Securitizing rhetoric creates Sinophobic sentiments and racist practices.

“Lots of cars go over 60 miles per hour, but this is like ticketing just one because the driver had a Chinese face”84 Cecilia Chang, a friend of Dr. Wen Ho Lee’s family, said to a Times journalist outside the courtroom in 1999. For the scientist’s colleagues and friends, there was little doubt Dr. Lee was a victim of racial profiling in a moment of securysteria. The two China-Threat episodes documented in this paper reveal a security paradox: the unintentionally racist effect of over-securitizing a state adversary like China. Namely, unsupported and dropped prosecutions against American citizens of Chinese heritage accused of acting as foreign spies contributed, in both cycles, to the waning of the China-Threat. I call these events “reflexive triggers.” While agenda-setting scholars argue that information shocks (Jones, 1994; Jones and Baumgartner, 2005) can propel issues from obscurity to prominence, I suggest instead that reflexive trigger can move securitizing vocabulary from visibility to obscurity since they expose the fear-inducing, alarmist, and paranoid nature of the China-Threat perspective. In addition to the real-life effect of the China-Threat discourse, what else contributes to the fading of sinophobic sentiments and racist legal practices? Consistent with the literature, both declining China-Threat cycles discussed in this paper show the significant role of state power (Zhang, 2010). Following the collapse of Dr. Lee’s case, the U.S. War on Terror definitively ended the 1996-2001 China-Threat cycle in 2001. The 2010-2016 period saw not a drastic shift in state enemy—from Communist China to Islamic Terrorism and Rogue States—but the implementation of state mechanisms designed to prevent over-zealous national-security prosecutions from targeting Asian Americans. The War on Terror—the securitization of states that the U.S. believes are sponsoring terrorism and radical Islam networks—has exacerbated policing and racist sentiments against North American citizens of Arabic heritage and Islamic faith (Love, 2017; Wilkins-Laflamme, 2018). My findings show similar patterns with sinophobic moments, between both 1996 and 2001, and 2010 and 2016. The American-media writing of China using securitizing rhetoric has real-life consequences: mediatic scripts and sounds reverberate back into key political and social realms to reinforce already-rooted worldviews, as The Times discovered in the early 2000s. Al-Jazeera Center for Studies recently pointed at Fox News for its “media-driven reinforcement of the alleged Muslim-terror menace” and the rise of Islamophobic politics on U.S. soil (Cherkaoui, 2016:2-3).