David Dayen
Democratic congressional candidate Jay Chen, left, holds a press event at his campaign office in Garden Grove, California, with Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-CA), who currently represents a portion of the 45th District in Congress.
ORANGE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA – Just past the sign welcoming visitors to the “All-American city” of Westminster, in one of the endless strip malls along its wide boulevards, I saw them. High up on a couple of light poles were a series of posters with just four words: “China’s Choice … Jay Chen.” I’d heard about the posters, done in the colors of the Chinese flag, but wanted to seek one out, and it didn’t take long. Zooming in on my phone, I could read the disclaimer in tiny lettering: “Paid for by Michelle Steel for Congress.”
David Dayen
This midterm election has played host to the usaual cornucopia of misinformation, baseless accusations, and barely contained rage. But few places have seen such a sustained bout of open demonization as Steel’s campaign against Chen, a Taiwanese American lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve and community college trustee, running as the Democratic candidate in California’s heavily Asian 45th District. Steel, herself a Korean immigrant, is targeting ads at the local Vietnamese community—the largest anywhere outside of Vietnam—which has historically been virulently anti-communist. She is playing on that history to tar her opponent as being in league with the Chinese Communist Party.
China has been a punching bag on both sides of the aisle this year. Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan drew criticism earlier in the year for an ad that repeatedly set up a U.S.-vs.-China binary. Trudy Busch Valentine, a Democrat running for Senate in Missouri, more recently criticized her opponent Eric Schmitt for voting to “allow communists from China to buy our farmland,” saying that “he’d be China’s senator.”
But the decidedly personal and brazenly public message against Chen, whose grandmother fled communist China, has taken things to an entirely new level, even driving backlash within the community. A new divisiveness has come to the area known as “Little Saigon,” with the potential to build dangerous momentum for hate.
AT HIS GARDEN GROVE CAMPAIGN OFFICE on Sunday, Chen held a press briefing for local Vietnamese media, condemning Steele for running “one of the nastiest, ugliest campaigns in the entire country.” Rep. Alan Lowenthal, who currently represents Little Saigon (as well as much of Long Beach) in Congress, said at the same event that he has “never seen anything like the red-baiting that Jay is going through,” calling it “an act of desperation.”
The campaign can be best epitomized by a Steel ad that you can only find on Chen’s YouTube channel. In it, two Chinese actors speak in badly accented English at the “Chinese Communist Party Intelligence Division,” praising Chen as “perfect for China,” in part because his service as a delegate for Bernie Sanders “for supreme leader” makes him “a socialist comrade.”
“Sanders loves Mao, Chen loves Sanders,” says one of the actors, who burst into laughter with glee over the prospect of installing a secret Chinese agent in Washington. It’s a typical delirious McCarthyist accusation, except on behalf of a Chinese regime that hasn’t existed for almost half a century.
Steel’s campaign has yet to host that ad on her YouTube page, though it features the usual “I’m Michelle Steel and I approve this message” disclaimer. Steel has put her name on the “China’s Choice” posters throughout the district. And she paid for a mailer, sent to Vietnamese speakers in the district, of Chen photoshopped into a classroom setting, holding a copy of the Communist Manifesto, with photos of Lenin, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin, and bizarrely, the logo of the lefty journalist collective Indymedia adorning the walls. Other mailers connect Chen to Peking University, alma mater of a prominent former Chinese premier; Chen went to Harvard and did a study abroad program there.
“I was shocked by just how over-the-top and how egregious it was. How they would go so far as to hire Chinese actors with accents to play out this role,” Chen said in an interview at his campaign office. “And the fact that it’s coming from another Asian American, an immigrant from Korea, to me that makes it even worse. We know that we’ve already dealt with a spate of anti-Asian hate, and when someone from your own community is doing it just to score political points? What does it say about the state of politics?”
The accusations mostly hang on this thin reed: When Chen sat on the Hacienda/La Puente school board in 2010, he was among the supporters of a program for one of its middle schools called “Confucius Classroom,” funded with a $30,000 grant from the CCP government to teach students Chinese language and culture. China’s Confucius Institutes supplied teachers, textbooks, and curricula. Critics have labeled the program as Chinese propaganda, though supporters contested that.
Because of public outcry, the school district did not take the funding or the teachers, though they did accept the textbooks. Chen was later subject to a recall campaign that was later abandoned. A decade later, Biden’s CIA director William Burns called out the Confucius Institutes for “promoting a narrative of Xi Jinping’s China,” and a bipartisan group of senators as well as the State Department have called for its termination in the U.S. Chen has said that he now agrees with this assessment.
Chen actually predicted this would be used in the campaign. At an Indivisible event with supporters in August, he said that “I’m going to be a recipient of some of these attacks … They are going to be claiming that because our school district was teaching Chinese, that meant we’re trying to indoctrinate our students in communism.” In an incredible piece of dishonesty, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm for House Republicans, clipped the part of that sound bite that said, “we’re trying to indoctrinate our students in communism,” and used it in their campaign ad.
Steel’s campaign claims that Chen “doubled down” on support for the Confucius Institutes, but the only proof of this was a Chen fundraising email decrying Steel labeling him a CCP member. Steel has continued to highlight the Confucius program, linking to attacks from Fox News and elsewhere. The ad with the two actors playing Chinese intelligence officials also references the Confucius Institutes.
Steel planted the seed for her aggressive campaign during the primary, when she claimed that Chen mocked her accent at a town hall event in Fountain Valley. In the video, Chen says, “You kind of need an interpreter to figure out what she’s saying … the more she speaks, the better for us.” Chen says that he was talking about the convoluted nature of Steel’s talking points. “That was a precursor to try to justify what they were already planning to do,” Chen said.
Steel won the June primary by five points, but a poll from Courage California in September showed Chen up 35-33, with nearly a third undecided.
DESPITE THE RECENT FOCUS ON THE CONFUCIUS INSTITUTES, Steel has used similar tactics in the past to get elected in a district that’s more than one-third Asian American. Two years ago, when she defeated one-term Rep. Harley Rouda to win a congressional seat, Steel sent a mailer in Vietnamese highlighting Rouda’s alleged “praise” for Ho Chi Minh. In reality, Rouda asked for the resignation of a Democratic official in Orange County after that individual sent a Facebook message that included praise for Ho. Steel used an out-of-context headline to suggest that Rouda was the official offering the praise for the communist Vietnamese leader.
Even Steel’s ads that don’t specifically go after Chen highlight the Chinese threat, in the hopes that voters will make the connection to her opponent. “This is her go-to. Why? Because she doesn’t have a record to run on,” said Chen.
While these tactics are usually confined to whisper campaigns or foreign-language mailers, Steel’s use of them in the English language has led to an unusually high saliency in the district. On Saturday, about 70 people held a protest in front of Steel’s local election office, decrying the tactics; a similar number of people turned out to defend Steel.
“The Vietnamese community doesn’t want to be taken advantage of. They don’t want to be exploited,” Chen told me. He said that he’s heard outrage from community members who see the “China’s Choice” signs in the district. “This is not a racist community. And she is plastering these racist signs everywhere which makes everyone, whether you’re Democrat or Republican, uncomfortable. Because that’s not who they are.”
Paul Bersebach/The Orange County Register via AP
Michelle Steel in November 2020
While Democratic-aligned PACs from Aspire to the Asian American Action Fund have issued bracing statements about these attacks, so have nominally nonpartisan and apolitical groups like the Committee of 100, a nonprofit Chinese American leadership organization. “A Congressional race between two candidates of Asian descent should be an opportunity to highlight the diversity and achievement of the Asian American community,” said Zhengyu Huang, president of the Committee of 100, in a statement. “Instead, one candidate is using racist attacks and advertisements to question the patriotism and loyalty of an American military veteran.”
Another PAC, Asian Americans for Good Government, pulled its support for Steel in the wake of the campaign, though the Steel campaign questioned whether she ever got an endorsement from them. The PAC never donated to Steel.
Dzung Do, a local anchor with Saigon Entertainment Television and editor in chief of the largest Vietnamese-language daily in the country, ran a 20-minute fact check segment condemning this and other mailers. (Do was at the press briefing on Sunday, though in a T-shirt and shorts rather than a suit and tie. “It’s my day off,” he said.) Chen has appeared on HONVIETV, another Vietnamese-language station, to refute the attacks.
Viet Bao, another Vietnamese daily paper, ran a piece about the classroom mailer. “In recent years, the phenomenon of disinformation during the election season has become more and more common,” a translation of the piece reads. “Some campaigners have deliberately put out false, exaggerated information to smear their opponents.”
CHEN HAS TRIED TO PIVOT to policy issues by highlighting Steel’s support for special interests, whether by voting with Big Oil to protect industry price-gouging, or with the pharmaceutical industry to try to block Medicare price negotiation, or with the gun lobby to block an assault weapons ban. He’s noted Steel’s corruption for allegedly helping campaign donors gain sweetheart real estate deals in the area. His campaign has also referenced Steel’s husband, a Republican National Committee member, helping Chinese officials gain access to the Trump administration.
“Every step of the way she’s been siding with the special interests and you can’t run on that, so she has to try to fabricate something,” Chen said.
Manjusha Kulkarni of Stop AAPI Hate, a nonprofit that tracks discrimination against Asian Americans nationally, told the Prospect that the race’s messaging could have significant consequences. “Unfortunately, it’s been all too common,” Kulkarni said. “It gives permission for even communities of color to target one another.” Kulkarni added that episodes of scapegoating Chinese Americans could play into public policy, in addition to individual acts of hate.
Steel has not shown up to several campaign forums and debates. She did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment, but told LAist, “Voters deserve to know where candidates stand when it comes to dealing with the Chinese Communist Party, and my record of standing up to the CCP, its economic theft and human rights abuses is clear.”
Interestingly, Chen told the Prospect that one of his policy priorities is to “bring manufacturing back to the United States,” including through the CHIPS and Science Act, designed to reshore semiconductor manufacturing. Today, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is a dominant supplier of computer chips, and Chinese companies are major suppliers as well. A major memory chip producer, Kingston Technology of Fountain Valley, is in the district. Steel voted against the CHIPS Act.
Chen did open up about the harm that anti-Asian messaging could bring, amid a campaign season where harsh attacks spilling over into violence has become all too real. “There are little kids who have seen this on TV who are confused,” he said, “who are thinking wait, I look like these people on TV, does that mean that I’m somehow not American enough? She’s doing real damage to our country by pursuing this. There needs to be some level of decency.”
