suffering from a chronic case of China anxiety. Nearly anything with the word “Chinese” in front of it now triggers a fear response in our political system, muddling our ability to properly gauge and contextualize threats. This has led the U.S. government and American politicians to pursue policies grounded in repression and exclusion, mirroring the authoritarian system that they seek to combat.
Congress has moved to force the sale of TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media application; some states have sought restrictions on Chinese individuals or entities owning U.S. land and on Chinese researchers working in American universities; and the federal government has barred certain Chinese technology firms from competing in our markets. These measures all have a national security rationale, and it is not my intention here to weigh the merits of every one. But collectively they are yielding a United States that is fundamentally more closed — and more like China in meaningful ways.
When you are constantly anxious, no threat is too small. In January, Rick Scott, a senator from Florida, introduced legislation that would ban imports of Chinese garlic, which he suggested could be a threat to U.S. national security, citing reports that it is fertilized with human sewage. In 2017, scientists at McGill University wrote there is no evidence that this is the case. Even if it was, it’s common practice to use human waste, known as “biosolids”, as fertilizer in many countries, including the United States.
More recently, Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Elise Stefanik introduced legislation that would bar the Department of Defense from contracting with Tutor.com, a U.S.-based tutoring company, on the grounds that it poses a threat to national security because it was purchased by Primavera Capital Group, an investment firm based in Hong Kong. Their argument is that this could give the Chinese government backdoor access to the tutoring sessions and personal information of American military personnel who use the firm’s service.
The legislation does not mention that Tutor.com’s student data is housed in the United States, that it volunteered for a security review by the federal Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and that it created additional levels of data security protection in coordination with the U.S. government. The bill also does not specify how exactly the Chinese government would get access to Tutor.com’s data or what use it would actually have for information on the tutoring sessions of U.S. military personnel.
Last summer, several Republican lawmakers cried foul over the “Barbie” movie because a world map briefly shown in the background of one scene included a dashed line. They took this as a reference to China’s “nine-dashed line”, which Beijing uses to buttress its disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea. According to Representative Jim Banks, this is “endangering our national security”. The map in the movie is clearly fantastical, had only eight dashes and bore no resemblance to China’s line. Even the Philippine government, which has for years been embroiled in territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea, dismissed the controversy and approved the movie’s domestic release.
Of course, the United States should actively confront President Xi Jinping of China about his repression at home and aggression abroad. As a scholar of China’s political system, I worry about how Mr. Xi has made his country even more authoritarian; about increasing human rights abuses in China, particularly those directed at the Uyghur population in Xinjiang; about Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong, its threats toward Taiwan, its increasingly cozy relationship with Russia and its support for the war in Ukraine. America must remain alert to legitimate concerns about well-documented Chinese activities such as espionage and cyberattacks.
But should our policymakers really be focusing on Tutor.com, Chinese garlic or “Barbie”? Or should they concentrate on the more serious threats posed by China’s authoritarian system, or the many other issues that meaningfully affect the day-to-day lives of Americans?
Perhaps the most worrisome effect is that China anxiety is slowly creeping toward discrimination against Chinese Americans, a new “yellow peril”. We’ve already seen how an initiative begun during the Trump administration to target Chinese espionage led to unfair scrutiny of Chinese researchers and even Asian American government employees, leading to the program being terminated in 2022. And we saw how xenophobia during the pandemic triggered threats and attacks against Asian Americans. There also have been numerous reports of law enforcement officials interrogating Chinese students and researchers traveling to and from China on the grounds that they may be agents of the Chinese state. Again, this treatment — being brought in for questioning by the police or government officials — is something foreign scholars experience in China, where it is euphemistically referred to as “being invited for tea”.
Last year, state legislators in Texas proposed a bill that initially sought to prevent Chinese (as well as Iranian, North Korean and Russian) citizens and entities from buying land, homes or other real estate, citing concerns about the security of the food supply. Putting aside the fact that Chinese citizens are not the Chinese government, the actual amount of American farmland owned by Chinese entities is negligible — never exceeding 1 percent of farmland in any given American state as of 2021. The bill ultimately failed, but only after substantial pushback from the Chinese American community.
This China panic, also stirred up by both liberal and conservative U.S. media, may be influencing how average people perceive their fellow Americans of Chinese heritage. Michael Cerny, a fellow China researcher, and I recently surveyed over 2,500 Americans on the question of whether Chinese Americans who were born in the United States should be allowed to serve in the U.S. intelligence community. Roughly 27 percent said Chinese Americans’ access to classified information should be more limited than for other U.S. citizens, and 14 percent said they should be allowed no access at all.
This is overt racism, and while not the majority opinion, it is concerning that so many Americans are blurring the line between the Chinese government and people of Chinese ethnicity, mirroring the language of our politicians.
China is a formidable geopolitical rival. But there is no world in which garlic, “Barbie” or a tutoring site poses meaningful threats to American national security. Labeling them as such reveals a certain lack of seriousness in our policy discourse.
If the United States is to properly compete with China, it’s going to require healthy, balanced policymaking that protects U.S. national security without compromising core American values.
Let’s take a deep breath.
Rory Truex is an associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, where he teaches courses on Chinese politics and authoritarian rule.