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The intense polarisation of the AI arms race as a clash between civilisations is further amplified by the distinct racial character of the US–China conflict. The West – and the US, in particular – has long used technological prowess to assume superiority over other nations perceived as ‘static, primitive, passive, Communist, terrorist, or fundamentalist (depending on the era)’ (Dinerstein, 2006: 571). Nonetheless, the AI arms race specifically builds on and reinvents existing anti-Asian racial tropes, such as Orientalism and the ‘Yellow Peril’. While the ‘clash of civilizations’ could extend to a variety of different cultural forms and groupings across the globe, the contemporary US–China AI arms race gains its rhetorical and affective power through reference to the West's longstanding understanding of China – and the East, more broadly – as its constitutive racial ‘Other’. In 1978, the Palestinian academic Edward Said critiqued how Western academics construed the ‘East’ or the ‘Orient’ as backwards, passive and feminine in comparison to the modern, active, masculine West (Said, 1979). Crucially, Said argued that the West's Orientalism revealed far less about the nature of the so-called Orient itself, and much more about the West's own crises of identity and the contradictory conditions of modernity. The Orientalism of the West's interpretation of the East extends to the East's technological production. In 1995, following the ‘Japan bashing’ and ‘Japan panic’ that characterised the US political and economic landscape in the 1980s, Morley and Robins coined the term techno-Orientalism to describe the West's distinct anxieties and desires regarding the spectre of a technologically ascendant Japan (Roh, Huang and Niu, 2015; Morley and Robins, 1995). Central to these anxieties was the notion that ‘Japan is the future, and it is a future that seems to be transcending and displacing Western modernity’ (Morley and Robins, 1995: 168). While the locus of these anxieties has shifted since Japan's asset price bubble collapse in 1991, the affective structures of techno-Orientalism have remained in place. Rather than being solely confined to Japan and Western perceptions of Japaneseness, they have been transposed and translated across to various countries and nations in the ‘Far East’, in particular China. Furthermore, in the case of the US–China AI arms race, the queasy relations of fetishisation and fear that characterise techno-Orientalism become imbricated in a second, much more overtly hostile, racial trope: that of the ‘Yellow Peril’. The term Yellow Peril describes the West's racialised fears of invasion, domination and imperilment by forces from the so-called ‘East’ (Tchen and Yeats, 2014). Key to the Yellow Peril's racialising force is its conflation of a country's government, its ‘culture’, and its economy with its people, including its extensive diaspora. In 1971, Webster's New International Dictionary defined the Yellow Peril as ‘1. A danger to Western Civilization held to arise from expansion of the power and influence of Oriental people; 2: a threat to Western living standards developed through the incursion into Western countries of Oriental labourers willing to work for very low wages and under inferior working conditions’ (Frayling, 2014: 10). While fears of an Asian uprising had been present in Europe since Genghis Khan, it was amplified by the invention of the ‘yellow race’ in 18th and 19th century race science (Keevak, 2011), populist uprisings against Chinese immigrants (Lew-Williams, 2018), and the proliferation of Yellow Perilist characters and tropes in US popular culture. The tenets of Yellow Perilism were observable in the US political establishment and media's response to Japan's technological development in the 1980s, where Japan's ascendency was portrayed as an existential threat to the economic prosperity and geopolitical supremacy of the US state (Heale, 2009; Garvey, 2020). In the case of the AI arms race, the Yellow Perilism originally directed towards Japan's technological advancement, which at the time was both a democracy and a military ally of the US, is further amplified by the geopolitical and military animosity between the US and China (Garvey, 2020). By casting China's AI development as a fundamental concern for all Americans – as the NSCAI 2021 Final Report does, alongside other key US AI strategy documents – the rhetoric around the AI arms race reproduces previous histories of Yellow Perilism that cast the Chinese state as an inherent threat to the US. In the AI arms race, the techno-Orientalism previously directed toward Japan combines with the much longer Sinophobic history of the Yellow Peril to create a new racial configuration: the Yellow Techno-Peril. Moreover, the AI arms race re-animates forms of anti-Chinese racism that constitute Chinese people as an ontological extension of the Chinese state, whether or not they have any meaningful political connections to China. The Chinese state is established as the external existential threat to the US, while Chinese-American and Chinese people living within the US borders are constituted as dangerous ‘enemies within’. The rhetoric of the Yellow Techno-Peril does not only further the ideology of a clash of civilisations between two hostile techno-superpowers: it also dehumanises Chinese Americans living within US borders, entrenching the deeply held racial belief that Chinese people are ‘permanent sojourners’ or eternal aliens in the eyes of the US state (Lew-Williams, 2018). There are strong parallels between the current wave of Sinophobic and anti-Chinese rhetoric in the AI arms race and the Yellow Peril politics of the 1980s, which had negative ramifications on Japanese Americans and Asian American communities in the US (Heale, 2009; Garvey, 2020). Take, for example, the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, which is now recognised as a landmark event in the formation of an Asian American political identity in the US. As Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora write, ‘layoffs in the US auto industry, perceived by the public as a response to the dominance of Japanese automobile manufacturing, led to a series of attacks on Asian Americans. This includes the infamous 1982 beating of Vincent Chin in Detroit by two laid-off Chrysler workers, which resulted in Chin's death…killers justified their attack by saying, “It's because of you we’re out of work”, linking the Asian American Chin to Japanese autoworkers’ (Atanasoski and Vora, 2019: 45). Vincent Chin was not even Japanese, let alone an automobile worker; instead, he was a Chinese American draftsman. Chin's murder demonstrates how easily Yellow Perilist fearmongering moves and slips between different Asian peoples and countries, from the technologically ascendant Japan of the 1980s through to the contemporary AI arms race between the US and China today. Moreover, it also demonstrates how the Yellow Techno-Perilist rhetoric of the time – in particular, the fearmongering that, in the words of US Senator John Dingell, ‘little yellow men’ were taking white US automobile workers’ jobs – became attached to the bodies of Asian Americans, with violent and disastrous results. The scapegoating of Asian American people as internal threats and permanent aliens who embody white fears of the Yellow Peril extends into the age of the AI arms race, most notably through the US government's China Initiative. In 2018, the Trump administration founded the China Initiative to counter Chinese economic espionage and protect the US national security interests (Guo, Aloe and Hao, 2021). The Trump administration's emphasis on Chinese economic espionage reproduced earlier forms of fiscal orientalism (Yang, 2016) and monetary orientalism (Bui, 2019) that cast China as a ‘barbarian economic aggressor’ (Zhang, 2021) and a ‘global cheater’ (Bui, 2019; Garvey, 2020). Even more troublingly, it gave further credence to forms of racial internal policing that have historically been used to profile and punish Asian Americans as perceived spies. As Frank H. Wu (2023) notes, ‘with conflict between the United States and China increasingly a dominant theme of public discourse, Asian Americans, visible as such, have ended up overrepresented in the prosecution of espionage and associated crimes’ (pp. 191–192). In 2018, the FBI director Christopher Wray argued that the ‘China threat’ should not be seen only as a ‘whole-of-government’ threat, but as a ‘whole-of-society’ threat requiring a ‘whole-of-society’ response (Wu, 2023: 192). Through this lens, all Chinese people are seen as an extension of the Chinese government and its aims, regardless of their own personal political beliefs (Wu, 2023: 192). Donald Trump reinforced this view when he insisted that ‘almost every student’ that comes to the US from China ‘is a spy’ (Wu, 2023: 192). Consequently, an investigation by the MIT Technology Review found that the China Initiative evolved from a narrow initiative focusing on economic espionage to an ‘umbrella term for cases with any connection to China’, and that 88% of the defendants charged were of Chinese heritage (Guo, Aloe and Hao, 2021). The racial profiling of Chinese researchers through the China Initiative reflects how ‘three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, as China emerges as a new superpower and contests US hegemony, the face of foreign espionage in the West has become Chinese’ (Cheng, 2023). The ‘whole-of-society’ approach to the threat supposedly posed by the Chinese state and, by extension, Chinese people within the US, has even led to calls for the US government to restrict or entirely ban Chinese students. In April 2021, the Republican Senators Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn, and Tommy Tuberville introduced the Secure Campus Act, which aimed to ‘prohibit Chinese nationals from receiving visas to the United States for graduate or post-graduate studies in STEM fields and would ban participants in China's foreign talent recruitment programs and Chinese nationals from taking part in federally-funded STEM research’ (‘Cotton, Colleagues Introduce Bill to Restrict Chinese STEM Graduate Student Visas’ 2021). Tom Cotton justified the Bill on the basis that ‘allowing China unfettered access to American research institutions is akin to granting Soviet scientists access to our critical laboratories during the Cold War. We shouldn’t allow the Chinese Communist Party to exploit the openness of American research institutions any longer. The SECURE CAMPUS Act will help stop Chinese nationals from stealing U.S. technology, which the CCP uses against our own troops and businesses’ (Cotton, Colleagues 2021). Cotton, Blackburn and Tuberville are not alone in their desire to ban or restrict the entry of Chinese STEM students: a Pew Research poll found that 55% of Americans want to instate restrictions on Chinese students entering the country (Zwetsloot and Arnold, 2021). The racial logics underlying the Secure Campus Act mimic those that drove the Chinese Exclusion Acts (1882, 1892, 1902), preventing Chinese nationals from entering the US. Central to the China Initiative and the Secure Campus Act is the assumption that Chinese people are ‘permanently loyal to China’ and ‘racially incapable of becoming American’ (Lew-Williams, 2018: 6). Hence, despite arguments that Chinese students enrich the US economy and STEM research cultures, Chinese students and researchers remain marked by the assumption that they are an extension of the Chinese state. Despite the shutdown of the China Initiative in 2023 and the failure of the Secure Campus Act, the racial profiling of Chinese Americans and people of Chinese heritage as inherent threats to the US technological supremacy continues to haunt Chinese American researchers and technologists. Writing in Nature, Natasha Gilbert argues that the ‘climate of fear and anxiety’ generated by the China Initiative has not dissipated, and that scrutiny of Chinese scientists has only intensified (Gilbert, 2023). While acknowledging the initiative's failures, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen argued, ‘if you were looking for general deterrence, it has been achieved in spades – we have terrified the entire research community…Deterrence is about fear’ (Barry and Benner, 2022). Olsen's insistence that a nebulous and widespread fear is a good thing obscures how the racial fear of surveillance and violence has long conditioned Asian Americans’ experiences in the US (Lew-Williams, 2018; Wu, 2023), and how this fear is born unequally by scientists of Chinese descent. Consequently, Chinese scientists and researchers have argued that ‘tensions between the United States and China are likely to increase, but Chinese Americans should not be treated as collateral damage’ (Liu et al., 2023: 804), and ‘urge the federal government to shift away from deterrence and fear and instead focus on the philosophies that have made the United States a global leader in science and technology: openness, diversity, and international collaboration’ (Liu et al., 2023: 804). However, without significant efforts to combat and transform the US portrayal of China as the Yellow Techno-Peril, the fear and anxiety experienced by researchers of Chinese descent is unlikely to dissipate.