TikTok proves the cyber link

THE FEMINIZED ASIANNESS OF CHINESE CYBERCRIME In a recent article for the South China Morning Post, Leo Yu observed that ongoing Congressional investigations into Tik Tok as spying technology are rooted not in fact but in the “original sin” of Chinese ownership.34 During the hearings, Republican Jay Obernolte asked accusatorily: “How could looking at the algorithm confirm that [Tik Tok is] free from foreign influence?”35 while confrontationally informing CEO Shou Zi Chew “you are not trusted here.”36 Reasonable people may disagree about the nature and scope of the privacy issues associated with Tik Tok but the evidence that Chinese-owned companies are held to higher and racialized standards than white-owned ones is difficult to deny. A bipartisan majority of US policymakers appear committed to the narrative of China as a nation of disloyal spies, who mobilize new technologies in the service of global political and economic domination. Their prejudices are evident in the long history of actions intended to rein in Chinese trade secret theft that the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), among other US government agencies, has characterized as “active and persistent.”37 While the NCSC’s conclusion has its kernel of truth, the assumptions upon which it is based are troubling and hypocritical. Multiple independent analyses of the China Initiative characterize it as a racist policy that targeted Chinese researchers for “relatively minor errors and omissions in grant applications, rather than spies stealing national security secrets or proprietary technology at the direction of the Chinese government.”38 A recent Brennan Center report historicizes the program, observing that “the FBI and Justice Department tendency to stretch facts and jump to conclusions in Chinese espionage cases pre-dated the China Initiative.”39 For instance, FBI counterintelligence training materials otherize those of Asian descent.40 And earlier policies and actions, including the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (EEA), reflect similar racial animus. The EEA, which turned theft of trade secrets into a federal crime,41 marked an uptick in criminalizing previously accepted forms of competitive behavior, with an eye to Asia.42 In 2022, the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions noted that “[a] significant increase in the number of cases charging EEA-related offenses against suspects of Chinese heritage began in 2009 under the Obama administration.”43 The report goes on to propose that this is a symptom of disproportionate and racist targeting of Chinese people.44 In a detailed review of the EEA, Andrew Chongseh Kim finds “significant disparities in the rates at which people of Asian descent are prosecuted for espionage and the outcomes of those prosecutions.”45 He concludes that “Chinese and other Asian defendants are twice as likely to be innocent as those of other races.”46 This, of course, reinforces Del Visco’s argument, that Sinophobic logics are reflexive in American political culture, including among Democrats.47 CRT scholars and activists have long argued that “yellow peril” and “model minority” stereotypes organize American thinking about Asianness.48 Within this binary, East Asians are presented as dangerous and disloyal “forever foreigners,” who threaten to overrun the nation.49 All too often, Asianness is also feminized, for instance through the association of spying with gossip and the association of disloyalty with weakness.50 Such gendered tropes are evident in representations of the Chinese government as an all-powerful regime and Chinese citizens as eternally committed ideologues. Consider, for instance, the FBI’s semi-fictional propaganda film, The Company Man (2015), which promotes yellow perilism by telling a story that contrasts a loyal American businessman with two disloyal Chinese cybercriminals in search of trade secrets. Circulated as a both an agency training video and public awareness campaign, The Company Man encourages multiple audiences to embrace American exceptionalism and Sinophobic paranoia.51 The film tells a gendered, as well as raced, tale in which the dishonorable Chinese men, who shamelessly sneak around industrial spaces and offer exorbitant bribes, fail to live up to the honorable white masculinity of their American target.52 As evident in the short film, representations of yellow perils and forever foreigners often feminize and emasculate East Asians,53 representing them as obedient and cowardly automatons, dishonestly and submissively slinking through the shadows while sabotaging others and destroying relationships.54 Techno-Orientalism, Betsy Huang argues, emerged in the 1880s with descriptions of Asians as mechanistic alien bots without emotions.55 In a longer history of the Asian as “model machine,” a feminized robotic model of race, Long Bui highlights the many ways that US public culture consistently expresses ambivalence, specifically hate and reverence, about Asian technological prowess.56 Though most often applied in science fiction studies, the term techno-Orientalism is useful in theorizing political rhetoric as well, specifically in highlighting how US trade, innovation, internet, and technology policy has collided with racial and gender anxieties. As Lok Sui and Claire Chun put it, “techno-orientalism . . . is the expressive vehicle . . . by which Western and Eastern nations articulate their fears, desires, and anxieties that are produced in their competitive struggle to gain technological hegemony through economic trade and scientific innovation.”57 They trace the concept of techno-Orientalism, through the work of David Morely and Kevin Robin, back to fears of Japanese technological superiority in the 1980s.58 These fears played out in the VCR Wars, a series of conflicts over Asian production of video recording technologies that became lightning rods for national security and economic downturn rhetoric.59 With respect to the former, the Supreme Court, in a decision that largely sidestepped the race and gender anxieties of the moment, held that the production and use of Betamax recorders did not constitute copyright infringement, only “time shifting” of programming that viewers could watch at the originally scheduled time.60 Still techno-Orientalism continued to rear its head, first in disputes over semiconductors and automobiles and later in disputes over cybercrime and platforms. Despite the Supreme Court’s decision, Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti doubled down on the Japanophobic sentiments of the time. In 1982, he testified before Congress, at a hearing on home recording: “The single one American-made product that the Japanese, skilled beyond all comparison in their conquest of world trade, are unable to duplicate or displace or to compete with or to clone . . . this asset, [the US film and television production industry], which is unlike steel or silicon chips or motor cars or electronics of all kinds—a piece of sardonic irony that while the Japanese are unable to duplicate the American films by flank assault, they can destroy it by this video cassette recorder.”61 This eerily familiar language expresses ambivalence about Japan, a nation “skilled beyond all comparison in the conquest of world trade,” but nonetheless incapable of competing with America’s creative moviemaking spirit. Technology operates as a tool of conquest in Valenti’s analogy, as well as an anchor for racist and sexist intellectual property rights talk. War metaphors such as “flank assault” add a militant and patriotic urgency to the fight, with Japan engaging in feminized treachery and pathologized virality. Perhaps more importantly, they transform intellectual property rights talk into a raced and gendered conversation that disparages Japanese peoples’ ability to produce artistic works and engage in war. The backhanded compliment that implicitly broadens copyright to include economic espionage, is discrimination deployed in the service of ownership rights. The Japanophobia of the 1980s is intertwined with contemporary Sinophobia because, as Stanford Lyman puts it, anti-Asian racisms are overlapping and interchangeable, despite cultural and geopolitical differences: “The yellow peril appeared first as China, then as Japan, then as China and North Korea, then as China and Vietnam, then briefly as a temporarily prosperous Japan again, and, at the moment—once again as China.”62 Moreover, both are orientalist in their demonization of the so-called Orient as a means of validating Euroamerican white supremacy and legal regimes. Over time, the yellow peril narrative of the “Chinese copy” came to be treated as bipartisan fact, with the Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration cracking down on infringement, while bashing China’s intellectual property policies. Under the Obama Administration, Biden declared: “Why have they not become [one of] the most innovative countries in the world? Why is there a need to steal our intellectual property? Why is there a need to have a business hand over its trade secrets to have access to a market of a billion, three hundred million people? Because they’re not innovating.”63 This racist and gendered intellectual property rights talk is perpetually justified through moving goalposts: when China agrees to international norms, the US demands greater compliance with its visions of knowledge ownership and economic norms.64 Copying is treated as weakness not as resilience or choice. America consistently shores up support for white supremacist intellectual property policies, including around trade secrets, through the mobilization of public emotions of fear and anger. These feelings are frequently rooted in national and geopolitical anxieties about the sustainability of the economy and whiteness.65 But, as Sara Ahmed might contend, these “racial feelings” about employment, resources, and more are dishonest projections, defensive postures that ignore how the United States built its own economy on infringement and imposes double standards on other nations.66 Indeed, good faith international intellectual property engagements require acknowledging the unique knowledge production trajectories and economic flows of nations in the Global South.67 Yet according to US racial epistemes, Chinese people are quintessential bad intellectual property citizens who constitutionally refuse to comply with global norms, and Euroamerican nations are quintessentially good intellectual property citizens who intuitively steward international norms. These heroic myths of whiteness and masculinity are further normalized through relational racialization.