Paul Vernon/AP Photo
Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat running for an open U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, talks with reporters following a debate with other Democrats on March 28, 2022.
China has been cleaning America’s economic clock ever since Bill Clinton let the country into the WTO with no assurances that it would cease its state subsidies, its repression of free worker organizations, or its theft of U.S. intellectual property. According to Clinton and kindred spirits, as China became more quasi-capitalist, it would become more democratic. Instead, China has become more of a dictatorship. And China’s mercantilist displacement of U.S. industry has only increased.
The toxic impact of U.S. reliance on China became more visible with the supply chain crisis. As our colleague David Dayen reported, virtually 100 percent of containers used in ocean shipping are made in China. The Biden administration has embraced the once-forbidden idea of industrial policy and vowed to bring production back to America.
But try to make this imperative vivid in a political campaign and you can get into treacherous waters. Tim Ryan, the front-runner for the Ohio Democratic Senate nomination, learned that recently after he ran a campaign ad that did not mince words about the economic threat posed by China.
“It is us versus China,” Ryan says in the TV spot. The staccato ad is a one-minute montage of past Ryan speeches, mostly to blue-collar audiences. The entire theme is the economic menace posed by China, and the displacement of Ohio’s workers.
The ad provoked a reaction from several Asian American politicians and organizations, who conflated an attack on China’s policies and their effect on America’s industrial heartland with an attack on Chinese people as an ethnic group.
Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY), vice chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, called on Ryan to stop airing it. Shekar Narasimhan, chairman of AAPI Victory Fund, a super PAC, tweeted that Ryan’s ad “stirs up a racist pedagogy vis-a-vis China and makes Americans of East Asian descent vulnerable to attacks.”
This is tricky territory, especially at a time when hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans have been on the rise. Donald Trump fomented this hate by shabbily blurring the line between contesting China’s unacceptable trade strategies and engaging in xenophobic China-bashing.
Given the fallout from Trump’s racism, are Ryan’s critics right? Did he cross a line?
Everything Ryan said in the ad is true, and nothing in the ad remotely implies criticism of Chinese people as an ethnic group. Numerous critics of China policy who are themselves Asian American, inside the administration and out, have made similar criticisms.
Biden’s leading China hawk, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Is Tai stirring up “racist pedagogy vis-a-vis China” and making “Americans of East Asian descent vulnerable to attacks?” Hardly.
The controversy evokes the question of Jews and Israel. Those who oppose Israel’s colonialist policy toward Palestinians routinely get attacked as antisemitic, all the more vehemently if the critics are themselves Jews. Indeed, Jews with the effrontery to criticize the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages in the occupied territories are routinely described as “self-hating Jews.”
No serious person would call Ambassador Tai a self-hating Asian American. There’s another dangerous similarity. When ultra-Zionists attack critics of Israel and suggest that Jews should defend Israel right or wrong, they are feeding the myth of dual loyalty—that Jewish Americans are unreliable patriots because their deeper loyalty is to another country. This stance gives ammunition to real antisemites.
Israel tried to play the dual-loyalty card with American Jews when the Israeli government relentlessly campaigned for the release of Jonathan Pollard, a CIA intelligence analyst who pleaded guilty to spying for Israel in 1987, and received a life sentence. Pro-Israel American groups lobbied for Pollard’s release. Israel formally apologized to the United States and Pollard was released in 2015. He promptly emigrated to Israel.
By the same token, China’s strategists have explicitly sought to enlist overseas Chinese as allies and agents of the regime. As I reported in this piece, at the very outset of the COVID pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party, through its United Front Work Department, sent out an urgent appeal to have friendly Chinese all over the world buy up PPE and masks, and send them to China. This request, coupled with China’s domination of production, exacerbated the shortage of this equipment early in the pandemic.
Like the vast majority of American Jews, the overwhelming majority of Asian Americans are entirely loyal to the United States. But the contention that criticism of China is tantamount to racism directed against ethnic Chinese can backfire in the same fashion, especially when it is comingled with defense of the Beijing regime.
Tobita Chow, a Canadian (and U.S. citizen) who lives in Chicago, has written innumerable articles in left publications such as In These Times and The Guardian, defending the Beijing regime and its global policies and attacking critics. Chow heads an organization called Justice Is Global, which is affiliated with the progressive national group People’s Action. One Chow piece was titled “Anti-China Rhetoric Fuels Anti-Asian Hate.”
(Editor’s note: In response to criticism of this paragraph, the Prospect has published a rebuttal article by Mr. Chow and a response from Bob Kuttner.)
The reality is the opposite. Wrapping apologies for the Chinese regime in the banner of anti-racism feeds concerns about dual loyalties. This is doubly challenging since Xi’s government tries to use Chinese scholars and students in the U.S. as agents of the regime, and the U.S. government has to be careful not to use racial profiling.
Biden has handled this challenge well, more strategically focusing scattershot China measures initiated by Trump’s trade chief Robert Lighthizer to take on China’s illicit and damaging trade policies, while getting rid of Trump policies that improperly targeted Chinese Americans. In February, the Justice Department, after a three-month review, scrapped Trump’s 2018 “China initiative” that targeted Chinese or Chinese American researchers, in favor of a more general strategy of countering industrial and scientific espionage regardless of its origin.
Under the Trump program, more than 20 academic researchers faced accusations and indictments. Defendants were often charged with lesser infractions such as grant fraud or visa fraud, or lying to investigators, but federal prosecutors depicted them as national-security threats. In most cases, the charges were ultimately dropped.
Trump acted in bad faith as an economic nationalist. He deliberately blurred criticism of immigration policy with vicious anti-Mexican hate-mongering. He did the same thing with China. These tactics, paradoxically, undermined bona fide critics of Chinese mercantilism and neoliberal U.S. China policy.
Trump did stir up hate, and made Asian American groups justifiably anxious. But advocacy organizations do not advance the cause of tolerance when they engage in the same kind of blurring in reverse.
In sum, we need to be vigilant about resisting anti-Asian hate—and resolute about countering China as a national-security and industrial threat. The two issues need to be kept separate.
As a grace note: The offending Ryan ad was made by a firm called Left Hook Strategy, several of whose partners are Asian American.
